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.

Bush’s Backward Sprint To The Finish

In its final days, the administration is rushing to implement a sweeping array of "midnight regulations" — de facto laws issued by the executive branch — designed to lock in Bush's legacy. Under the last- minute rules, which can be extremely difficult to overturn, loaded firearms would be allowed in national parks, uranium mining would be permitted near the Grand Canyon and many injured consumers would no longer be able to sue negligent manufacturers in state courts. Other rules would gut the Endangered Species Act, open millions of acres of wild lands to mining, restrict access to birth control and put local cops to work spying for the federal government.

More troubling is a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that suggests Apple may be embracing the authentication model after it pushed other industries to abandon copy protection. The EFF points out that several of Apple's core products have some sort of DRM or authentication chip embedded in them, including iPods, the iPhone, OSX, and video ports on the new MacBooks. In its report, the EFF accuses Apple of trying to "shove competitors to the fringes and wrest control out of the hands of users."

It's frustrating that so many recent trends in consumer technology seem to not have the consumer's best interests at heart. Thankfully, though, some of the trends mentioned here are starting to fall by the wayside as corporations bow to consumer pressure. Here's a look at ten of the most annoying trends that take the "consumer" out of consumer technology.

In the two months since Israel ended its military assault on Gaza, Palestinians and international rights groups have accused it of excessive force and wanton killing in that operation, but the Israeli military has said it followed high ethical standards and took great care to avoid civilian casualties. Now testimony is emerging from within the ranks of soldiers and officers alleging a permissive attitude toward the killing of civilians and reckless destruction of property that is sure to inflame the domestic and international debate about the army’s conduct in Gaza. On Thursday, the military’s chief advocate general ordered an investigation into a soldier’s account of a sniper killing a woman and her two children who walked too close to a designated no-go area by mistake, and another account of a sharpshooter who killed an elderly woman who came within 100 yards of a commandeered house.

Privacy groups are urging the Federal Trade Commission to open an investigation on cloud computing services—especially Google's. If the FTC finds that Google isn't doing enough to protect user data, one organization suggests that the Big G's web-based services should be shut down.

One of the advantages of having helped found the open-source movement that I cherish most is that nobody can criticize me when I criticize it. I’m a gadfly by nature, disgusted by cant even (actually, especially!) when it’s my own insights being reflected back at me as dogma. Anyone who actually does that is likely to flip me into full Discordian rascal-guru mode. So I was actually pleased to learn of the existence of Linux-Hater’s Blog. I rather looked forward to winnowing through it for nuggets with which I could shock the more fanboyish members of my community by agreeing. Alas: when I finally went there with intent to read, I discovered that the never-actually-identified author of the blog had ended the project. I read the entire archives anway.

Red light cameras are controversial enough, but now the city of Denver is embroiled in controversy over data reporting and camera accuracy. As for safety, it appears that a minor change to yellow light times has a significant impact. The only thing better than setting up red light cameras and watching the cash flow in is doing so without collecting the required data to prove that the cameras are useful and accurate. Right? Okay, maybe not so much. This is, however, the situation unfolding in Denver, Colorado, where a local newspaper's detective work has revealed that the contractor hired by the city to manage the cameras has failed to submit contractually-required documentation. What's more, the city wasn't even asking for it.

The very characteristic that makes digital TV look so good is the one that makes it so vulnerable to restriction and manipulation: A TV broadcast is no longer a signal, it's a bitstream, one that has far fewer points of origination than the Internet and is therefore easier to control. Digital TV is rapidly heading for precisely the sort of lockdown that entertainment and broadcast lobbies desire for the Internet, and to the extent that they can be used as video players and recorders, our PCs, Macs, and notebooks.