On May 12, 2009, the ACLU and the Public Patent Foundation at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (PUBPAT) filed a lawsuit charging that patents on two human genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer are unconstitutional and invalid. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of four scientific organizations representing more than 150,000 geneticists, pathologists, and laboratory professionals, as well as individual researchers, breast cancer and women's health groups, genetic counselors and individual women. Individuals with certain mutations along these two genes, known as BRCA1 and BRCA2, are at a significantly higher risk for developing hereditary breast and ovarian cancers.

Hal Halpin is fighting the good fight for consumers, and the Entertainment Consumer Association has told the FTC it wants two things: full disclosure, on the box, of included DRM, as well as a standardized End-User Licensing Agreement. What's crazy? They might get it. Ars speaks to the man who wants you to have a voice in the gaming industry.

LinuxChix is a community for women who like Linux and Free Software, and for women and men who want to support women in computing. The membership ranges from novices to experienced users, and includes professional and amateur programmers, system administrators and technical writers.

The EFF has put its entire archive of government documents online. These have been "pried loose from secretive government agencies" through Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits over the years, but EFF has scanned and indexed all of them, then created a custom search engine to make browsing or digging much easier.

Corporate Critic is a product of the Ethical Consumer Research Association Ltd. Corporate Critic indexes and rates the Corporate Social Responsibility records of over 50,000 companies, using primarily civil society data. Ranging from large multinationals to small independents, it includes both publicly listed and private companies from anywhere in the world.

Take a load off with a toxin-free sofa By Adria Vasil Q: Where can I buy a healthy sofa? I don’t want any nasty flame retardants or polyurethane foam. A: Fine, so you’re too old to turn your couch cushions into a mighty fort, but sofas still represent a safe haven from the headaches outside your door. But where, oh where can a couch surfer loaf these days without lounging on pollutants? If you’ve been reading Ecoholic for a while, discerning sofa searcher, you know that the cushiony feel-good surface you sink into can be downright dodgy. Polyurethane foam is manufactured with carcinogenic toxins (like toluene diisocyanate) and offgasses air-polluting vapours (like volatile organic compounds).

We provide legal representation and other law-related services to protect and advance Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS). Founded in 2005, the Center now represents many of the most important and well-established free software and open source projects.

Full public disclosure is the only path to software that voters can trust.