Corruption

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

WASHINGTON--For someone not interested in politics, Craigslist.org founder Craig Newmark spends quite a bit of time these days working with people in Washington.

"Most people, including myself, don't want to be bothered with politics," Newmark said Friday at Google's Washington, D.C., headquarters. "They just want to call 311 to get a pothole fixed."

Yet as a proponent for policy ideas like Net neutrality and government transparency, Newmark has found himself an unlikely advocate for career lobbyists--just the good kind, though.

While lawmakers should embrace the online tools to make democracy more widespread, … Read more

Oracle deliberately destroyed or withheld CEO Larry Ellison's e-mails and failed to preserve audio recordings sought as evidence in a class-action lawsuit filed against the software maker, a federal judge has ruled.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco said Tuesday that Oracle willfully withheld tapes and transcripts of interviews that a journalist conducted with Ellison in 2001 and 2002 while researching a book about the Oracle founder called Softwar. The recordings and transcripts were stored on laptop by the author, Matthew Symonds, who directed a computer repair shop to destroy the laptop in late 2006 or … Read more

The owner of an opposition Internet news site in Russia's volatile Ingushetia region was shot and killed Sunday after being detained by police.

Magomed Yevloyev, owner of the www.Ingushetiya.ru Web site, was arrested at Nazran airport in southern Russia after disembarking a flight, according to a statement by media watchdog Reporters Without Borders. Yevloyev was later found dumped on the side of the road, suffering from a gunshot wound to the head, the news site's deputy editor, Ruslan Khautiyev, told the Associated Press. Yevloyev later died at a hospital, Khautiyev said.

Yevloyev had angered the region'… Read more

In what appears the final chapter of the Hans Reiser crime saga, the Linux programmer convicted of killing his wife was sentenced Friday afternoon to 15 years to life in prison under a deal he worked out with prosecutors in exchange for leading police to his victim's body.

Reiser--known to the technology world as the founder of the ReiserFS file system software--was found guilty in April of first-degree murder in the 2006 killing of his wife, with whom he was undergoing a bitter divorce. The jury convicted him largely on circumstantial evidence and despite the fact that Nina … Read more

One of the country's most important terrorism databases is on the verge of failure after suffering from gross mismanagement and technical design flaws that went ignored for months, a congressional investigation found.

A congressional committee on Thursday called for an investigation into a program called "Railhead," which was supposed to upgrade the National Counterterrorism Center's integrated terrorist intelligence database, called Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE). The database serves the United States' 16 separate intelligence agencies, and as of January, contained more than 500,000 names (PDF), according to the NCTC. The program has cost an estimated $… Read more

When police ask a judge to grant a wiretap order, there's no defense lawyer present to raise objections. The judge has a limited amount of information, all provided by the cops and prosecutors, who in theory will take this solemn responsibility seriously and never lie or twist the facts.

Which brings us to U.S. v. Romero, a relatively routine case in Massachusetts in which Alberto Romero and 17 others were charged with conspiracy to manufacture and distribute crack cocaine.

To get a wiretap against the alleged crack cocaine ring, Drug Enforcement Administration agent Joao Monteiro filed an affidavit … Read more

The company behind the proposed .xxx top-level domain, which was rejected after the Bush administration intervened, has been trying to dig up embarrassing government documents through a federal lawsuit.

Make that "was trying." A federal judge on March 12 granted summary judgment to the Bush administration in the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the ICM Registry.

By way of background, ICM Registry had proposed the porn-friendly .xxx domain in 2004 to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, four years after ICANN rejected the idea the first time. In June 2005, ICANN approved .xxx--but … Read more

Updated at 1:42 p.m. and again at 5:02 p.m. PST.

SAN FRANCISCO--Wikileaks is getting its domain name back.

After spending more than three hours hearing arguments from a raft of attorneys--two representing the Swiss bank that fought to get the site's plug pulled and about 10 who have been trying to get the site back online--a federal judge here has ruled in favor of Wikileaks.

Wikileaks, which uses Wikileaks.org as its primary domain, is a whistle-blowing site that focuses on posting leaked documents.

"The court denies the motion for preliminary injunction, and … Read more