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The FBI has successfully accessed data on an iPhone that has been the subject of a legal battle between the Justice Department and Apple, according to a court filing. EFF is pleased that the Justice Department has retreated from its dangerous and unconstitutional attempt to force Apple to subvert...
In Alice v. CLS Bank, the Supreme Court ruled that an abstract idea does not become eligible for a patent simply by being implemented on a generic computer. This 2014 decision has significantly reduced the harm caused by vague and overbroad software patents. Before Alice, patent owners who had...
In a stunning rejection of the will of five million online petitioners, and over 100,000 protestors this weekend, the European Parliament has abandoned common-sense and the advice of academics, technologists, and UN human rights experts, and approved the Copyright in the Digital Single Market...
For the first time ever, this month’s Stupid Patent of the Month is being awarded to a design patent. Microsoft recently sued Corel for, among other things, infringing its patent on a slider, D554,140, claiming that Corel Home Office has infringed Microsoft’s design. The design patent, as detailed...
In Saturday’s edition of the New York Times, Matt Apuzzo reports that the Department of Justice is locked in a “prolonged standoff” with WhatsApp. The government is frustrated by its lack of real-time access to messages protected by the company’s end-to-end encryption. The story may represent a...
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) just made a move that will protect bad patents at the expense of everyone else. In a memo released February 28, the USPTO further restricted access to inter partes review, or IPR—the process Congress created to let the public challenge invalid patents...
H.R. 2666 Would Undermine FCC’s Charge to Protect the Open Internet In a disappointing turn of events, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 241 to 173 to pass H.R. 2666, the No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act, a bill that would undermine the FCC’s ability to enforce key net...
Get ready for a tale as good as anything you’d see on television. Here’s the sequence of events: the website TorrentFreak publishes an article about a leak of TV episodes, including shows from the network Starz. TorrentFreak tweets its article, Starz sends a copyright takedown notice. TorrentFreak writes about the…
We need to have a hard look at the surveillance industry. It is a key enabler of vast and untold violations of human rights and civil liberties, and it continues to be used by aspiring autocrats to threaten our very democracy. As long as it exists, the surveillance industry, and the data it generates, will be an…
There is room to debate what makes an invention patentable, but one thing should be uncontroversial: patentable inventions should actually be new. That’s what EFF and the R Street Institute told the Supreme Court this week in an amicus brief urging it to grant certiorari and reverse the Federal...
In most issues of EFFector, we give an overview of all the work we’re doing at EFF. Today, in light of recent developments at the U.S. Patent Office, we’re doing a deep dive into a single issue: recent changes to the patent system, and how it’s in danger of heading backwards.
It’s not enough to say that the Internet is built on interoperability. The Internet is interoperability. Billions of machines around the world use the same set of open protocols—like TCP/IP, HTTP, and TLS—to talk to one another. The first Internet-connected devices were only possible because phone...
The New York Times' editorial board has made a disappointing endorsement of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), even as the actual text of the agreement remains secret. That raises two distressing possibilities: either in an act of extraordinary subservience, the Times has endorsed an agreement...
The European Union’s new Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a complex, many-legged beast, but at root, it is a regulation that aims to make it easier for the public to control the technology they use and rely on. One DMA rule forces the powerful “gatekeeper” tech companies to allow third-party app stores...
A “notice” slapped on the outside of a package saying “single use only” continues to ensure a manufacturer selling you the product can sue for patent infringement should someone dare reuse its goods. This is what the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held on Friday, reaffirming its previous...
The bipartisan legislation creates a federal cause of action against government officials who coerce or attempt to coerce broadcasters, interactive computer services, or AI providers into taking actions against lawful, First-Amendment-protected speech, and establishes a transparency system for government…
Are you a young person fighting back against bad bills like KOSA? Become an EFF member at a new, discounted Neon membership level specifically for you--stickers included! Congress has resurrected the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill that would increase surveillance and restrict access to...
The Internet is a diverse ecosystem of private and public stakeholders. By excluding a large sector of communities—like security researchers, artists, libraries, and user rights groups—trade negotiators skewed the priorities of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) towards major tech companies and...
The online advertising industry has built a massive surveillance machine, and the government can co-opt it to spy on us.
Can the cops get your online data? In short, yes. There are a variety of US federal and state laws which give law enforcement powers to obtain information that you provided to online services. But, there are steps you as a user and/or as a service provider can take to improve online privacy.Law...
Have you ever violated a website’s terms of use, such as by using something other than your real name on a website that requires one, or by sharing your account password with a family member when doing so is prohibited? Probably. Have you ever clicked “I agree” without actually reading the terms in...
As Congress and the President rush to re-authorize the dangerous FISA Amendments Act (FAA)—the law shamefully passed after pressure to legalize certain portions of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program—EFF has been sounding the alarm that Americans’ communications are still being...
After a leaked FISA court document revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) is vacuuming up private data on millions of innocent Americans by collecting all the phone records of Verizon customers, President Obama responded by saying "let's have a debate" about the scope of US surveillance...
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued an opinion rejecting the government’s attempt to hold an employee criminally liable under the federal hacking statute—the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”)—for violating his employer-imposed computer use restrictions. The decision...
From Cloudflare’s headline-making takedown of the Daily Stormer last autumn to YouTube’s summer restrictions on LGBTQ content, there's been a surge in “voluntary” platform censorship. Companies—under pressure from lawmakers, shareholders, and the public alike—have ramped up restrictions on speech,...
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today presented a federal court with a detailed explanation of how the NSA taps into the Internet backbone and requested the judge rule that the agency is violating the Fourth Amendment by copying and searching the collected data. EFF argues...
2018 has barely begun, and so has the fight to preserve net neutrality. January 3 was the first day of business in the California state legislature, and state Sen. Scott Wiener used it to introduce legislation to protect net neutrality for Californians. As the FCC has sought to abandon its role as...
EFF has been writing about the upcoming European Digital Single Market directive on copyright for a long time now. But it's time to put away the keyboard, and pick up the phone, because the proposal just got worse—and it's headed for a crucial vote on June 20-21. For those who need no further...
Yesterday afternoon, Ars Technica published a story reporting two possible logs of Heartbleed attacks occurring in the wild, months before Monday's public disclosure of the vulnerability. It would be very bad news if these stories were true, indicating that blackhats and/or intelligence agencies...
UPDATE: Enigmail and GPG Tools have been patched for EFAIL. For more up-to-date information, please see EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense guides.UPDATE (5/14/18): More information has been released. See EFF's more detailed explanation and analysis here.A group of European security researchers have...