Myspace agrees to submit to FTC privacy audits over the next 20 years, while Google is understood to be under investigation
Myspace, the once-mighty social network that was ultimately toppled by Facebook, has settled a privacy investigation by the powerful Federal Trade Commission in the US over its sharing of personally identifiable information about users with advertisers.
The company, which is trying to recover its position in the market, has agreed to submit to FTC privacy audits over the next 20 years.
The settlement, which lays to rest charges that Myspace misrepresented its …

Jury deadlocked on whether use of Java to build Android mobile operating system amounted to ‘fair use’
Both sides lost, or arguably won, the first round of the Oracle-Google trial after the jury came to deadlock on a key question: was Google’s use of Java to build its Android mobile operating system amount to “fair use”?
Although the jury found in favour of Oracle, which has been demanding hundreds of millions of dollars in damages from Google, they could not agree on the key question. Google has called for a mistrial; if …

Very soon, Facebook will go public. That means anyone will be able to buy shares of the social networking giant on the Nasdaq exchange. But sophisticated investors have already been buying pieces of Facebook and many other hot tech stocks, on private exchanges.
And now it seems that trading in private company shares is poised to grow, thanks to recent changes in the law.
Tradition says that the life cycle of a new company might look something like this: birth — the founder starts her business; childhood — angel investors and venture …

A judge urged jurors to resume deliberating Oracle Corp’s copyright claims against Google over the Android mobile platform, after they indicated there was unanimous agreement on all but one of the questions they must decide.
“It’s worth you going home over weekend,” District Judge William Alsup told the jurors, adding that deliberations in the federal court in San Francisco should continue next week.
Oracle sued Google in August 2010, saying Android infringes on its intellectual property rights to the Java programming language. Google says it does not violate Oracle’s patents and that …

The Samsung Galaxy S3, unveiled last night, has confirmed Samsung’s position as the main challenger to Apple in the booming smartphone industry, according to analysts.
The new device is the follow-up to the Galaxy S2, the best-selling Android handset and the only smartphone to rival the iPhone in sales. It brings new software such as voice recognition, a bigger and sharper screen and 50GB of online storage through a partnership with Dropbox.
The Galaxy S3 is also the official Olympics phone and will be intensively marketed over the summer, giving it a …