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One of the two JLENS aerostats on the ground at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. Two aerostats make up a JLENS "orbit."

The Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor (JLENS) system program has been savaged by the House Armed Services Committee in its markup of the Defense Department's 2017 budget. The proposed cut in funding—from the $45 million requested by the Army to a mere $2.5 million—may signal the end of a program that was a source of controversy well before one of the program's radar aerostats broke loose and drifted hundreds of miles. But that incident, which caused power outages and property damage as the wayward blimp dragged its broken tether from Aberdeen, Maryland, into central Pennsylvania, was likely responsible for the program finally being brought to heel.

JLENS was originally intended to be a collection of paired radar dirigibles, tethered to the ground while floating at altitudes of up to 10,000 feet. Of each pair, one aerostat would be equipped with a sensitive "look-down" phased array search radar; the other would have a targeting radar for tracking targets and guiding weapons to them.

The system was intended, as the program's name suggests, to defend against submarine-launched and ship-launched cruise missiles, but it was also advertised as a way to spot low-flying aircraft, drones, swarms of small boats, and even some ground vehicles. Raytheon, the prime contractor for JLENS, and the Army tried to dispel concerns that JLENS could be used for domestic surveillance.

Artist's conception of Blizzard defending its legal rights.

Weeks after forcing the shutdown of a popular, fan-run "pirate" server that ran a classic version of World of Warcraft, Blizzard now says it basically had no choice but to go after Nostalrius to protect its legal rights.

"Why not just let Nostalrius continue the way it was? The honest answer is, failure to protect against intellectual property infringement would damage Blizzard’s rights," World of Warcraft Executive Producer and Vice President J. Allen Brack writes in a post on the official WoW forums. "This applies to anything that uses WoW’s IP, including unofficial servers. And while we’ve looked into the possibility—there is not a clear legal path to protect Blizzard’s IP and grant an operating license to a pirate server."

In the narrowest sense, Blizzard's copyright wouldn't suddenly be invalidated if the company decided to look the other way for one popular "vanilla" server; you can't lose a copyright just by failing to defend it legally. Still, failure to go after Nostalrius would have done some damage to the idea that Blizzard is in full control of the World of Warcraft IP and could have encouraged others to think that such unofficial servers were OK. Even now, there are plenty of other pirate servers out there running previous, current, and/or modified versions of World of Warcraft, most of which have yet to draw Blizzard's legal fire.

iPhone sales account for a huge chunk of Apple's revenue, so slower iPhone sales means a lot less revenue. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple will report its earnings for the second quarter of fiscal 2016 at 5pm EDT/2pm PDT/10pm UK, and as usual Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson and I will be following along with the call and providing charts and commentary. Apple is expected to report its first year-over-year revenue decline since 2003, mainly due to lower iPhone sales.

Apple's own forecasts predict revenue between $50 billion and $53 billion, well short of the $58 billion it earned in Q2 of 2015 though still higher than the $45.6 billion in revenue it earned in Q2 of 2014. The outsized success of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus last year set a tough benchmark for the company, and pent-up demand for the larger phones left over from Q1 of 2015 also made Q2 sales higher than they may otherwise have been. A slowing economy in China, Apple's fastest-growing market, could also affect growth this quarter, while increased pressure from the Chinese government could impact future growth.

Apple introduced a handful of new products in the second quarter, which runs from the beginning of January to the end of March, but they were all introduced late enough in the quarter that we won't know how much of a difference they made until next quarter. New devices include the iPhone SE and 9.7-inch iPad Pro, though price drops for the iPad Air 2 and a new capacity for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro could conceivably shore up the perennially backsliding iPad sales.

(credit: Anne Frank House)

Anne Frank was a teenager who is now known the world over for her diary of life in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II. She died in February or March 1945, at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where was she held, shortly before it was liberated. Since the applicable term of copyright in the EU is 70 years after the death of a writer, this means that her famous diary should now be in the public domain.

That is the supposed deal of copyright: in return for a time-limited monopoly enforced by the state, a protected work passes into the public domain after the copyright term expires, after which it can be freely used by anyone for any purpose.

So why isn't The Diary of a Young Girl free now? The answer to that question reveals the patchwork nature of copyright in the EU, and the absurdly long duration that makes it unsuited for a digital world where sharing and reuse is the norm.

(credit: Maria Elena)

Facebook doesn't like the fact that most users don't dwell in the social network; they just passively visit on a daily basis. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company may be looking to change this "bad" habit by developing a standalone camera app that would encourage creating and sharing photos and videos all within Facebook.

"People familiar with the matter" claim that Facebook's "friend-sharing" team has developed a prototype for an app that would open to a camera and allow users not only to take and share photos but also to record video and start livestreams as well. If the app opens to a camera, it would make it much like Snapchat. Facebook has tried in the past to make a Snapchat-like competitor app called Slingshot that lets users share photos and videos that disappeared after 24 hours. Facebook also dabbled in photo editing and sharing apps—the company developed the aptly named Camera app only to abandon it and Slingshot when neither caught on with users.

Facebook-owned Instagram certainly doesn't have a problem with users just passively visiting the app. That social network has become a place for the most manicured photos, but Facebook is focusing on spontaneous image and video capturing with this latest effort. While Instagram makes users go through multiple steps before posting an image (upload, crop, add filter, edit, write caption, etc), it's likely that Facebook's standalone camera app would encourage users to post without thinking twice.