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The Palm Beach Post is fighting a Florida judge's order that it remove from its news site transcripts of recorded calls of a jailhouse snitch to protect the inmate's "right to privacy." (PDF) Last week's decision from Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Jack Schramm Cox also prohibited the news outlet, or "any other person currently in possession of the recorded calls," from publishing transcripts of the informant's taped jailhouse phone conversations.

"The U.S. Supreme Court has never upheld a prior restraint on pure speech, nor has (the newspaper’s) counsel found a Florida appellate decision upholding such a restraint," the Post wrote (PDF) a Florida state appeals court. The Post said that Cox was erroneously putting the rights of jailhouse informant Frederick Cobia above those of the newspaper and that inmates have no expectation of privacy when speaking on jailhouse phones. Jail signs caution inmates that their calls are being recorded, the newspaper's appeal said.

The Fourth District Court of Appeal declined to immediately block Cox's order but on Friday expedited (PDF) briefing on the matter.

SAN FRANCISCO—Former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges was sentenced Monday to 71 months in prison after he stole money from Silk Road dealers while investigating the site.

"This, to me, is an extremely serious crime consisting of the betrayal of public trust from a public official. From what I can see, it was motivated by greed," US District Judge Richard Seeborg told the court today. "No departure or variance is warranted in this case. I seldom find myself in the position of imposing a high-end sentence, but I find this is warranted in this case."

In addition to his sentence today, the judge ordered Bridges to forfeit the following property: $165,000 from Fidelity brokerage, $306,000 held in trust, and $4,000 from a PNC Bank account.

Customers of Green Mountain Power (GMP) in Vermont will be the first in the US to have Tesla Powerwall stationary batteries installed in their homes, according to the utility. Tesla’s home battery was announced in late April this year and attracted nearly 38,000 reservations in the first week after it was announced.

GMP says it will receive 500 7kWh Powerwalls in early 2016 with shipments starting in January. It will initially install the daily cycling batteries in the homes of 10 pilot customers, and then the utility will open order and installation to all customers.

Back in September, Tesla said that it would start providing Powerwalls for pilot installations, with power company SunEdison beginning installations in Australia in November. Tesla said 7kWh Powerwalls would be shipped first since those batteries have a chemistry that is made for daily cycling (filling up the battery from solar panels and using that power to run your home at night, for example). The 10kWh Powerwalls will not be shipped until later next year—these larger-capacity batteries will have a chemistry suited for backup use in case of a power failure, rather than daily use. Tesla has been clear that third-party installers will be the intermediary getting Powerwalls to individual consumers. Tesla only directly handles the installation and management of so-called “Powerpacks,” which are built for industrial- and utility-grade customers.

Last week, a San Bernardino couple armed with two .223-caliber assault rifles and two 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistols killed 14 people. And the very next day, the Senate voted against a measure that would have barred gun sales to people on federal terror watchlists. Another gun-control measure to expand background checks at gun shows and for online purchases also failed that same afternoon.

It was political theater at its finest, as the votes came as part of GOP legislation to repeal Obamacare and gut Planned Parenthood funding. So with gun control clearly off-limits, lawmakers are directing their attention to social media as a method to combat domestic terrorism.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday will debate legislation (PDF) called the "Combat Terrorist Use of Social Media Act." Among other things, the measure requires a White House "policy that enhances the exchange of information and dialogue between the Federal Government and social media companies as it relates to the use of social media platforms by terrorists." What's more, the bill demands "a comprehensive strategy to counter terrorists' and terrorist organizations' use of social media."

Malware targeting banks, payment card processors, and other financial services has found an effective way to remain largely undetected as it plucks sensitive card data out of computer memory. It hijacks the computer's boot-up routine in a way that allows highly intrusive code to run even before the Windows operating system loads.

The so-called bootkit has been in operation since early this year and is part of "Nemesis," a suite of malware that includes programs for transferring files, capturing screens logging keystrokes, injecting processes, and carrying out other malicious actions on an infected computer. Its ability to modify the legitimate volume boot record makes it possible for the Nemesis components to load before Windows starts. That makes the malware hard to detect and remove using traditional security approaches. Because the infection lives in such a low-level portion of a hard drive, it can also survive when the operating system is completely reinstalled.

"The use of malware that persists outside of the operating system requires a different approach to detection and eradication," researchers from security firm FireEye's Mandiant Consulting wrote in a blog post published Monday. "Malware with bootkit functionality can be installed and executed almost completely independent of the Windows operating system. As a result, incident responders will need tools that can access and search raw disks at scale for evidence of bootkits."

Sling TV CEO Roger Lynch accused Comcast of setting its data caps just low enough to prevent customers from replacing cable TV with online video streaming.

In an interview with CordCutting.com today, Lynch said:

I think one of the areas we’re quite focused on is what’s happening in Washington, DC around net neutrality. We see concerning things happening if you look at cable companies like Comcast now instituting data caps that just happen to be at a level at or below what someone would use if they’re watching TV on the Internet—and at the same time launching their own streaming service that they say doesn’t count against the data cap. It’s something we’ve been warning Washington about for years, and it’s a risk to OTT [over-the-top Internet services] in general. We’re net neutrality proponents, and want to make sure that rules are implemented so that it really is a level playing field for new players like us.

Comcast is testing 300GB-per-month data caps in a variety of cities before a potential nationwide rollout. Customers are charged $10 for each additional 50GB, and in all but a few of the cities with data caps, they can pay an extra $30 or $35 per month for unlimited data.