The European Patent Office Enlarged Board of Appeal will soon be reviewing the legality of software patents in an effort to provide clarity to judges.

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Reader johnjac points us to a blog post from a guy who made some computer generated images of flocking birds, and was rather stunned when he discovered that a big time fashion designer had basically yanked one of his photos off of Flickr and put it on a sweatshirt. While we hear so many stories of people freaking out in such situations, this guy’s reaction is quite refreshing:

The more we looked, the more the neighboring details fell into place. Smith’s version was mirrored left to right so I loaded the image in Photoshop and flipped it. “Oh my god! He totally stole my work!” I was dancing around the room. “Paul Smith stole from me!” I will admit it was a strange reaction. I didn’t realize this until later in the day. I was actually thrilled that someone had ripped me off. Someone I liked.

Later on in the post, the guy, Robert Hodgin, admits that his own works are built off of the works of others, as well. And, that’s exactly how creativity works: you build on the works of others. It shouldn’t be seen as a crime or something to get angry about. It’s a way to provide more materials for more creativity going forward.

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US spy agencies had a budget of $47.5 billion in 2008, up 9 percent from 2007.

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I’ll admit that there are times when I’ve been known to take up more than my fair share of a conversation. Usually, though, I only realize this after the conversation is over (such as when my wife points it out), though it is something that I try to watch. However, some researchers at MIT are apparently working on devices that can better measure the dynamics of face-to-face conversation and provide direct feedback to the speakers — such as letting them know when they’ve been hogging the conversation and when to shut up. As the article link above notes, there really hasn’t been much done to regularly analyze and provide biofeedback on conversational techniques and the way that people interact on a regular basis. In the past, it’s mostly been limited to people being filmed doing some activity, and then reviewing the film later. Having a better system for monitoring certain actions in real time could be quite useful in getting people to adjust their behavior.

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Adobe has released the CS4 suite of applications just 18 months after CS3 hit the market. Ars reviews Photoshop CS4 to see if a redesigned interface and 64-bit support for Windows makes this an upgrade worth having.

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A few years back, we went from what had been a virtual office to actually having a real office. Yet, since the company had been virtual for a while, we’ve maintained something of a hybrid between a virtual office and a real office. Not everyone goes into the office all the time (some of our employees aren’t local, though the majority of them are). Some rarely go into the real office at all. Still, there are days when we do try to make sure that everyone’s at the office, and that can be quite useful. However, Wired is suggesting that more companies ditch their offices completely and move entirely to a virtual office arrangement. I can understand the appeal, but I think that a hybrid approach may work much better. There are times that having a real office space is quite useful, such as in allowing for more impromptu brainstorming and discussion. It also opens up the lines of communication much more. While our staff is good at using instant messaging, chat rooms and phone calls, there have been times when just sitting across from one another has helped get things done more quickly. Both the real office and the virtual office have pros and cons, but I’m not sure that it makes sense to go completely to one extreme or the other. Having a space that can function as an “open office” area, while allowing employees to telecommute most of the time seems to create a nice balance.

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In one of the most significant coups of the digital age, MTV and Viacom have secured exclusive rights to The Beatles music and have announced that Rock Band will be the platform through which the first ever digital Beatles tracks will be released. What’s left for competitor Activision to respond with, Guitar Hero: The Monkees?

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Free Press, which helped to win an FCC case against Comcast this summer, now wants the agency to require all ISPs to disclose network management practices and minimum speed guarantees.

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With the Associated Press bizarrely focusing on

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The OpenID initiative continues to gather momentum as Google joins Microsoft in announcing that they’ll be a provider of login credentials. The problem may be that everyone’s interested in providing ID, but none of the big companies are doing anything about consuming the credentials.

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Early on, in the RIAA’s legal campaign against file sharers, it appeared that judges were mostly siding with the RIAA, and taking the RIAA’s claims at face value. However, due to widespread backlash, and an improved understanding of how the RIAA’s tactics are legally questionable, it appears that opposing lawyers have become much better at pushing back on some of the dubious claims by the RIAA, including the basis for the whole campaign. It’s nice to see judges are beginning to recognize this as well. While we’ve seen it in judges rejecting RIAA arguments in court, in one case, it appears that Judge Nancy Gertner pointed out how ridiculous the RIAA’s position was and suggested they stop their legal blitz:

“…counsel representing the record companies have an ethical obligation to fully understand that they are fighting people without lawyers… to understand that the formalities of this are basically bankrupting people, and it’s terribly critical that you stop it….”

The RIAA used to count on the “sympathy” vote in court, and played the role of a “victim” quite well (they’re pirates! they’re stealing!). However, it appears that many judges just aren’t buying it any more.

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Those who watch online video in order to stay on top of the 2008 election season are more engaged in the nation’s politics than those who don’t, according to new survey results from Cisco and Compete. Republicans and Democrats also find out about online video in different ways.

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In 1998 I worked with a company that was trying to deliver CDs and (eventually) DVDs via rental kiosks. At the time, the idea was hardly new. In fact we’ve detailed the long list of failed companies who got into the kiosk business over the last few decades. But, apparently, they all had the wrong strategy. What they should have been doing is suing over patent infringement. We were just talking about Redbox, one of the few companies that’s made a successful go of DVD kiosks, and its lawsuit against Universal Studios, but it appears that the company is now being sued for patent infringement as well, by a company called DVDplay. The patent itself seems to cover a disc-based kiosk that’s connected to the internet. Reading through the claims, it’s difficult to see how there wasn’t any prior art on this stuff or that it wasn’t an obvious iteration on what had come before. But, really, what does that matter once you’ve got a patent and you can just sue away?

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We see various software companies and their representatives like the BSA complaining constantly about the damaging impact of piracy on their business, but reader Jon sent in an article that explores how piracy of proprietary software often does just as much, if not more, harm to open source alternatives. So, for example, when people make an unauthorized copy of Photoshop, doesn’t that hurt open source providers of the GiMP just as much as Adobe? And an unauthorized copy of Microsoft Office hits the Open Office crew.

Of course, this inevitably raises the question: should proprietary software companies be more worried about piracy… or open source competitors? After all, if the proprietary companies crack down on piracy, it often leads potential buyers to simply switch to open source providers instead. So, cracking down on piracy actually helps open source providers, while piracy hurts them. So, wouldn’t it make more sense for proprietary software companies to stop worrying about piracy and focus on competing with open source providers?

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The musician Prince has been quite fascinating to follow over the years from a business model perspective. He has aggressively experimented, and for a while seemed to be the

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A federal court has ruled that sophisticated hash value analysis of a hard drive counts as a “search” under the Fourth Amendment, but legal experts expect an appeal.

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Whenever we write about various business models around here that involve using free infinite goods to get people to buy some kind of scarce good, we always get some people who self-righteously exclaim that if they got content for free, they would never, ever buy those scarce goods, and somehow this disproves the model. This is similar to the common refrain that all of the “free riders” would destroy any such business model, to which I usually ask whether or not all those “free riders” who watched a BMW commercial and didn’t buy a BMW somehow destroyed BMW’s business.

In response to a similar question, concerning all of the “free riders” on Wikipedia, Tim Lee has done a fantastic job explaining why the whole concept of the “free rider” problem is a myth in most of these scenarios. In the case of Wikipedia, for example, all of those “free riders” who don’t contribute are actually what makes it worthwhile for the smaller group of contributors to take part. Those “free riders” aren’t a negative: they’re the audience. If you set up the model right, then any free rider actually becomes a part of the solution, not the problem. The more “free riders” on Wikipedia, the more people want to contribute. The more “free riders” who listen to a band, the more other people want to hear it — and the more some of those people will be willing to pay for scarce goods to associate themselves with that band. In other words, if you set up your model correctly, free riding isn’t a bug, it’s a feature that helps drive your model forward.

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The sprawling electronics and media giant gets hit by poor exchange rates and financial problems, but that didn’t prevent a couple of its divisions from showing signs of life.

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Another file-sharing case is moving to trial, but the defendant has recently picked up some powerful allies: a Harvard Law prof and his class of students. Together, they argue that the entire underpinnings of the RIAA campaign are flawed and unconstitutional.

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If someone pitched a movie based on e-voting machines that work as bad as the ones being used in the current election, the story would be dumped as being unrealistic. But truth is, indeed, often stranger than fiction. You may recall on Friday that we had a post about problems with e-voting machines in West Virginia selecting the wrong candidate when voters touched the screen. Various officials rushed to insist that there was absolutely nothing wrong. One, the local county clerk, Jeff Waybright insisted that the problems were “the result of voter error.”

Well, it appears that a group called Video The Vote went and visited with Mr. Waybright as he showed them how the e-voting machines work, and perhaps the “human error” is on Mr. Waybright’s part. The beginning of the video is troubling enough, as he brushes aside concerns while he shows a miscalibrated machine. He demonstrates how he clicks on one candidate and another is highlighted, in a tone of voice that suggests why would anyone possibly be upset or annoyed if that happened? He then oddly thinks the fact that his wildly miscalibrated machine enhances his point because when he clicks on Barack Obama’s name, the actual name highlighted isn’t McCain (of course, it’s not Obama either, but he doesn’t seem troubled by this). Waybright seems to think that the only complaint people are making is the fact that some tried to vote for the Democratic ticket and saw the Republican ticket show up — when the real concern is simply the fact that when you touch one name, someone else’s name is highlighted. Democrat or Republican really isn’t the issue here.

However, then things get worse. After mocking the idea that anyone clicking on a Democratic ticket vote would get the Republican ticket vote, he shows how to correctly calibrate the machine, showing how easy it is to fix the “problems” of the miscalibrated machine. When he’s done, to prove it works, he touches the box to vote for a straight Republican ticket ticket… and, wouldn’t you know it, Ralph Nader’s name is highlighted as the voter’s choice. His response? “Oh, that’s out of calibration!” as if it was no big deal, apparently missing the fact that he had just calibrated the machine. He then seems to think none of this is a big deal, because voters will see the misvote before they submit it, apparently unaware of the idea that many people are already quite distrustful of these machines, and seeing them highlight the wrong name over and over again will make them seriously question the legitimacy of the election.

>>>>

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The days of bullet points, résumés, and cover letters have been replaced by collaborative file-sharing widgets and dynamic trip planners. LinkedIn would like to welcome you to your new, more social, professional résumé.

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Fallout 3 suffers from morbidly high expectations, but after 50 hours we can say with some authority that both fans and first-timers will be very happy with what has been accomplished.

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Over the years we’ve seen so many stories of the messengers being blamed for finding security holes that you would think that most folks would realize how dangerous it is to do so. After all, that just encourages those who find security holes to keep quiet resulting in huge security vulnerabilities left wide open for those with malicious intent to exploit. However, what happens in cases where someone alerts those responsible for the flaw, but also is exploiting the flaw in some way? Do the lines get blurry?

For example, there’s a story making the rounds about a 15-year-old student who has been charged with various crimes after accessing data on school employees. Apparently the school misconfigured its servers, meaning that plenty of students could have gotten access to the file. What’s unclear, however, is the student’s motive. In the article linked above, it just says that one of the two students who accessed the data “alerted the principal” of the security hole, sending a semi-anonymous email signed from “a student.” However, the kid was quickly tracked down and promptly arrested.

On reading that story, it certainly sounds like yet another case of “blame the messenger.” But it’s not clear if that’s really accurate. A local newspaper’s version of the story is somewhat different, where it’s claimed that the “alert” to the principal was the student sending an email saying “look what I have” as if he were gloating — rather than alerting the school to a security breach. The police officer involved in the case also claims that the kid “was looking to profit from his criminal act.” There aren’t any details provided to back that up, but it certainly sounds like there may be more to this story than just a kid alerting officials to a security breach.

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What do The Bangles and Rob Zombie have in common? They’ve signed a petition that opposes unlicensed white space devices. Meanwhile Dell and Google tell the FCC to vote yes on white space on November 4.

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Canadian researchers demonstrate that it’s possible to successfully hack a commercial quantum key distribution system. The efficacy of the attack is a real threat to quantum key distribution.

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The Xbox 360 will get an entirely new interface this November. Ars takes a detailed look at the “New Xbox Experience” and goes right to the source to get your questions about it answered.

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Early Tuesday, I saw the news that the venerable Christian Science Monitor newspaper was the first major mainstream daily newspaper

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You may recall that throughout 2007, the MPAA was on something of a worldwide campaign to get governments to pass new laws with stricter punishment for “camcording” movies. Of course, camcording is not really a big deal. The quality is bad, and DVD-quality releases find their way to pirates pretty quickly anyway. The “losses” from camcorded movies are minimal, though it didn’t stop the MPAA from totally making up numbers that were clearly bogus. Each place they pressured to get new laws apparently represented some huge percentage of camcorded movies on the market, such that if you added them up, you were talking about well over 100%. Then, of course, there was the case where they claimed that anti-camcording laws in the US had wiped out piracy in the US. Of course, that was when they were pushing for such laws in Canada. Two months later when they were pushing for such laws in the US, suddenly New York represented 40% of all camcorded movies.

However, what was most disturbing was the idea existing laws weren’t already enough to deal with whatever “problem” camcording represented. So, it’s rather interesting to see that a guy who was caught camcording movies in Maryland was just sentenced to 21 months in prison under a 2005 law. So why did the MPAA scream bloody murder about needing new, more stringent laws in 2007? As for someone getting 21 months in prison for filming a movie that was probably already available online from a studio leak, well, that’s a different issue for another day…

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Here’s a surprising study. A survey from a company called Paragon Media Strategies claims that people between the ages of 14 and 24 are listening to more radio than they were a year or two ago. This greatly contradicts the findings of Arbitron, which famously tracks radio listeners. Paragon suggests that radio stations may be doing a better job connecting with people and that “the music may simply be more interesting.” Of course, all of this might depend on how you define “radio.” I wouldn’t be surprised if many folks in that age range are listening to streaming radio online or downloadable podcasts — that they might consider to be radio. But that’s quite different than actually listening to terrestrial radio.

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We’ve pointed out in the past that whenever you hear warnings about a coming broadband crunch, it almost always comes from consultants and politicians. If it comes directly from companies, it’s inevitably from the CEO or lobbyists. Yet, when you talk to execs who actually are technologists (even at telcos) they’re quite willing to admit that the whole broadband crunch issue is something of a myth. All you need to do is regular upgrades to the network, and most recognize that there’s no risk to a network getting overwhelmed. The latest to add their voice to this crew is cable company Cox’s VP of technology, who admits that the company’s latest upgrades mean that there shouldn’t be any bandwidth problems for at least a decade. Yet, how much do you want to bet we’ll be hearing that we’re running out of bandwidth from a politician or a lobbyist well before a decade is up?

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Former KaZaA heavyweight Kevin Bermeister has allied with his former music-business enemy and plans to launch a new service that would present would-be pirates with legal alternatives when they attempt to download content. The software is ready for trial deployment, but no word yet on whether it can navigate the minefield of Big Content licensing.

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There was plenty of news over the weekend about a

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Universal Studios is facing a lawsuit from DVD rental kiosk company Redbox over a predatory revenue sharing agreement. Universal has threatened to cut off Redbox’s suppliers if the rental company refuses to stop selling used movies and give the film company 40 percent of its revenue.

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Earlier this year, we talked about getting beyond the “webpage” metaphor when setting up online shopping experiences, and noted how Borders was testing a virtual bookshelf system that seemed more gimmicky than useful. Well, now it appears that Amazon has one-upped Borders by offering WindowShop, a 3D shopping experience… and once again I find myself underwhelmed. While it also has something of a shelf metaphor, it has some advantages in that clicking on any individual “product” can bring up audio, video and text about the product. However, it still feels rather gimmicky rather than useful. For years people have tried to create 3D browsing systems online and they never seem more useful than just straight webpages. In fact, in trying to replicate a 3D environment, it often feels like they’re more limited than what a single webpage could do.

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Ten years after the passage of the DMCA, and the consequences of the law have become clear: safe harbor provisions have been good, anticircumvention provisions bad, and all of it leaves companies, consumers, and even presidential candidates victims of spurious abuse.

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LittleBigPlanet has been delayed for a week and has only now seen release, but don’t let that scare you away: this is an already-amazing game that will only get better with time.

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While there have been plenty of news stories about how the various political campaigns in the US have been using the internet to get out the vote, Newsweek has a fascinating story about how Japanese election law pretty much bans all use of the internet in campaigning. Once a political campaign is announced, that candidate can’t update his website or blog. The only loophole is podcasts (the law doesn’t cover audio), but that’s hardly enough to make much of a dent. As the article notes, this has helped keep younger, more technically savvy politicians from succeeding when they run for office — and that’s part of the reason why older politicians are perfectly happy with the system the way it exists. It sounds like some are pushing for change, while others are actively defying the ban, but it’s apparently quite a different online atmosphere during election season in Japan than elsewhere.

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While I was pointing out all of the reasons why the DMCA needs to be re-examined from scratch, Wired has put up an article detailing the one single positive aspect of the DMCA: the safe harbor provisions that protect service providers from liability for copyright infringement done by users. However, I think Wired, and the various people quoted in the article, give way too much credit to the DMCA for a variety of reasons. In fact, Wired goes way too far in claiming that the DMCA “saved” the web and allowed it to become what it is today, suggesting (incorrectly) that things like blogs and YouTube wouldn’t be successes without the DMCA.

First, the claim by an MPAA representative that without the DMCA movie studios wouldn’t have moved to DVDs is, at best, stretching the truth. While some studios would have been nervous, it wouldn’t have taken long for some studios to more aggressively experiment with DVDs, and early success would have made studios unwilling to hold back. Besides, it’s not as if the DMCA has actually done anything to protect DVDs. DVD ripping software is widely available.

As for the safe harbor provisions, there’s plenty of reason to believe that we would have reached the same legal situation even without the DMCA’s safe harbors. Two years prior to the DMCA, the CDA was passed, and while pretty much all of that law was thrown out as unconstitutional, the bit that remained was the famous section 230, which provides a very similar safe harbor for non-copyright issues. It’s not difficult to believe that in the absence of a DMCA, section 230 would have been expanded to cover copyright. And, even if section 230 wasn’t extended explicitly, one would hope that the courts would have established the exact same precedent by noting how ridiculous it is to blame a service provider for the actions of its users. The fact that we even need safe harbor provisions is ridiculous. It should be common sense that liability should be placed on the actual party to do the action, rather than any service provider that was used in the process.

Finally, Wired talks up the whole notice-and-takedown process, which has been a tremendous burden for many sites. While Wired does highlight how the notice-and-takedown process has been regularly abused, it still gives too much credit to the whole system. If Congress really had to have a formal takedown process, it makes perfect sense to have a notice-and-notice system, where the accused infringer would have a chance to respond to the charges before the content is taken down (innocent until proven guilty, blah blah blah).

So, yes, the safe harbors provided by the DMCA are a good thing — but to extrapolate from that and a few other questionable points that the DMCA is responsible for the rise of things like blogging and YouTube is hard to square with reality. It’s quite likely that things wouldn’t be all that different in the absence of the DMCA — except we’d have a lot fewer abuses of it.

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In Windows 7, many previously bundled apps will be separate, as part of the Windows Live brand and Microsoft is positioning Windows Live as a key part of its Windows experience. Ars reports from PDC where Microsoft outlined what looks to be a compelling Windows Live strategy.

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Today the tech/business press was filled with stories about how

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You may recall the story of Wayne Crookes, a Canadian businessman who is active in the Green Party in Canada. In 2007, he sued Google, Yahoo, Myspace, Wikipedia and some other sites, claiming that all were liable for content that he found defamatory. It’s somewhat interesting to try to follow the trail of what the actual libel is — as many of the lawsuits for libel are focused on stories about (you guessed it) him filing for libel lawsuits (which certainly appears to be true, rather than libelous). With at least some of those lawsuits, the Canadian Supreme Court tossed them out, though over jurisdiction issues, rather than on the merits of the case.

In one case, Crookes sued the website P2PNet for just linking to the material that Crookes found libelous. It seemed like a huge stretch to say that merely linking to content (even if you grant that it was libelous) is also libel. And, the good news is that a court has now agreed. It has sided with Jon Newton, the operator of P2PNet in noting that simply linking to libelous material is not, in itself, libelous. The ruling does note that if the link text had been libelous, that might be a different story — but just linking to the text as part of a discussion about the lawsuits is hardly libelous. This is definitely a huge win for free speech in Canada — though, Canada could take a big step forward in updating its defamation laws to make it clear that the liability for libel should be on those who actually were libelous, rather than those who host it or point to it.

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With the upcoming release of Office 14, Microsoft today announced Office Web, a suite of five core Office components that will float up into the clouds.

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Wasn’t it YouTube that wanted to host “every music video ever created” back in 2006? Unfortunately that hasn’t happened, and now the Viacom-owned MTV has swooped in to post more than 16,000 music videos to its site with more being uploaded every day. Ouch.

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I have to admit that when I first heard about the whole Redbox concept of renting DVDs from a kiosk I was skeptical, but that was mainly because previous experiments had all been quite expensive with very limited selection. However, in actually offering super cheap prices ($1 rentals), I’ve been hearing from many Techdirt readers who swear that Redbox is fantastic and, at such a cheap price, often easier than downloading the movie.

So, wouldn’t you know it? Hollywood is trying to block Redbox from doing business.

The company has filed a lawsuit against Universal Studios for trying to coerce the company into signing a ridiculous, business-destroying agreement — and threatening to try to stop others from supplying Redbox movies if the company didn’t agree. Specifically, Universal wanted Redbox to agree to:

• wait 45 days after a DVD’s release date before renting it;
• pay a royalty of 40% of gross rental revenues;
• promise that prices never dip below $0.99 per night; and
• destroy all previously rented DVDs rather than offering them for purchase for $7, as Redbox currently does.

In other words, Universal Studios is basically trying to kill off Redbox, a company that has innovated in its business model, and, in doing so, effectively trying to circumvent the first sale doctrine by controlling how a copyrighted product can be resold. Universal threatened that if Redbox did not agree to these business-destroying clauses, it would stop supplying movies to any distributor who supplies Redbox. Effectively, that would mean that those distributors would stop supplying Redbox, rather than lose Universal as a supplier. This is, quite clearly, a case of corporate bullying. It’s also yet another example of how the movie studios want to stop any innovation in the industry that doesn’t come directly from the studios.

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Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others have finally unveiled a new code of conduct governing how they should conduct business with totalitarian regimes.

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One of Prince’s more absurd moments of fan abuse came when he threatened various fansites for hosting photos of him and including images of album covers on their sites. Yes, these were fansites, promoting Prince and his music… and Prince threatened them. It appears that musician Bryan Adams is now doing the same, hiring WebSheriff (one of the companies that tries to track down file sharing) to bully and threaten Bryan Adams’ fansites for daring to help promote Adams. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Bryan Adams has fansites? But, beyond that, it does seem like WebSheriff is going beyond legal boundaries in its threats. Its big complaint seems to be that some of these sites link to unauthorized versions of Adams’ music. But linking isn’t illegal in most places, so it’s difficult to see what sort of legal leg they have to stand on. If I ran a fansite helping to promote a musician for free, and then started receiving legal threats over it, my instincts would be to simply stop helping promote that musician’s work for free — and let the musician know that if they wanted me to continue promoting his work, he should pay up.

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Zimbra has a base of 30,000 customers employing its e-mail and collaboration software for over 20 million users. A new hosted option that runs on Yahoo’s new data centers and targeted, at least initially, at the education market should only help to expand that base.

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Microsoft has given us a first glimpse as Windows 7. The taskbar has changed significantly, and there are a number of other changes we have screenshots of.

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Google announces a $125 million deal that settles a lawsuit with publishers that had sued it over its book search. Not only does it put the search feature in the clear, but it may see Google become a major retailer of out-of-print books.

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One of my big complaints with the law making process is that there’s no built-in process to make sure a law actually does what it’s intended to do. Thanks to the law of unintended consequences, quite frequently, laws do plenty of other stuff, but do little to accomplish their stated purpose. Since politicians just want to pass laws so they can tell voters about the laws they passed, there’s no real review process. So, as long as a Congress member can claim “I helped build houses/protect children/save jobs/etc.,” because of a law that is called the Build Houses Act/Protect Kids Act/Save Jobs Act, they’re happy — even if the law did nothing to actually build houses, protect kids or save jobs.

In a business setting, if a course of action is agreed upon, there are usually regular milestones and checkups, whereby the business reviews whether the decided course of action has actually achieved its goals, or if those goals need to be revisited. A good business plan will often have alternative courses of action (i.e., “plan B, C, D, etc.”) written in as well, so that it’s easier to adjust should the original not get the job done. But, we almost never see any legislation show up that includes a clause where Congress goes back each year and determines: did this law build houses, protect kids or save jobs? So bad laws stay on the books, doing more harm than good for years, until some politician can push through an entirely new law that insists it will be the one that builds houses, protects kids or saves jobs.

So, with the DMCA hitting its 10 year anniversary today, it’s good to see a bunch of folks are taking on the challenge of examining the law and noting all of its many, many faults. The EFF has released an updated version of its report on

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