Net neutrality advocates got a boost of support Wednesday from the Obama administration when it released grant guidelines for spending the government's $7.2 billion broadband stimulus package.

Companies winning grants to help build new broadband infrastructure will have to follow the Federal Communications Commission's Internet Policy statement, which prohibits companies from deliberately blocking or slowing Internet traffic on their networks.

Proponents of that concept, Net neutrality, have been pushing the government to pass laws or set stricter requirements to ensure that consumers get access to content they want and that competitors are not run out of business by network operators.

The phone companies and cable operators have opposed such legislation, a sentiment that seemed to be shared by the Republican-controlled FCC under the previous...

Lori Drew, the woman convicted of using a hoax MySpace profile to harass a teenage girl to the point of suicide, was acquitted by a Los Angeles judge on Thursday, Wired reported.

Judge George Wu overturned Drew's guilty verdict, which was issued in November, saying that if Drew had been convicted of a felony in the case, she would already have been sentenced. But because she was convicted of three misdemeanors--a significantly lighter offense than prosecutors originally sought--the constitutionality of the guilty verdict was less clear.

Drew, a Missouri resident, had been convicted of three misdemeanor counts of "accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress," each of which could have resulted in a year of jail and a $100,000 fine. But she hadn't been convicted of conspiracy, a felony that could've led...

After nearly five years of litigation, Microsoft is still butting heads with patent holders who filed suit against the Xbox house for patent infringement -- and a U.S. District Court Judge is getting cranky.

In 2004, Peter A. Hochstein and Jeffrey Tenenbaum filed suit against Microsoft and Sony, accusing the companies of infringing on the 1994 patent, "Apparatus and method for electrically connecting remotely located video games." The pair said Microsoft and Sony infringed on the patent with Xbox Live and Sony's gaming network, now known as PlayStation Network.

Sony settled out of court in April this year, according to a report on the video game patent specialist site Patent Arcade, but Microsoft is still a defendant in the case.

Now, a U.S. District Court judge has accused Microsoft lawyers of courtroom shenanigans that he said were intended to...

Mozilla plans to release a patched version of its latest browser, to be named Firefox 3.5.1, in response to certain bugs that have revealed themselves following Firefox 3.5's June 30 release. Firefox 3.5 offers new features such as extensive support for HTML 5, faster speeds than previous versions, and support for JSON and Web worker threads.

Mozilla will rush out a patch to its Firefox 3.5 browser, in order to correct a number of bugs that users have cited as causing them issues. The patch, if it proceeds on schedule, will be released later in July 2009.

The patched version will be named Firefox 3.5.1, and include a fix to the browser's JavaScript engine, TraceMonkey, and another to how the browser runs in Windows XP. Mozilla has scheduled a Firefox BugDay, for its community to tackle "major 3.5 bugs" on July 7.

According to the real-time counter...

Social networks like MySpace still cannot be held responsible for assaults that happen offline, according to California's Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles. The court was asked to review the case of four underage girls (referred to as Julie Does) who, along with their parents, had sued MySpace for gross negligence and strict product liability after they were all sexually assaulted by older men whom they met on the service.

Despite the scary circumstances in which these events took place, the judge said that MySpace was protected under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and could not be held liable.
Who's responsible for safety?

Each of the Julie Does were between the ages of 13 and 15 at the time of their assaults. The girls all met their assaulters on MySpace men who ranged in age from 18 to 25 despite MySpace's automatic...