Weeks after forcing the shutdown of a popular, fan-run "pirate" server that ran a classic version of World of Warcraft, Blizzard now says it basically had no choice but to go after Nostalrius to protect its legal rights.

In his post, Brack goes on to say that Blizzard has looked into running a Nostalrius-style "classic" server on its own, but that "none could be executed without great difficulty. If we could push a button and all of this would be created, we would. However, there are tremendous operational challenges to integrating classic servers, not to mention the ongoing support of multiple live versions for every aspect of WoW."

The massive litigation has been co-mingled in Missouri, and there are some interesting elements at play. For starters, the judge presiding over the case says that if you want to be a named plaintiff in the litigation, you can't use a pseudonym like "John Doe," and instead you have to use your real name.

Attorneys want to use confidential communications between Ashley Madison executives and their attorneys as part of their lawsuit in a bid to establish that the company made fake female profiles to induce people to become one of the site's 39 million members.

A new women-only ride-sharing service, Chariot for Women, is set to launch April 19 in Boston, Massachusetts. Surprisingly, its founder is not a former female passenger who felt unsafe in an Uber—as many of us have—but Michael Pelletz, an Uber driver who had a revelation when he felt threatened by a passenger.

Scores of women have reported rapes and assaults by Uber drivers, while, anecdotally, countless others have felt threatened.

According to civil rights lawyers, Chariots for Women’s female-only policies could put it squarely in the crosshairs of gender discrimination lawsuits, which would be difficult to win.

One of the most popular "pirate" servers for World of Warcraft, running a classic version of the game no longer offered by Blizzard, will be shutting down under the threat of legal action from Blizzard.

The administrators say that 800,000 registered accounts and 150,000 active players were working through quest progressions reproduced to precisely match the game of a decade ago.

Hosting private servers is explicitly against Blizzard's Terms of Use, a rule the company says "isn’t an issue because of ‘lost’ subscription fees from players choosing these illegitimate servers over the real WoW servers—it simply boils down to the fact that private servers are illegal, and that’s that."

Social networking forum reddit on Thursday removed a section from its site used to tacitly inform users it had never received a certain type of U.S. government surveillance request, suggesting the platform is now being asked to hand over customer data under a secretive law enforcement authority.

"I've been advised not to say anything one way or the other," a reddit administrator named "spez," who made the update, said in a thread discussing the change. “Even with the canaries, we're treading a fine line.”

A man who sparked an outcry on Twitter after tweeting about confronting a Muslim woman on a street in Croydon, south London, and challenging her to “explain Brussels” has been arrested by police.

Officers for the Metropolitan police in Croydon tweeted on Wednesday that a suspect had been arrested for inciting racial hatred.

Even though a gagging order has prevented Ladar Levison who owned Lavabit, or any of his team from spilling, it now appears that the Feds have done it themselves.

His stance cost him dearly, with by his own estimates 410,000 registered users with many paying for encrypted storage, and denying him his main source of income. Levison wanted to be able to explain what happened.

Then last June Elsevier filed a case in New York trying to shut down Library Genesis and Sci-Hub. Both are apparently based in Russia, which is not highly motivated to send more of its foreign reserves to Western publishers. So the case was not effective at shutting them down. It turned out, however, to be a classic case of the Streisand Effect, in which attempting to suppress information on the Web causes it to attract far more attention.

Last weekend the Streisand Effect reached the opinion pages of the New York Times with Kate Murphy's Should All Research Papers Be Free?, replete with quotes from Michael Eisen, Alicia Wise, Peter Suber and David Crotty. Alas, Murphy starts by writing "Her protest against scholarly journals’ paywalls". Sci-Hub isn't a protest. Calling something a protest is a way of labelling it ineffectual. Sci-Hub is a tool that implements a paywall-free world.

"I can tell you, the first time we do have trouble getting into a cell phone, we're going to seek a court order from Apple," he said. "And when they deny us, I'm going to go lock the CEO of Apple up. I'll lock the rascal up."

When once asked why his officers had shot at a suspect 110 times, hitting him 68 times, he explained that it was "all the ammunition they had."

The stories keep on coming about prosecutions for "insulting" Erdogan. The most insane one started making news a few weeks ago, when a Turkish man filed a complaint against his own wife for apparently insulting Erdogan in their home.

Incredibly, it appears that such complaints, which need to be approved by the Justice Ministry are coming in at a rate of over 1,000 per month.