Tech Law

A Pennsylvania couple has filed a lawsuit against their local school district for allegedly using the webcam in a school-issued laptop to spy on their son at home. The suit -- which was filed last week in U.S. District Court by Michael Robbins and Holly Robbins on behalf of their son, Blake Robbins ...

THIS WEEK IN TECH

Google’s New Social Scene-Stealer

A few weeks ago, I was hearing rumors about Facebook opening a new email service. Looks like Google beat them to the punch, though, because Gmail just opened up a new Facebook service. Maybe not technically -- Facebook plays absolutely no role in "Buzz," which is what Google named its creation. Buzz...

It could be the next service announced by your car's GPS feature when you drive from state to state: letting you know what highway exit to take -- and warning you about whether texting/phoning while driving in that state is legal. Tuesday's move by the Department of Transportation to outlaw texting ...

3-D is definitely not just for cheesy drive-in movies anymore. It's done great box office with animated films, and that big 3-D sci-fi action movie "Avatar" coming out this weekend has won over a lot of early reviewers, at least on a technical level. But one of these days you won't have to go out to...

At the third annual U.S.-China Internet Industry Forum last week, top government and technology leaders gathered to discuss business and policy topics of mutual interest, such as online child protection and intellectual property issues. The conversation has broad implications for the Net as a whole....

THIS WEEK IN TECH

Google’s Strange and Shiny New OS

Google just keeps invading new territories, and its latest target is your computer's operating system. It's officially released the open source code for its Chrome OS, an operating system that will turn up in third-party vendors' netbooks. Those devices should start selling next year. With Chrome, G...

We seem to be surrounded by conflict; sometimes it seems peace is harder to make than war. There were two big events in tech last week: HP picked up 3Com, the company that first dominated the network space, as a major shot across Cisco's bow. Also the major legal battle of the decade, between AMD a...

Civil liberties groups continue to lock horns with the Department of Homeland Security over border searches of electronic equipment, although relatively few people have been affected. The Department's statistics show that only 1,000 laptops were searched between October 2008 and August 2009, a time ...

THIS WEEK IN TECH

Droid Lurches to Life

Today is the day of the Droid. The Motorola smartphone touches down today in what's shaping up to be one of the biggest handset launches in recent memory. Of course Verizon is going all-in as far as advertising is concerned, but there's more to the Droid's story than a marketing campaign. First, the...

CONFERENCE REPORT

ISF Panelists Spar Over Security vs. Anonymity

Can the Web's big-time masters of malware really be tracked down? How risky is cloud computing to network security? And what challenges await the Obama administration's plans to lock down the nation's electronic infrastructure -- while at the same time creating a "smart grid?" An experienced panel o...

THIS WEEK IN TECH

The Audacity of Droid

The Android mobile operating system is graduating soon to 2.0 status, and Google gave it a pretty nice present to celebrate: a free turn-by-turn navigation app called "Google Maps Navigation." It'll run on Android 2.0 phones with GPS, and it'll use the phone's cellular Internet connection to get liv...

The age of the computer started in the 1950s, and one of the first things that happened to a then relatively tiny IBM was it got nailed by the Department of Justice. The result was competition and the modern age of computing. Last week, the DoJ opened another, very similar, investigation of IBM. It ...

When a blogger writes favorably about a company's product or service, how can you tell if he or she is getting paid to write a positive review? Did the blogger get a "freebie" media player or baby stroller or digital camera for that glowing post? These are the kinds of questions bloggers -- and adve...

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski stirred up the Net neutrality pot last week with his speech at the Brookings Institution where he pledged to create new rules for governing the Internet. The FCC boss implied that because the Internet is such a big part of the lives of Americans, its management can...

Facebook now has some new "friends:" the United States Secret Service, thanks to a startling weekend poll appearing on the world's largest social network that asked the question, "Should Obama be killed?" The poll provided four possible answers: "Yes," "No," "Maybe," and "Yes if he cuts my healthcar...

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