Internet

Law enforcement representatives are planning to endorse a proposed federal law that would require Internet service providers to store logs about their customers for 18 months, CNET has learned.

The National Sheriffs' Association will say it "strongly supports" mandatory data retention during Tuesday's U.S. House of Representatives hearing on the topic.

Michael Brown, sheriff in Bedford County, Va., and a board member and executive committee member of the National Sheriffs' Association, is planning to argue that a new law is necessary because Internet providers do not store customer records long enough.

"The limited data retention … Read more

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt will testify before a U.S. Senate hearing on antitrust that could be held as soon as this month.

The agreement, which Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Google confirmed this afternoon, caps a few weeks of public wrangling over who the company would provide to be grilled at a public event that's unlikely to be sympathetic to the Mountain View, Calif.-based company.

In late June, a U.S. Senate panel probing antitrust and Internet search topics publicly threatened to subpoena Schmidt or Google CEO Larry Page. Google had been reluctant to provide either … Read more

Editor's note: Please see update note at the end of this post, which includes a statement from Visa saying it has not reinstated DataCell.

WikiLeaks' financial blockade appears to have been lifted, at least temporarily.

Visa and MasterCard, which cut off payments to the secret-sharing site in December after it published hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. government documents, may have reversed course. CNET was the first to report that MasterCard pulled the plug.

Iceland-based DataCell, which handles WikiLeaks payments, said today that it is now able to process Visa and MasterCard payments again. "Today we have … Read more

New chat logs provide a detailed look at what may have motivated hacker-turned-Army enlistee Bradley Manning to allegedly turn over hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents to WikiLeaks.

The logs, released by New York magazine, show that Manning was becoming frustrated with the military's daily regimens and came to treasure his weekends off, especially the time he could spend with then-boyfriend Tyler Watkins. He maintained a sense of humor, though, and believed the Army was a "diverse place" where even a self-described "gay, libertarian, atheist, computer nerd" like himself could find a home.

The online … Read more

President Obama will host a Webcast at the White House at 11 a.m. PT (2 p.m. ET) today to answer questions submitted via Twitter. We're covering it live.

The White House and Twitter are billing the event as a "town hall," but it's not exactly going to be an exercise in open-microphone democracy. Instead, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey will select a handful of questions submitted through the #AskObama hashtag.

Among the #AskObama questions: immigration, taxes, gigabit Internet speeds, and whether it's possible to win re-election if the unemployment rate is 9 percent or … Read more

Google+ is being tweaked to move it in an even more privacy-sensitive direction.

Google said today that it was completely eliminating the ability to share certain semiprivate posts more widely. That option was previously available as an option for users.

At the moment, if I created a post and specified that it could be viewed only by family members, they would nevertheless have the option to share it publicly--the Google+ equivalent of forwarding e-mail--unless I remembered to select the "Disable reshare" option.

Google engineer Kelly Ellis said in a video that: "Starting next week, limited posts will … Read more

Hulu acknowledged this afternoon that an attempt to integrate itself with Facebook didn't go exactly as planned.

Far from aiding the "entire social experience," which the video streaming service had promised in its announcement earlier in the day, the attempted integration allowed some Hulu users to access other users' accounts.

In a followup blog post this afternoon, Hulu Vice President Richard Tom said the security breach was the result of a programming error, not malicious activity, and did not expose passwords or credit card numbers.

"When we launched our Facebook Connect feature early this morning, we … Read more

President Obama has an unusual problem when appearing at Internet "town halls": the distinct presence of marijuana. And by that we mean a committed cadre of legalize-pot activists, not the plant.

Obama's first event of the sort, which took place mere weeks after his inauguration, used a democratic-style voting mechanism soon flooded by marijuana legalization advocates, who propelled their questions to the top of the "green jobs," "financial stability," "jobs," and "budget" categories. During a YouTube Q&A earlier this year, 198 of the highest-rated 200 questions dealt with drug policy. … Read more

Amazon.com said today that it's reluctantly severing ties with affiliates in California, a move that it hopes will let it continue shipping products to state residents without collecting sales taxes.

But a little-noticed clause in the legislation that Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, signed into law today gives California tax collectors a second, albeit legally untested, cudgel to use against the Seattle-based company. The law takes effect immediately.

The measure says that any retailer who "through a subsidiary" has any "place of business" in California must collect sales taxes. And--surprise!--Amazon has two subsidiaries … Read more