This Week In Techdirt History: December 20th - 26th

from the ghost-of-christmas-past dept

Fri, Dec 25th 2020 12:00pm — Leigh Beadon

Five Years Ago

This week in 2015, while newly-leaked documents were exposing the US government's surveillance options, Hillary Clinton was nonsensically calling for an encryption "Manhattan Project" but not to produce a back door. Tom Cotton was also attacking Tim Cook and demonstrating profound ignorance, and was joined by Manhattan's Disctrict Attorney. Blackberry, apparently hoping to hasten its own demise, started arguing for greater cooperation with law enforcement. And yet, amidst all this, the government apparently didn't notice the irony in freaking out about an unauthorized backdoor discovered in Juniper firewall software.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2010, we wondered if journalists would face the same treatment as Julian Assange and why US publications were downplaying the significance of major leaks, while, in apparent anticipation of a leak, Bank of America started trying to block payments to Wikileaks, soon followed by Apple blocking the Wikileaks app. Meanwhile, we got a closer look and Homeland Security's terrible evidence for its recent domain seizures, and its affidavit that was riddled with errors that just got worse and worse.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2005, Senators were apparently undeterred by multiple court rulings on the unconstitutionality of video game bans, the FTC was cautiously optimistic about spam trends although the clock was ticking on Bill Gates's prediction that the problem of spam would be solved by early 2006, and Eliot Spitzer began an investigation into digital music price fixing. Sony's woes continued as Texas expanded its lawsuit to include MediaMax CDs and some of the parent company's own stores were failing to pull the rootkit CDs from shelves. And, as three men were facing charges for selling modified Xboxes, we wanted to know why modifying your own hardware is a federal crime.

Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: history, look back