Google Inc. said an internal investigation has discovered that the roving vans the company uses to create its online mapping services were mistakenly collecting data about websites people were visiting over wireless networks.

The Internet giant said it would stop collecting Wi-Fi data from its StreetView vans, which workers drive to capture street images and to locate Wi-Fi networks. The company said it would dispose of the data it had accidentally collected.

Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research for Google, wrote in a blog post that the company uncovered the mistake while responding to a German data-protection agency’s request for it to audit the Wi-Fi data, amid mounting concerns that Google’s practices violated users’ privacy.

The Wall Street Journal article continues here.

The Obama administration on Wednesday handed Google and other web content providers a significant victory as it announced that cable and telecommunications companies would face tough new regulations on how they manage their high-speed internet networks.

An official at the Federal Communications Commission, the US media regulator, said that chairman Julius Genachowski would on Thursday announce that the FCC will seek to regulate broadband service providers such as Comcast and AT&T under a more rigorous legal framework.

The move would open the door for the FCC to implement so-called net neutrality regulations that would bar the companies from favouring some content and discriminating against other traffic over their networks. Google, Amazon and other content groups strongly support net neutrality rules.

Financial Times article continues here.

Google and an alliance of privacy groups have come to Yahoo’s aid by helping the Web portal fend off a broad request from the U.S. Department of Justice for e-mail messages, CNET has learned.

In a brief filed Tuesday afternoon, the coalition says a search warrant signed by a judge is necessary before the FBI or other police agencies can read the contents of Yahoo Mail messages–a position that puts those companies directly at odds with the Obama administration.

Yahoo has been quietly fighting prosecutors’ requests in front of a federal judge in Colorado, with many documents filed under seal. Tuesday’s brief from Google and the other groups aims to buttress Yahoo’s position by saying users who store their e-mail in the cloud enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy that is protected by the U.S. Constitution.

CNET News article continues here.

China’s government reacted testily Tuesday to Google Inc.’s decision to stop censoring its China-based search engine, calling the move “totally wrong” and accusing the company of violating promises.

More than two months after it threatened to shut down Google.cn if it had to continue policing the site, Google made the shift early Tuesday Beijing time. Visitors to Google.cn are automatically redirected to the Chinese-language service based in Hong Kong, where Google is not legally required to censor searches.

“Google has violated its written promise it made when entering the Chinese market by stopping filtering its searching service and blaming China in insinuation for alleged hacker attacks,” an official with the State Council Information Office, a Cabinet office that oversees the Internet, said in a statement carried by the official Xinhua News Agency.

Fox News article continues here.

Web sites dealing with subjects such as the Tiananmen Square democracy protests, Tibet and regional independence movements could all be accessed through Google’s Chinese search engine Tuesday, after the company said it would no longer abide by Beijing’s censorship rules.

Despite a report in the China Daily that Google China was still filtering content on its search engine and the firm’s own insistence that its policies had not changed, people in Beijing found that it wasn’t necessarily the case.

NBC News, using the publicly accessible Internet, tried searching for three sensitive topics normally blocked in China.

MSNBC article continues here.

Google has drawn up detailed plans for the closure of its Chinese search engine and is now “99.9 per cent” certain to go ahead as talks over censorship with the Chinese authorities have reached an apparent impasse, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking.

In a hardening of positions on both sides, the Chinese government also on Friday threw down a direct public challenge to the US search company, with a warning that it was not prepared to compromise on internet censorship to stop Google leaving.

The signs that Google was on the brink of closing Google.cn, its local search service in China, came two months after it promised to stop bowing to censorship there. But while a decision could be made very soon, the company is likely to take some time to follow through with the plan as it seeks an orderly closure and takes steps to protect local employees from retaliation by the authorities, the person familiar with its position said.

Financial Times article continues here.

Google said it is fully prepared to shut down its China operation if that is the only way to end the country’s censorship of its networks.

“Google is firm in its decision to stop censoring in China,” said Nicole Wong, Google’s deputy general counsel, in a hearing today before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. “We do not underestimate the seriousness or sensitivity of the decision is made…We are not going to change our decision.”

“If the option is that we shutter our .cn operation and leave the country, we are prepared to do that,” she said.

The Hill article continues here.

China’s military warned the United States on Thursday to “speak and act cautiously” to avoid reigniting tensions between the two powers, denying the People’s Liberation Army played a part in Internet hacking.

Huang Xueping, spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Defense, said his government would not reverse its decision to suspend “bilateral military plans” with Washington after it said in late January that it would sell $6.4 billion of arms to Taiwan, the self-ruled island Beijing claims as its own.

In January, the giant Internet search company Google Inc threatened to pull back from China after complaining of censorship and hacking attacks on it and other companies.

Yahoo! News (Reuters) article continues here.

An Italian court convicted three Google executives of privacy violations Wednesday because they did not act quickly enough to pull down a video that showed bullies abusing an autistic boy.

The case was being closely watched around the world due to its implications for Internet freedom.

In the first such criminal trial of its kind, Judge Oscar Magi sentenced the three to a six-month suspended sentence and absolved them of defamation charges. A fourth defendant, charged only with defamation, was acquitted.

Google called the decision “astonishing” and said it would appeal.

Fox News (AP) article continues here.

China fired back at Google on Tuesday, describing assertions that the country was involved in a massive cyberattack as “groundless.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang stressed his country remained “opposed” to Google’s conclusions about last month’s attack, which targeted U.S. businesses’ trade secrets, human-rights workers in China and the search-engine giant itself.

“Reports that these attacks came from Chinese schools are totally groundless and the accusation of Chinese government involvement is also irresponsible and driven by ulterior motives,” the Chinese spokesman said.

“China administers its Internet according to law, and this position will not change. China prohibits hacking and will crack down on hacking according to law,” Qin said.

The Hill article continues here.

Google has been forced into a hasty revamp of its social networking service Buzz after the new feature was met with a storm of criticism because of gaping privacy flaws.

The company today announced it will introduce a prominent “kill button” that will allow people to turn off Buzz altogether.

Central to the row is a feature that automatically enrolled Gmail users to the service but also revealed the identities of the people they e-mailed most frequently. The blunder was met with a torrent of complaints, including one woman who said that an abusive ex-husband could now follow her every move.

Google has now apologised, announcing it will fix Buzz so that Gmail users can now choose who they want as their “friends” under the system. Sources at the company said today that the new changes will be implemented in “the next couple of days”.

Times Online article continues here.

Iran’s telecommunications agency announced what it described as a permanent suspension of Google Inc.’s email services, saying a national email service for Iranian citizens would soon be rolled out.

It wasn’t clear late Wednesday what effect the order had on Gmail services in Iran, or even if Iran had implemented its new policy. Iranian officials have claimed technological advances in the past that they haven’t been able to execute.

A Google spokesman said in a statement, “We have heard from users in Iran that they are having trouble accessing Gmail. We can confirm a sharp drop in traffic, and we have looked at our own networks and found that they are working properly. Whenever we encounter blocks in our services we try to resolve them as quickly as possibly because we strongly believe that people everywhere should have the ability to communicate freely online.”

An Iranian official said the move was meant to boost local development of Internet technology and to build trust between people and the government.

The Wall Street Journal article continues here.

Google is set to make a fresh attempt to gain a stronger foothold in the booming social networking business on Tuesday as it seeks to counter the growing threat that Facebook poses to some of its core services.

The search company is preparing to announce new features for Gmail that would extend the capabilities of the internet-based e-mail service to mirror some aspects of the fast-growing social networking site, according to a person familiar with its plans.

However, earlier Google efforts to establish a presence in social networking have failed to gain much traction and analysts said that the company was still likely to find it difficult to turn the tables on Facebook with its latest plan.

Financial Times article continues here.

The world’s largest Internet search company and the world’s most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity.

Under an agreement that is still being finalized, the National Security Agency would help Google analyze a major corporate espionage attack that the firm said originated in China and targeted its computer networks, according to cybersecurity experts familiar with the matter. The objective is to better defend Google — and its users — from future attack.

Google and the NSA declined to comment on the partnership. But sources with knowledge of the arrangement, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the alliance is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information without violating Google’s policies or laws that protect the privacy of Americans’ online communications. The sources said the deal does not mean the NSA will be viewing users’ searches or e-mail accounts or that Google will be sharing proprietary data.

The Washignton Post article continues here.

After a big public announcement of the sort Apple had this week for the iPad CEO Steve Jobs often takes time in the day or two afterwards to have a Town Hall at One Infinite Loop, making himself available for questions from employees bold enough to stand up and take one right between the eyes.

This time, the big topics included Google and Adobe — no surprises there. Google recently unveiled its own Android-powered handset, the Nexus One, whose release Jan. 5 prompted Jobs to perhaps over-react by announcing on the same day that the iTunes store had served up three billion apps and that “… we see no signs of the competition catching up any time soon.” Apple’s billionth iPhone app download was greeted with great fanfare, but the two billionth not so much, so it felt a tad like Jobs was feeling some heat.

And the absence of Adobe Flash support on the iPhone for three years and counting, and now on the iPad, is either celebrated by users as a poke in the eye of one of the web’s most dextrous tools, or the most over-rated and overused crutch for decent design.

Wired article continues here.

The company said it had evidence to suggest that “a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts” of Chinese human rights activists. The attack was discovered in December.

David Drummond, Google senior vice president and chief legal officer, added that the attacks “have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China.”

Google has further decided it is no longer willing to continue censoring its search results in Chinese Google sites, Drummond said, and over the next few weeks it will discuss with the Beijing government how it may operate “an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all,” he said.

The Washington Post article continues here.