Despite promises of transparency and efforts to create "open data" in the hopes of latching onto the "app economy"—words frequently used in government agency press releases—much of the data that would be of the greatest value to citizens often ends up out of reach. For example, if you want to plan a trip on public transportation in many cities (or even just find out when your bus will show up), you often have to turn to Google Maps or another transit-tracking application on your mobile device. In Baltimore, however, that data has been locked behind the firewalls of the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA).

But now a civic hacker has made that data available to app developers by doing what the MTA claimed would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete—simply tapping into websites that the agency has already built. And the hacker did it without spending a dime of taxpayer money. The work took just a few man-days' worth of spare time and a commercial app development team's afternoon.

While the MTA released an early version of its own bus tracking application this month, it's a Web application and lacks tools like geolocation. It has the sort of byzantine interface that most people have come to expect from government websites, it makes accessing the data difficult, and the MTA isn't making the data available to Google or others to make finding the best route any easier.

Reuters is reporting that defense contractor Lockheed Martin claims it has made a technological breakthrough that places us on the doorstep of affordable fusion energy. Supposedly, the breakthrough will result in compact fusion reactors before a decade is out.

But the Lockheed Martin press release that coincides with the coverage says little of the sort. There, the company simply states that after initial work in the area, it expects to be able to build a prototype in five years. If everything goes well, the design could "be developed and deployed in as little as ten years." The "if" in the last sentence, however, is a big one.

The hype also seems to have been designed to leverage a technical article in Aviation Week that goes into some of the details about how Lockheed Martin is structuring their its. The general concept is similar to a Tokomak, in that it involves magnetic confinement of a plasma rather than hitting a small target with massive amounts of laser power. But the shape of the container is different and, according to the company's researchers, more efficient. However, the Aviation Week report also notes, "The team acknowledges that the project is in its earliest stages, and many key challenges remain before a viable prototype can be built."

Lex Machina

Data produced by Lex Machina shows that patent lawsuits reached a near-record low in September, down 40 percent from September in 2013. The month's numbers for new lawsuits filed are lower than any other month in recent years, going back to 2011.

The drop comes shortly after new patent rules came down from the Supreme Court. Most notably, the Alice v. CLS Bank decision made it clear that courts shouldn't accept "do it on a computer"-type patents as valid. That's resulted in nearly a dozen patents being tossed out in a short period of time, and some patent trolls with dubious patents aren't bothering to fight it out anymore.

"It is an interesting coincidence to me it lines up with Alice this way," said Brian Howard, Lex Machina's legal data scientist. "I'm not sure I can say Alice caused this, yet. but it is an interesting correlation."