Internet

Last month, Sen. Mark Udall and a handful of other privacy-focused politicians persuaded the IRS to promise to cease warrantless searches of Americans' private correspondence.

Now Udall, a Colorado Democrat, is taking aim at the Justice Department, which has claimed the right to conduct warrantless searches of Americans' e-mail, Facebook chats, and other private communications.

"I am extremely concerned that the Justice Department and FBI are justifying warrantless searches of Americans' electronic communications based on a loophole in an outdated law that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled was unconstitutional," Udall said in … Read more

Syria is back online after an Internet outage cut it off from the rest of the online world on Tuesday.

Internet monitoring company Renesys updated its latest blog post on Wednesday, saying that "Syrian Internet has returned." The outage itself lasted 19.5 hours from Tuesday to Wednesday.

A new graph tweeted by content delivery network Akamai shows a huge spike in traffic to Syria, indicating that the Internet is flowing once again.

Syria Digital Reports earlier confirmed the news by tweeting that it received reports that Internet connectivity was returning.

This latest outage marks the third time … Read more

The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI believe they don't need a search warrant to review Americans' e-mails, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and other private files, internal documents reveal.

Government documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and provided to CNET show a split over electronic privacy rights within the Obama administration, with Justice Department prosecutors and investigators privately insisting they're not legally required to obtain search warrants for e-mail. The IRS, on the other hand, publicly said last month that it would abandon a controversial policy that claimed it could get warrantless access … Read more

Update: The Senate late today passed the bill, sending it to the House.

The U.S. Senate is planning to vote Monday to levy new taxes on mobile app developers, cloud computing services, music and movie downloads, and even people selling collections of WordPress themes.

Senators who are backing the legislation known as S.743 describe it as a way to force out-of-state retailers to collect taxes on physical shipments. Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., claims his bill will "put local and Main Street retailers on a level playing field with their out-of-state and online counterparts."

What Enzi and … Read more

If you know the American Midwest like the back of your hand, I want to pick your brain.

Starting around July 1, I'll be heading out on CNET Road Trip 2013, my eighth-annual journey in search of some of the most interesting destinations for technology, military, aviation, architecture, nature, science, manufacturing, and so on. I'll start in Chicago and spend a month or so traveling through Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Kansas, and possibly Indiana, Iowa, and/or Minnesota.

A couple of months ago, I posted here asking for suggestions of where I should stop, offering a … Read more

Craigslist has won the first round in its federal lawsuit against PadMapper and two other companies, which extracted and used real estate listings from the world's most popular classifieds site.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco on Tuesday rejected attempts by the defendants to dismiss Craigslist's lawsuit, which alleged a slew of unlawful acts -- including terms of use violations, copyright violations, trespass, and civil violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

"Defendants' continued use of Craigslist after the clear statements regarding authorization in the cease and desist letters and the technological … Read more

A quick history lesson for readers.

In 1989, British physicist Tim Berners-Lee invented what would be called the "World Wide Web." The first trials were held in December 1990 at the laboratories of CERN, the major research laboratory in Geneva that's better known today as the home of the Large Hadron Collider.

On April 30, 1993, CERN published a statement -- on the Web, no less! -- that made the technology behind the World Wide Web available on a royalty-free basis. (Specifically, this was the software required to run a Web server, a basic browser, and a library of code.)

And thus the modern public Web was born, at info.cern.ch. … Read more

The Senate will almost certainly kill a controversial cybersecurity bill, recently passed by the House, according to a U.S. Senate Committee member.

The comments were first reported by U.S. News on Thursday.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., the chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, said in a statement on April 18 that CISPA's privacy protections are "insufficient."

A committee aide told CNET on Thursday that Rockefeller believes the Senate will not take up CISPA. The White House has also said the president won't sign the House bill.

Staff … Read more

Senior Obama administration officials have secretly authorized the interception of communications carried on portions of networks operated by AT&T and other Internet service providers, a practice that might otherwise be illegal under federal wiretapping laws.

The secret legal authorization from the Justice Department originally applied to a cybersecurity pilot project in which the military monitored defense contractors' Internet links. Since then, however, the program has been expanded by President Obama to cover all critical infrastructure sectors including energy, healthcare, and finance starting June 12.

"The Justice Department is helping private companies evade federal wiretap laws," said … Read more