Senior politicians and an independent reviewer have said police must explain why David Miranda was detained for nine hours at Heathrow Airport....

Keith Vaz, chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, and shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said police must explain why terrorism powers were used.

Brazil has complained that his detention was "without justification". - BBC News

"This has caused considerable consternation and swift answers are needed," said Labor lawmaker Yvette Cooper, the party's spokeswoman on interior affairs, in a statement.

The Home Office, or interior ministry, said the detention was an operational police matter. The police declined to provide any details beyond confirming the detention.

"Schedule 7 forms an essential part of the UK's security arrangements. It is for the police to decide when it is necessary and proportionate to use these powers," a Home Office spokesman said.

[PJ: File that last under OMG. It's up to the *police* to decide when they are doing things according to the law?! If that is how the law is written, with no oversight over the police and no standards of when it is appropriate to use terrorism laws and against what kind of people, someone should rewrite that law asap.] - Reuters

"I am going to publish many more documents now. I am going to publish a lot about England, too, I have a lot of documents about the espionage system in England. Now my focus is going to be that as well."...

"This is obviously a rather profound escalation of their attacks on the news-gathering process and journalism," he said.

"It's bad enough to prosecute and imprison sources. It's worse still to imprison journalists who report the truth. But to start detaining the family members and loved ones of journalists is simply despotic. Even the Mafia had ethical rules against targeting the family members of people they felt threatened by." - CNN

1) Juries are more favorable to patentees than judges.

2) The length of a trial has no effect on its outcome.

3) There is only a modest difference between patentee win rates in favored jurisdictions like Delaware and the Eastern District of Texas.

Professor Lemley and his colleagues did identify some predictors of success:

Juries rule for patentees more than judges.
Juries in some districts appear to be more likely to find for patentees than are others. But the inter-district results are much more modest than most people suspect.

Read the full paper: “Rush to Judgment? Trial Length and Outcomes in Patent Cases.” - Technology Academics Policy

Author Mark Forsyth was writing his book in the library, and needed to check a line from the famous play. The British Library said the fault was caused by a newly installed wi-fi service from a third-party provider. One security expert said the incident highlighted the "dysfunction" of internet filters.

Mr Forsyth revealed on his blog that the filter had logged his attempt to access the page. - BBC News

hose same facts lead to a civil lawsuit in the UK by Apple users, which was filed earlier this year.

Now Google is moving to dismiss the UK case on jurisdictional grounds, arguing that it is not subject to UK privacy laws and that plaintiffs must refile their case in California where Google is based. Google argues, essentially, that UK courts have no jurisdiction over the company.

Making that claim involves a lot of “chutzpah” (audacity) on Google’s part....The implications are pretty stunning. Playing them out, it would mean all international disputes involving US-based internet companies would have to be brought in the US and would be governed by US law.

[PJ: No. It's not chutzpah. It's quite normal to make that argument in international cases. Can Google be sued in Iran under Iranian law? How about North Korea? Let's make the question a little closer to home. Let's say you are being sued by someone in Iran. You don't live in Iran. You live in the US. Now how do you feel? Do you wish to be under the laws of every disparate nation in the world? As this class on jurisdiction points out, in Saudi Arabia there is a death penalty for adultery. Do you want to be liable under that law if you are a US citizen living in the US? Can Saudi Arabia come and stone you? How would the internet work if it was the law that companies are liable under each and every country's laws, regardless of the obvious contradictions, and could enforce its rulings everywhere in the world? Would anyone set up an online business in such a situation? I wouldn't. How about China? Shall we accept limitations that it imposes on its citizens as limitations on US citizens also?

I know it's popular to attack Google, but really it's quite normal to be sued where you are in business. Terms of use, which users accept, usually, typically tell you where you can sue. There are some exceptions, such as in cases of libel, where one can argue that you want it tried where the harm was done to the plaintiff, but even then, it's quite typical to see jurisdictional assertions at least raised. It's not only not chutzpah to do that, it'd be malpractice not to. The first time a country asserted jurisdiction over the Internet, Australia, it was big news. That's how unusual it was to even try to assert jurisdiction over a US company under another country's laws. Do you want to accept Germany's laws about not speaking about Hitler favorably? Does Germany get to annul America's First Amendment in the US? Do you see the complexity that ensues if a company can be sued anywhere and everywhere? If a country can claim jurisdiction over another country's territory? It is *normal* to sue where a company is headquartered. Google may or may not succeed, but it's certainly not chutzpah to argue that it should be sued where it is located.] - Greg Sterling, SearchEngineland

To be sure, Craigslist had granted authorization to everyone by setting up a public website that anyone could access. But when Craigslist had sent the cease-and-desist letter and then blocked 3taps’s IP addresses, Breyer ruled, Craigslist had exercised its “power to revoke, on a case-by-case basis, the general permission it granted to the public to access the information on its website.” - Orin Kerr, Volokh Conspiracy

Mr. Miranda was in Berlin to deliver documents related to Mr. Greenwald’s investigation into government surveillance to Ms. Poitras, Mr. Greenwald said. Ms. Poitras, in turn, gave Mr. Miranda different documents to pass to Mr. Greenwald. Those documents, which were stored on encrypted thumb drives, were confiscated by airport security, Mr. Greenwald said. All of the documents came from the trove of materials provided to the two journalists by Mr. Snowden. The British authorities seized all of his electronic media — including video games, DVDs and data storage devices — and did not return them, Mr. Greenwald said. - Charlie Savage and Michael Schwirtz, The N.Y. Times

One final note: The NSA's noncompliance incidents are a big deal, but we shouldn't let them become a distraction. The far bigger problem is with the law itself, which gives the NSA almost unchecked authority to monitor Americans' international calls and emails. The problem arises, in other words, not just from the NSA's non-compliance with the law, but from its compliance with it. - Jameel Jaffer, ACLU

The 3D style view of the buildings in Google Maps makes it possible to locate a spot in a jiffy as compared to Nokia Here which is woefully short when it comes to information like the street name at similar levels of Zoom....

Google Street View is miles ahead of the Nokia’s version. Image quality of the Google Street View is also better than Nokia Here. Nokia Here and Google Maps offer alternative routes and display information about distance and travel time based on the mode of transport. The Nokia Here directions are a bit easier to follow. So is the traffic information on The Nokia Here which is much clearer and better than Google maps.

[PJ: Maybe even FairSearch can see why Android phones would rather have Google Maps than Nokia Here.] - PC Tablet

What does Microsoft get out of the deal? Mueller believes Redmond has been very keen to get access to Java. "Amazon's AWS cloud gets developer support because it offers Java, and Microsoft is desperate to do the same," he says. "It wants to become the No. 1 IaaS vendor, but if it has no support for Java, then that becomes almost impossible." - Paul Rubens, CIO

Google raises concerns about our branding too. The funny thing about this point is that we’ve been using the same branding continuously since 2010 for an inferior YouTube app. Now that we have an app that gives users a fuller YouTube experience, Google objects to the branding (even though we’ve taken additional steps to clarify that we are the author of the app). Go figure.

Finally, Google cites a degraded experience. Since 2010, Google permitted a Windows Phone app that was far below the iPhone and Android app experiences. Reviews of our new app are unanimous that the experience is much improved, and we’re committed to making adjustments to improve it further. If Google were truly concerned about a degraded experience, it would allow our users access to the new YouTube app they love.

We think it’s clear that Google just doesn’t want Windows Phone users to have the same experience as Android and Apple users, and that their objections are nothing other than excuses.

[PJ: If you read the most recent FairSearch complaint filed with the EU Commission, which Microsoft and other FairSearch members hope will become an official investigation, I think you'll see that Microsoft is here trying to buttress its case, rather than trying to "work with Google" to solve the issues raised. As you watch this play out, I think you'll find that is what this is really all about. When it's a lawyer writing a blog post, they're not just whistling Dixie.] - David Howard, Corp. V. P. & Deputy General Counsel, Litigation & Antitrust, Microsoft

[http://www.livefromdarylshouse.com/]
[http://baconbros.com/]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ The_Bacon_Brothers]
[http://www.allmusic.com/artist/ the-bacon-brothers] - YouTube

About that: The NSA has admitted, separately, that it employs a practice called "contact chaining." That means that if one of their targets calls someone, who in turn calls someone else, who in turn calls you, agency's checking you out.

"But I'm probably not even three degrees away from a terrorist!" you might cry. Doesn't matter. You just have to be what the NSA calls a "target," or person of interest. And thanks to Snowden, we know the agency has a rather broad definition of what constitutes a target, like you're in the same online phone directory—the Yellow Pages, perhaps?—as another target. Anyone who's worked for any foreign government is on the list. So is anyone who tries to use standard, legal techniques to avoid being tracked online—like using the Tor browser. - Daily Dot

But then, not everyone is Google. According to web analytics firm GoSquared, worldwide internet traffic dipped by a stunning 40 per cent during the brief minutes that the Chocolate Factory's services were offline. Here's the graph of what that looked like. - Neil McAllister, The Register

He has also started a legal defense fund and said he's gotten "an overwhelming response," raising more than $90,000 in the past few days. Among those now backing him is former Texas congressman and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, who told NBC News on Tuesday that Levison's legal battle "should be in the interests of everybody who cares about liberty." - NBC News

[PJ: Interesting debate here.] - Scott Travers, Twitter