Politics and Law

Ads for Democratic politician Barack Obama are appearing in an Electronic Arts high-speed racing game. This appears to be the first time that a presidential candidate has bought in-game advertising.

Electronic Arts confirmed on Tuesday to our sister site GameSpot that the ads have been appearing on virtual Obama billboards since October 6, and will continue to run until election day in November.

The ads will appear in the Xbox 360 version of the game in 10 states, most of them hotly contested: Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Colorado, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, and Wisconsin.

The game in question … Read more

Child predators will be easier to track online because of two new laws President Bush signed Monday.

The Protect Our Children Act--which includes provisions introduced by Sens. Joe Biden (D-Del.), Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), and John McCain, (R-Ariz.)--sets requirements for Internet companies to report incidences of child pornography. It also authorizes more than $320 million for the Justice Department over the next five years for, among other things, the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.

The president on Monday also signed the Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act, which requires a sex offender to provide the … Read more

Updated at 12:45 p.m. PDT with quotes.

President Bush on Monday signed into law an intellectual-property enforcement bill that would consolidate federal efforts to combat copyright infringement under a new White House cabinet position.

The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act establishes within the executive branch the position of intellectual property enforcement coordinator, who will be appointed by the president.

The law also steepens penalties for intellectual-property infringement, and increases resources for the Department of Justice to coordinate for federal and state efforts against counterfeiting and piracy. The so-called Pro-IP Act passed unanimously in the Senate … Read more

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin must save any e-mails she sent from private accounts regarding state business, an Anchorage judge ordered Friday.

The e-mails must be preserved until a lawsuit requesting that the e-mails be made public is resolved, Anchorage Superior Court Judge Craig Stowers said. The judge also said e-mails from private accounts belonging to Palin's staff must be preserved.

Palin and her staff used about a dozen private e-mail accounts for state business, and a Yahoo account belonging to Palin was hacked earlier this year.

State officials should work with Yahoo and other e-mail service providers to preserve … Read more

President Bush on Friday signed into law a bill that would facilitate the collection of data regarding broadband access in the United States, though most of the actions required by the law have already been accomplished by federal regulators.

The Broadband Data Act directs the Federal Communications Commission to redefine broadband, which was largely achieved earlier this year. The commission in March voted to consider 768Kbps, which is the entry-level speed offered by major DSL providers like Verizon, the low end of "basic broadband," a range that extends to under 1.5Mbps. For years, the commission had considered … Read more

The U.S. Senate is investigating allegations by two National Security Agency whistleblowers who have described widespread monitoring of innocuous telephone conversations by the Bush administration's clandestine program.

The reports fill in some details about how the NSA's program works in practice. The two whistleblowers, Adrienne Kinne and David Murfee Faulk, are former military linguists who worked for a secretive NSA operation they say routinely intercepted phone calls of U.S. military officers, American journalists, American aid workers, and others who were calling home from abroad.

The two ex-military employees came forward independently and spoke to ABC News … Read more

Two former top executives from Seattle software provider Entellium were arrested on Tuesday night after allegedly inflating their company's revenues to attract investments.

Former CEO Paul Thomas Johnston and former Chief Financial Officer Parrish Jones face charges in a U.S. District Court in Seattle for wire fraud.

The pair used false accounting figures to attract about $50 million in private investment from companies such as Ignition Partners, the FBI alleges. Ignition, based in Bellevue, Wash., invested $19 million in Entellium but told investigators that it would not have made the investment, had it been aware of the company'… Read more

A number of nifty applications have popped up in response to the 2008 elections, like Google's tool to search political speeches and the Obama iPhone application. One more social-networking application is attempting to gain from the current political fever with a very speculative electoral map. For an application with only 321 active monthly users on Facebook, the myPicks U.S. Election 2008 electoral college map looks surprisingly (though certainly not completely) reasonable.

Developed by the Indian company Pramati Technologies, using the Sun Microsystems' social-application tool zembly, myPicks U.S. Election 2008 is a game that lets you "run&… Read more

WASHINGTON--With only five days left for President Bush to decide whether to sign into law a controversial copyright bill, business lobbyists and even the AFL-CIO are pushing for it to become law.

Most bills to expand copyright law are bipartisan--one aimed at file-swappers and prerelease movies in 2005 comes to mind--and the so-called Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act is no exception. Sens. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, and Arlen Specter, a Republican, are the sponsors, and it enjoys the support of the Recording Industry Association of America.

But the Pro-IP Act is unusual because the Bush administration threatened a veto … Read more