On Friday, EFF and the law firm of Fish and Richardson filed an emergency motion to quash and for the return of seized property on behalf of a Boston College computer science student whose computers, cell phone, and other property were seized as part of an investigation into who sent an e-mail to a school mailing list identifying another student as gay. The problem? Not only is there no indication that any crime was committed, the investigating officer argued that the computer expertise of the student itself supported a finding of probable cause to seize the student’s property.

Read the rest of this post

For the past five years, John Rennie has braved the towering waves of the North Atlantic Ocean to keep your email coming to you. As chief submersible engineer aboard the Wave Sentinel, part of the fleet operated by U.K.-based undersea installation and maintenance firm Global Marine Systems, Rennie–a congenial, 6-feet 4-inch, 57-year-old Scotsman–patrols the seas, dispatching a remotely operated submarine deep below the surface to repair undersea cables. The cables, thick as fire hoses and packed with fiber optics, run everywhere along the seafloor, ferrying phone and Web traffic from continent to continent at the speed of light.

The cables regularly fail. On any given day, somewhere in the world there is the nautical equivalent of a hit and run when a cable is torn by fishing nets or sliced by dragging anchors. If the mishap occurs in the Irish Sea, the North Sea or the North Atlantic, Rennie comes in to splice the break together.

Read the rest of this post

Last month an email message washed up at the offices of The Cook Islands News in the South Pacific. It was a request to place a half-page advertisement in the newspaper, which has a circulation of 2,500. The cost was $370.

“We were amazed–it came from out of nowhere,” the newspaper’s editor, John Woods, said in a telephone interview. “We are very skeptical of ads like that.”

Even more surprising was who was paying for it: Google (GOOG).

Read the rest of this post

Last week I criticized Yahoo for their insecure password recovery mechanism that allowed an intruder to take control of Sarah Palin’s email account. Several readers asked me the obvious follow-up question: What should Yahoo have done instead?

Read the rest of this post

Human history is one of progressive improvement in communication. From the 20th century, mail was a fundamental form of communication. The invention of email changed two things. It became cheap to send short mail, and delivery was instant. Email became favored for both corporate and personal communication. But email faces increasing competition. Chat, text messages, Twitter, social networks and even life-streaming tools are chipping away at email usage. In this post we take a look at what’s happening and assess if email is in danger.

Read the rest of this post

We are a society that lives more and more in our technology-induced bubbles. When we go outside, we wear an iPod; we talk on cell phones while driving. In urban areas, we might never meet our neighbors unless there’s a fire or earthquake. But can technology also help bring us together in our physical communities, and help us get to know our neighbors? Front Porch Forum (FPF) is making a valiant effort to do just that, offering up closed email forums that are strictly limited to people living within each physical neighborhood in Chittenden County, Vermont.

Read the rest of this post