law

Tuesday's top tech stories are out to disrupt your world:

Oh Amazon, what don't you do? Well cross off game development, as it just launched its own studio to make Facebook games and compete with Zynga. It also joined the textbook rental service to face off with eBay's Half.com and BookRenter.

YouTube will no longer be a pre-loaded default app on Apple devices. Apple is dropping the YouTube app for iOS 6, and Google will create a separate app you can download. It's all part of Apple's mission to distance itself from Google.

If … Read more

I have a certain fondness for courtroom drama.

From the novels of Scott Turow to the pulsating shenanigans of my selfless mentor, Alan Shore of "Boston Legal," the posing and the revelations can often be far more exciting than anything in Henry James or E. L. James.

But though the excitement of seeing excluded evidence being slipped into journalists' hands is precisely the sort of thing the great Shore would have done with innocent eyes and guilty lips, one aspect of the case confuses me.

It gnaws at me like the tags on an H&M shirt. … Read more

You have to be careful which band you book for your wedding. Your choice carries with it a message.

If you book the Libertines, your wife may look at you askance. If you tell her it's the Porcupine Tree, well, please imagine her face.

So one wonders whether sufficient thought went into Amazon Senior Vice President Brian Valentine's choice of Tom Petty. When your Valentine brings you something Petty, trouble may ensue.

In this case, it apparently did -- but from an unexpected source.

I hear down the Geekwire that Valentine thought he could book Petty online. Amazon'… Read more

I've been flying a lot lately and it's become harder to find security lines that don't have nude body scanners.

They seem to be proliferating like Zuckerbergs at Google.

Worse, they become ever more spectacularly demeaning, as people take up a submissive pose -- like bending over at the proctologist's -- and hope it will be over quickly.

One assumes that all the powers that were, be, and are were happy with these things.

It appears not. For the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is grousing that the TSA … Read more

How many people, on seeing a man lying the road at 2 a.m., would go over to ask if he's all right?

How many would just walk on by and assume the man was just another drunk?

And how many would take a picture and tweet it with an amused caption?

This research seems relevant on hearing the story of a teen who saw a man lying in the road at 2 a.m. in Edinburgh, Scotland.

He chose option No. 3.… Read more

I am not sure that all's well that ends well.

Sometimes, you just want things to end and then decide if all can ever be well.

This might be the case with the Highers brothers.

Twenty-five years ago, they were convicted of the murder of Robert Karey at his Detroit home. They say they're innocent.

In 2009, a friend called Mary Evans happened to think of the Highers brothers when she was posting something to the Northeast Detroit Alumni Facebook page.

She told My Fox Detroit: "(All) I said was it's too bad or it's … Read more

The Austrian group Europe versus Facebook, which has been a thorn in the social-networking giant's European side ever since it brought various privacy issues to light and spurred an investigation by Ireland Data Protection Commissioner Billy Hawkes, just got a rather unpleasant text message. The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC) has made it quite clear it does not have the time to talk to the group, even though the duo has been working together for months with the goal of getting Facebook to care about privacy.

You might think all of this isn't a big deal, … Read more

LAS VEGAS -- Got a Wi-Fi network? If someone, say Google or the government, sniffs your open network, you may think you're legally protected. Don't be so sure.

It remains unclear whether the law protects your unencrypted Wi-Fi from interception, because there are differing interpretations and lack of court precedent, Kevin Bankston, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said in a session at Defcon yesterday.

The federal wiretap statute prohibits sniffing of contents of communications by a device unless the contents are readily accessible to the general public. If the network is password-protected you're … Read more

Cell phone videos and photos have increasingly brought law enforcement activities to the public eye, such as the killing of Oscar Grant in Oakland, Calif., and crowd control tactics during the Occupy Wall Street protests. But this has also meant that police are more wary of camera-toting citizens.

However, Washington D.C.'s police chief, Cathy Lanier, recently announced that cops are going to have to learn to live with people recording and snapping photos of them, according to DCist. In a six-page General Order, Lanier outlines specific do's and don'ts that her staff must adhere to when … Read more