(Photo: Comcast)

What's in your inbox? Some risque dirty talk? Maybe a handful of regretful messages about how hammered you were last night? If a law enforcement-backed proposal going before a House subcommittee today gets passed, wireless companies will be one step closer to having to store all of your text messages, sexy or not.

The bill is backed by law enforcement agencies, which argue that text messages can serve as key pieces of evidence in cases, particularly related to "domestic violence, stalking, menacing, drug trafficking, and weapons trafficking." Cops want wireless companies to store your text messages so that they can have access to them in the event that any crime occurs. This is similar to a wireless provider recording phone calls and storing the audio files.

The House is working to update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and today's hearing will focus on whether or not a bill like this one should be tacked on to the act. The Justice Department itself requested yesterday that any update to the ECPA allows the government access to Facebook messages and Twitter DMs.

How long before they're subpoenaing Snapchats?

Macmillan's HQ. (Photo: flickr.com/-jvl-)

When four of the biggest publishers in the U.S. worked with Apple to create a new model of book sales, one that allowed them to set a minimum price on ebook sales, it was clearly meant to buck Amazon's stubbon insistence on charging $9.99 even for the newest releases. What wasn't so clear was the legality of the move. Matters settled into an uneasy truce until April, when the Justice Department accused them all of colluding to fix prices.

Now Macmillan, the last of the book businesses still fighting, has finally caved. As part of the settlement, the company has agreed to let booksellers (i.e. Amazon) resume their previous cost-cutting.

But just because you settle doesn't mean you have to say you're sorry.

The company has released a letter from CEO John Sargent explaining the decision to settle and why it took so long. Rather than sounding contrite, the ever-feisty Mr. Sargent takes the opportunity to throw a few punches on the way out: "I had an old fashioned belief that you should not settle if you have done no wrong. As it turns out, that is indeed old fashioned."

It's not that Mr. Sargent and his fellow execs saw the light. They just realized the risk of losing was simply too high: "Our company is not large enough to risk a worst case judgment," Mr. Sargent wrote. That's not humility talking, but math:

A few weeks ago I got an estimate of the maximum possible damage figure. I cannot share the breathtaking amount with you, but it was much more than the entire equity of our company.

He closes the whole thing with what sounds suspiciously like a call to arms: "I’m disappointed it ended this way. But this round will shortly be over, and it is time for us to move on to the next." Remember the Alamo!

Apple still refuses to settle, but then Apple basically has all of the money in the world.

From Flickr user meddygarnet

Since 2005 New York State has allowed residents to enter their number for Lotto or MegaMillions through an online subscription. But it has also been building a much broader and more advanced online gambling system that it was reluctant to launch over legal concerns. A recent decision by the Justice Department, however, seems to have cleared the way for states to run internet gaming operations within their own borders, and New York officials are pumped!

“We’ve been waiting for a couple years,” Gordon Medenica, the director of New York State Lottery, told The New York Times. “We’re thrilled that this ruling has now come down and confirmed that our legal analysis was correct all along.”

The new ruling from the Justice Department, which revolves around the Wire Act of 1961, runs contrary to its former position, which had banned all online gambling within the United States. The clarification only outlaws online gambling on sports, paving the way for expansions of state lottery programs on the web.

Remember it was only this past April that New York prosecutors charged Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars and Absolute Poker, three of the most popular sites on the web, with fraud and money laundering. These sites had been operating from Antigua and the Isle of Man, where online gambling is legal, but serving hundreds of thousands of U.S. customers.

Experts say that the broad nature of the language in the Justice Department's new ruling may have opened the door for intrastate online poker. "

The interesting question is what the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate, Harry Reid (D.-NV) and Kyl, the number two Republican in the Senate, will do. They had sent a letter asking the DoJ for clarification of its position on internet gambling. "They now have their answer, though it may not have been what they had wanted," wrote Professor Nelson Rose of GamblingAndTheLaw.com. "My bet is that they, and Congress, will continue to do nothing, while internet gambling explodes across the nation, made legal under state laws."