This Week In Techdirt History: July 30th - August 5th

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Five Years AgoThis week in 2012, it was Olympic time — which also means, time to be frustrated with NBC's exclusive coverage. One journalist who was highly critical of the network ended up getting his Twitter account suspended, then eventually reinstated, with the end result (of course) of a massive Streisand Effect. Meanwhile, a leaked document revealed the unsurprising fact that the IFPI had no plans to share any money it got from The Pirate Bay with musicians, the MPAA was hosting movie screenings to get cozy with congress, and for some reason Homeland Security was getting in on the YouTube takedown game.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, as had been the case for many years and still is to this day, e-voting machines were found to have terrible security. That particular report came from California, but was quickly followed up by a similar one from Florida, and then a source-code review that also uncovered numerous vulnerabilities. And yet election officials, as always, defended the machines — perhaps because of so many of the officials used to work at the companies that make them?Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2002, people were digging deeper into the many horrors of the bill that would make it legal for Hollywood to hack your computer in its crusade against piracy. Not that this was the only bad internet bill being considered — Congress was also looking into making even more stringent anti-circumvention laws than those in the DMCA. The same DMCA that, the very same week, was being used by HP to threaten security researchers who revealed a vulnerability in their software (though they later backed down). Amidst all this, we were glad to see some attempts to wake academics up to the dangers of the DMCA.

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