The billionaire's potential about-face came after widespread publicity last week about the suits, which target a dozen plots covering slightly more than 8 acres of land strewn throughout the acreage that Zuckerberg bought for $100 million two years ago.

Zuckerberg-controlled companies filed eight so-called quiet title lawsuits in a Kauai court on Dec. 30 requesting the forced sales at public auction to the highest bidder.

Shortly after the American College of Education (ACE) in Indiana fired IT administrator Triano Williams in April, 2016, it found that it no longer had any employees with admin access to the Google email service used by the school.

ACE claimed that its students could not access their Google-hosted ACE email accounts or their online coursework.

Defamation claims like this can force independent media companies to capitulate and shut down due to mounting legal costs. Ayyadurai's attorney, Charles Harder, has already shown that this model can lead to exactly that result. His efforts helped put a much larger and much more well-resourced company than Techdirt completely out of business.

We intend to fight this baseless lawsuit because of the principles at stake, but we have no illusions about the costs. It will take a toll on us, even if we win.

The law would also force the social networks to create in-country offices focused on responding to takedown demands and would make these networks responsible for compensation if a post by individual users were found to slander someone.

German lawmakers believe this bill will help tackle the possibility of Russia meddling in Parliamentary elections scheduled for next year. This follows the allegations that the Kremlin was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee that led to the leak of thousands of emails by key aides to Hillary Clinton.

We've already seen authoritarian countries with long histories of punishing and silencing dissent jump on the "fake news is a problem!" bandwagon to justify heavy handed censorship. Both China and Iran have pointed to "fake news" as a reason for new internet censorship plans.

Over in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel has now endorsed a proposal to criminalize publishing fake news.

The legal fight started Wednesday morning when the ridesharing giant opened its fleet of autonomous Volvos to riders throughout the city. It did so without applying for a permit to test autonomous technology, arguing that California regulations governing the tech apply only to vehicles that don’t require a human supervisor.

“We respectfully disagree with the California DMV’s legal interpretation of today’s automation regulations,” Anthony Levandowski, who leads Uber’s automation efforts, said in a conference call Friday afternoon.

Officers executed a search warrant for "Phone Traders" on Coney Island Avenue at about 11:55 a.m. ET Thursday. They seized 9,000 counterfeit phones and $59,000 from the store. The location had actually been a warehouse for a stash of fake phones, which police believed was supplying smaller stores with its counterfeit devices.

Both men are accused of taking a vast quantity of private data with them and successfully recruited former colleagues to join them at Scopely, which Zynga claimed was a violation of their employment contracts. (Scopely has several Zynga alumni, including Roy Rosenthal, the company’s general counsel. Rosenthal also did not respond to Ars.)

Those documents also allegedly included “hundreds of detailed design specifications,” “unreleased game design documents,” and “financial-related information."

Given that most large-scale hacks tend to be backed by states such as China and Russia, it seems that Sir Michael's speech is a public shot across their bows, warning them not to target Blighty – while simultaneously urging NATO to treat the Article 5 collective defence provisions as applying to cyberspace.

It is unlikely that many countries would take Article 5 seriously in the context of cyberspace, given that many NATO member states effectively ignore the treaty requirement for them to spend two per cent of GDP on military spending

As you probably know, there have been a bunch of protests in North Dakota lately concerning the Dakota Access Pipeline. Back in September, after covering the protests and having some of her videos of an attack on the protestors go viral, famed Democracy Now reporter Amy Goodman found out an arrest warrant had been issued for her.

As Democracy Now points out, the criminal complaint against her is so transparently unconstitutional and so transparently about intimidating reporters, that it actually notes that "Amy Goodman can be seen on the video identifying herself and interviewing protesters about their involvement in the protest." Right. That's called journalism.