This Week In Techdirt History: November 4th - 10th

from the can-we-fix-voting-machines-please dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2013, UK officials were going a bit nuts in response to the fallout from their detention of David Miranda, first arguing that he was, in fact, a terrorist, then that they didn't know he was a journalist, and then that the Snowden leaks would help pedophiles — leading us to wonder of the State Department would condemn their stifling of journalism (okay, not really wonder...)

Stateside, Mike Rogers was claiming that more NSA transparency would hurt privacy, while also being opportunistically concerned about the privacy implications of the Affordable Care Act. The agency was positively comparing metadata searches to stop-and-frisk, and making a similar argument that curbing metadata protection would harm privacy. And of course the Inspector General was rejecting a request from Congress to investigate the agency, while the Senate Intelligence Committee advanced a bill to give the NSA more funding.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2008, while we were wondering why the MPAA gets to review and approve DVD players, the Copyright Alliance was fighting to outlaw remote DVRs. A UK ISP was threatening to disconnect anyone who has open wifi, the French Senate approved the three strikes law that would create the infamous Hadopi, and Italian authors were fighting for a piracy tax on DSL connections (while Italian officials were moving forward with criminal charges against Google executives over a user's video).

Today, there's a lot of concern about issues with electronic voting machines and their poor security. Naturally, if people had known about this ten years ago, it would have been fixed by now. Oh, wait...

Fifteen Years Ago

But certainly if we'd known about it all the way back in 2003, it'd definitely be fixed by now, right? It's not like we'd need advocacy groups and law clinics to fight to stop Diebold from C&D-ing people who talk about its security issues, right? Oh...

Well anyway, also this week in 2003, we saw the first big record label merger of the 21st century, with Sony and BMG turning the Big Five into the Big Four. The RIAA was bragging about the success of its lawsuits based on dubious causality, while studies showed they were somewhat effective in making people delete MP3s and really, really hate the record industry.

It was also around this time that the trend of making computers look cool started taking root beyond the world of Apple.

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Filed Under: history, look back