act

A gritty video released by Wikileaks on Monday shows U.S. troops in Iraq destroying a vehicle that was preparing to rush a wounded Reuters journalist to the hospital.

The secret black-and-white video, recorded by at least one Apache helicopter that was shooting at a group of about a dozen people, appears to show the death of a Reuters photographer and his assistant, who were unarmed.

The U.S. Army had rejected Reuters' earlier requests, including ones made under the Freedom of Information Act, to disclose the July 2007 video. Government sources told both Reuters and the Associated Press on … Read more

When Barack Obama was campaigning for the presidency in 2008, he promised that as president, he would "strengthen privacy protections for the digital age."

That pledge will be put to the test as the Obama administration considers whether to support a new privacy proposal released by a coalition including Google, eBay, Microsoft, AT&T, the ACLU, and Americans for Tax Reform. CNET was the first to report on the proposal in an article published Monday.

The group, the Digital Due Process coalition, is calling for a federal law requiring police to obtain search warrants before tracking Americans' … Read more

This post has been updated several times since it was published. See update notes at the bottom of the page.

A broad coalition of companies including Google, Microsoft, and AT&T, joined by liberal and conservative advocacy groups, will announce a major push Tuesday to update federal privacy laws to protect mobile and cloud computing users, CNET has learned.

They hope to convince the U.S. Congress to update a 1986 law--written in the pre-Internet era of telephone modems and the black-and-white Macintosh Plus--to sweep in location privacy and documents stored on the Web through services like Google … Read more

Thursday's 200-page dump of court documents in the 3-year-old, $1 billion copyright fight between Viacom and Google's YouTube was entertaining enough.

The documents, filed in federal court in New York, had everything from accusations of young, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs cynically ignoring the law as they sought their fortune, to claims of duplicity from a New York media conglomerate trying to embrace a start-up's youthful audience, even while it was threatening to sue that start-up into oblivion. Oh yeah, and they revealed that the conglomerate also considered buying the little company, which made the entrepreneurs multimillionaires upon selling … Read more

Court filings released on Thursday in the bitter $1 billion copyright fight between Viacom and Google's YouTube show just how far apart the companies remain, as the 3-year-old case winds through federal court.

Viacom, in 108 pages of court documents, portrays YouTube's founders as reckless copyright violators who were far more concerned with increasing traffic to their site than obeying the law. Even executives at Google, which acquired YouTube for $1.7 billion in October 2006, questioned the ethics of building a site through questionable copyright practices, according to the Viacom filings.

But in the 100-page document filed … Read more

By now I'm pretty certain that most of you are aware of the potential ecological and economical benefits of driving an electric or hybrid car that isn't reliant solely on fossil fuels. Not surprisingly, the U.S. government is getting behind the cause as well, influenced in part by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). The ARRA is the official term for the economic stimulus package passed by Congress in early 2009 to help create jobs and promote investment in American enterprises during the current recession. And when it comes to the conception and push … Read more

For at least seven years, a handful of politicians in Washington, D.C., have been unsuccessfully trying to make it more difficult for countries such as China or Iran to censor and monitor the Internet.

There was a failed 2003 bill directing the U.S. State Department to develop anti-"jamming" software, and another two years later. A 2007 effort by Rep. Christopher Smith, a New Jersey Republican, to ban Internet companies from storing personal information about users inside a "designated Internet-restricting country" never received a vote. Neither has a bizarre new proposal allowing the Federal … Read more

Announced Tuesday at the start of the Game Developers Conference, Power Gig: Rise of the SixString is a novel approach to the well-trod music game genre.

Instead of using plastic simulations of guitars that are essentially just dressed-up plastic game controllers, the game uses fully functional six-string guitars that control the game, but can also be played in real life.

As one might imagine, the game is being developed by a company connected with the guitar business. Developer/publisher Seven45 Studios is a sister company of First Act, a leading musical-instrument maker responsible for making the entry-level guitars, basses, and … Read more

The copyright fight being waged by Viacom against Google will move into a crucial stage on Friday.

According to documents filed in federal court on Thursday, both companies are expected to file motions for summary judgment--when a judge decides enough undisputed evidence exists for a ruling to be made without sending the case to trial.

In addition to Viacom and Google, a group of copyright owners that also sued Google for copyright infringement in 2007 is expected to file for summary judgment as well. What this means is that the time of taking depositions and exchanging documents is over. The … Read more