Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is demanding access to 135 computers and hard drives that were seized from his home in January, so the data can be used for his defense. Until then, he refuses to give up passwords to encrypted data stored on the machines. Dotcom’s legal team is challenging the legality of the search warrants at the High Court in Auckland and is accusing the US Government of an unfair fight.
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The internet is built of services. One of the core services, and a major choke-point for control, is domain name resolution. There have been some alternates come and go, but one of the strongest has been OpenNIC, and they’ve just launched a new top level domain – .pirate
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If further proof is needed that copyright trolls are only interested in money and couldn’t care less about artists or their reputations, read on. A lawsuit, filed against fans of the band All Shall Perish, caused chaos in the past 48 hours when the horrified band revealed they know nothing about it. Speaking with TorrentFreak, the band’s manager says they are “gutted” by the news and have no idea what is going on.
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A bill already passed by the Senate and set to be rubber stamped by the House would make it mandatory for all new cars in the United States to be fitted with black box data recorders from 2015 onwards.
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The Motion Picture Association of America is squaring off against a coalition of Internet giants and public interest groups over the key question of whether it's possible to directly infringe copyright by embedding an image or video hosted by a third party. ...

This week's Boston Phoenix cover story -- Hunting the Craigslist Killer: An Untold Detective Story from the Digital Frontier -- would not have been possible without access to a huge trove of case files released by the Boston Police Department. Many of those documents have never been made public -- until now.
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