Evening Edition is a wonderful way to catch up on news that doesn’t include a Kardashian or an Apple rumor. Now, they offer a five-minute daily podcast featuring the stories of the day. I tried reading Evening Edition via their email newsletter, RSS, and the website itself, but I miss a day or two each week. I have found the podcast much easier to fit into a hectic schedule. I highly recommend it.

Copyright trolls sue lots of people to extract settlements from those who can’t afford to litigate in the face of potentially massive statutory damages. Their claims are often facially lacking in merit and instead leverage intimidation and poorly-constructed federal copyright damages provisions to bankrupt people for profit.

I’m impressed by Wordpress’ parent company, Automattic, who refused to respond to the troll’s fishing expedition. And it’s good to see EFF lend a hand here in the form of representation, but eventually Congress needs to step in and fix the statutory damages provisions that incentivize copyright trolls to this vile abuse of our legal system in the first place.

For some great background and reporting on trolls and those who fight them, read this Ars Technica piece by Timothy B. Lee.

If you’re composing an email you don’t want someone to see, consider picking up the phone instead. Your assumptions about the privacy of email are inaccurate.

Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Ted Poe (R-Texas), and Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) are pushing an amendment to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that would require a warrant for authorities to obtain any email, instead of allowing free access to messages older than six months.

I wrote in January about Google’s decision to require a warrant even where the law does not, so the ECPA’s shortcomings in the digital age (the law is more than twenty years old) are sometimes mitigated by responsible corporate policies.

But a legitimate amendment like Lofgren’s would apply Google’s common sense approach to 4th Amendment rights to all such service providers. There’s simply no excuse not to get this done.

I admit, squeezing the entire post into the title is lazy, but at least it’s informative. I’ll link to Twitter’s death notice for Posterous and call it a post.

I’ve been doing this from my Galaxy Nexus for a while now. I paired my phone to my Xbox 360 so I can pull videos up on my phone’s YouTube app (which is much easier to use than the Xbox app) and then send to my TV via the console. It’s a great experience.

If you need some YouTube content to try this out with, consider the massive Slenderman collection I linked to at my personal blog yesterday.

I was hoping Marisa Mayer would bring Yahoo¹ into the twenty-first century.

This is one piece of evidence that tips the scales very far in the opposite direction, and will probably cost Yahoo a few good employees.

In August, Twitter turned its back on the sort of independent developers who built their community for them. Now, my favorite Twitter app for Android, Falcon Pro, has hit Twitter’s artificial user limit.

They have other apps, (like an incredible widget that is also a fully-functional Twitter client), but they can’t accept any more Falcon Pro users.

Falcon Pro’s left- and right-drawer layout, with an elegant, clutter-free but feature-packed design, won me over instantly. It came out just as I had given up on Carbon for Twitter, a beautiful app nearly dismissed as vaporware as it faced numerous release setbacks.

Carbon finally came out, and it is very pretty, but Falcon Pro fits my personal Twitter use case best, so Carbon is a close second. You know what isn’t even in the top five? Twitter’s official Android client.

Over 3,000 people have signed a petition to raise Falcon Pro’s limit as of Saturday night, but that’s at Twitter’s absolute discretion, and it would set a bad precedent, so I’m not holding my breath.

But if you tried out Falcon Pro and didn’t like it, you can revoke the app’s access to your Twitter account, thereby freeing up a token for a new user. Redditor classic_schmosby explains in this comment.

Twitter: You can’t build and maintain a thriving ecosystem with token limits and patronizing blog posts about “building user value.” You will never offer a sufficient variety of apps to please all use cases. Your developer community fosters a massive user base that may not otherwise come to or stay with Twitter, pumping data into your system for you to monetize. Developers get and keep users for you by offering designs, features, and improvements that you cannot provide. Don’t stifle that, celebrate it.

Cotton Delo of Ad Age:

The targeting would hypothetically enable Coca-Cola to target to teenagers who’ve bought soda in the last month, or Pampers to show ads to North Carolina residents who’ve recently bought baby products, since Facebook’s own array of demographic and interest-based targeting options can be added to further refine audience segments. But adoption will be contingent on acceptance by corporate legal departments wary of becoming embroiled in a consumer privacy scare.

It’s not something I would rush into if I was one of those “corporate legal departments.” It’s not that I have some conspiracy theory about Facebook, or those data banks. I don’t. We give data to those data banks willingly when we use those discount cards. Shame on us for not reading the fine print.

And Facebook? They’re the same: the fact that nothing private is guaranteed to stay that way on the internet is common knowledge these days, and those who don’t know should know.

What would worry me as in-house counsel is what hackers will find when they inevitably get their hands on some of this data. In other words, Facebook and data banks are the devils we know. I would keep clients out of this plan because of the devils we don’t know.

Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, talking to Lifehacker:

What’s your favorite to-do list manager?

You know, I don’t actually have one. I use Evernote, which isn’t particularly great for to-dos yet. Yet.

Despite having tried every task management app I can find, and settling on Wunderlist¹Any.do for now, I’m very excited about an integrated Evernote task management solution.

Gerard Magliocca of Concurring Opinions introduces a fresh take on the legal education topic.

CBS’s strong-arming of CNET on this front has the exact opposite of the intended effect: now that it is clear how much control CBS has and is willing to exert over CNET content, any reasonable court must consider the possibility that the corporation is as deliberate about what CNET is allowed to do as they are being about what CNET is not allowed to do. Stock manipulation is the one I’m really thinking about here, but perhaps there are others.

It’s poor management, poor lawyering, and broken logic.

The numbers are pretty stark, and while it doesn’t hurt to be available on streaming services, if for nothing else than the opportunity to be found by new listeners, unknown artists are better off leveraging social media and sites like Bandcamp to manage their own digital distribution.

I wonder if there are any retail stores out there that have looked like Apple stores since before Apple stores, and before this trademark was granted earlier this month. I don’t mean knock-off stores, though. I’m thinking make-up shops, art galleries, and other entities that often embrace a minimalist store design aesthetic.

Here’s a direct link to the very-user-hostile USPTO page for the filing.

The Carribean nation Antigua and Barbuda and the World Trade Organization say a US ban on online gambling is costing jobs and “billions of dollars.” The WTO has approved a plan to allow infringement of US-based copyright interests to the tune of $21 million per year.

The recovery looks de minimis next to the claimed loss, but experts quoted in Annie Lowery’s New York Times article are probably right: this a ploy to get US artists up in arms about Congress conceding to Antigua and Barbuda on this conflict.

What a strange, strange story.

I still personally have no interest in a 128 GB iPad, but as John Gruber points out, some professionals prefer the tablet form factor generally, and the iPad specifically, but run out of space for the multimedia they use every day.

Novelist Justin Cronin presents a very well-written and reasonable take on why knee-jerk reactions on either side of the gun debate are misinformed and unrealistic:

[…] in the weeks since Newtown, I’ve watched my Facebook feed, which is dominated by my coastal friends, fill up with anti-gun dispatches that seemed divorced from reality. I agree it would be nice if the world had exactly zero guns in it. But I don’t see that happening, and calling gun owners “a bunch of inbred rednecks” doesn’t do much to advance rational discussion.

David Kravets quotes a Googler:

“Google requires an ECPA search warrant for contents of Gmail and other services based on the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which prevents unreasonable search and seizure,” Chris Gaither, a Google spokesman, said.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act isn’t always as demanding as Google, and their assertion that the policy is based on Constitutional requirements implies that the ECPA does not comport with the same requirements. That’s a bold legal position to take, but as Mr. Kravets explains at Wired, Google isn’t necessarily alone.

I must admit that I never thought about it in that light, but I’d love to read the plaintiff’s essay.

…but I’m not interested.

Peter Cohen of The Loop shared this earlier today, but I wonder why he didn’t offer any of his own thoughts on it. Here’s why I’m not interested:

Part of the iPad’s appeal to me is that it isn’t another crufty “filing cabinet.” I rather like that it is exactly what it appears to be: a big, beautiful window into the cloud. Everything I need is in Dropbox or Rdio or Google or Evernote, and when I make something, whether or not I’m connected to the internet, there’s always a way to save it for later synchronization. I also find that limited space makes me more discerning when it comes to installing apps, or choosing what music will sync to the device.

I understand some people lust after the one-terabyte tablet. I will never be one of those people.

My personal policy is to refrain from discussing work on social media. In all my years of Twitter-ing and Facebook-ing, I’ve posted only a very few work-related updates, invariably focused on interpersonal minutiae like elevator rudeness. I think it’s just best to leave work at work. However, as the Times's Steven Greenhouse reports, the National Labor Relations Board recently ruled that conversational exchanges about working conditions between multiple employees on social media may be construed as the kind of concerted activity protected by the National Labor Relations Act.

The Times story to which I link in this post’s headline mentions at least two instances (here and here¹) where the termination of lone complainers was upheld by the NLRB. This ruling suggests that my personal policy is a safe bet: there’s no way to engage in concerted activity if you’re venting alone.

Steven Zeitchik of the LA Times:

To make the movie, [Randy] Moore wouldn’t print out script pages or shot sequences for the 25 days he was filming on Disney turf, instead keeping all the info on iPhones. This way, when actors and crew were looking down between takes, passersby just thought they were glancing at their messages.

The films plot, such as it is, sounds as intriguing as its method of creation.

If it does get a distribution deal, Disney will most likely brings its formidable legal resources to bear upon it, and they’ll most likely succeed.

But I predict that the company will trigger a Streisand effect, perhaps as much to the filmmaker’s detriment as anyone else’s (to the extent that he hopes to recoup his investment), that will drive people to seek out and, in the era of digital file sharing, inevitably find the film.

If someone is videotaping a police incident, but not interfering therewith, there is no lawful justification for police interference. I’m not always in agreement with the ACLU, but this harassment must end. A nation where state surveillance is only increasing must be open to the right of citizens to turn the lens in the other direction.