Politics and Law

WASHINGTON--Tempers flared as a key House committee on Thursday pored over tech-related portions of a massive and expensive so-called stimulus package, with Democrats downplaying the lack of any hearings and Republicans calling the rush to a vote the same day an "abomination."

Members of the House of Representatives committee, which is charged with finalizing the portions of the $825 billion legislation that deal with broadband, clean energy, and health care, were deeply divided along partisan lines over the procedures that should be followed. This is one of President Obama's first priorities: his spokesman said on Thursday that &… Read more

President Barack Obama will be able to keep his beloved BlackBerry, an aide confirmed on Thursday, making him the first U.S. president to use e-mail regularly.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that, thanks to a "compromise," his boss will be able to keep a security-enhanced BlackBerry and use it for e-mail.

That will, Gibbs said, allow Obama to continue to keep in touch with people and avoid getting "stuck in a bubble." (The new Washington insider test: Do you know the president's secret e-mail address?)

Gibbs didn't offer details, but … Read more

Forget the important task of opening up government. Never mind a recession that seems to be trying hard to be promoted to a full-scale depression. In geekish circles, the question of the week has been: Will President Obama manage to hang on to his BlackBerry?

Obama told us more than a year ago that it was his favorite gadget, and he was rarely without it during the 2008 campaign. In 2001, George Bush famously gave up e-mail, and there was plenty of speculation that Obama would too, either for privacy or open-government reasons. Last week, we suggested the Sectera Edge … Read more

Technology firms are often hampered by patent disputes, but the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office called into question last week a patent that had the potential to disrupt the habits of millions of Internet users.

The PTO rejected all 20 patent claims over Internet subdomains held by a company called Hoshiko, which were used to bully sites like LiveJournal and Freehomepage.com and pursue litigation against larger companies like Google. The idea behind how to manage subdomains--domains hosted within larger domains, such as news.cnet.com--is too obvious to patent, the PTO ruled after the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation … Read more

President Obama signed an order on Wednesday proclaiming that the entire federal government should be more open, transparent, and Internet-friendly. It said that agencies must "put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public."

That memorandum, along with a few other executive orders and statements from White House officials, were sent to reporters throughout the day. But in an ironic twist, the transparency and a slew of other first-day-in-office documents were still absent from the official Whitehouse.gov site as of Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET.

The Web site still says: "… Read more

In one of his first official acts as president, Barack Obama ordered more government openness, marking an abrupt end to his predecessor's policy of extraordinary secrecy.

Obama's still-be-named chief information officer -- some speculation has centered on Washington, D.C., CTO Vivek Kundra -- is required to come up with ways within 120 days to make the administration more Internet-friendly. (The memorandum says agencies must "harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.")

The second memorandum overrules the Bush administration's controversial policy, issued a few … Read more

The U.S. Department of Justice has been trying since 1998 to convince courts that a federal antiporn law targeting sexually explicit Web sites was constitutional.

No longer. On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected prosecutors' last-ditch defense of the Child Online Protection Act, meaning that the law will not be enforced.

COPA was enacted during the anti-Internet porn scares of the late 1990s, in part as a narrower answer to a previous Net censorship law that also met its demise in the courts. Any commercial Web site operator that posts "material that is harmful to minors" … Read more

Fans of President Barack Obama, or perhaps just those who dislike former President George W. Bush, seem to think there's something notable about the way the new White House Web site is configured to deal with search engines.

That configuration file is called robots.txt. It's designed to let Webmasters ask search engine robots not to include certain areas of a Web site in their index. Well-behaved robots will comply.

The Obama revamp of Whitehouse.gov included a shorter robots.txt file, which Thenextweb.com called "a sign of greater transparency and change." A BoingBoing poster … Read more

WASHINGTON--Barack Obama was sworn in as president Tuesday in what many spectators viewed as the nation's most interactive inauguration ceremony so far.

As millions of people in Washington and around the globe watched a weekend of festivities, culminating with Tuesday's ceremony, they gave their instant feedback online and through text messages and other means to family, friends, and anyone else listening. At the same time, event organizers were able to give spectators live updates about the state of affairs in the nation's chilly, crowded capital.

Most people who watched the inauguration did it through traditional television broadcasts, … Read more