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Clearly, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has decided he's ready for his close up.

After months of silence from Zuckerberg, the hacker-turned CEO is basking in the limelight. He's been doing public appearance after public appearance recently, with the latest -- an interview with Matt Lauer -- airing Thursday on the "Today Show."

Zuck and crew didn't make a peep as Facebook recoiled from a bungled IPO. And, now, with fallen stock and lawsuits dragging down the company's image, the social network is working hard to make sure the public hears its message loud and … Read more

By now most everyone knows about Apple's deficient Maps app in iOS 6 -- particularly those who counted on the former Google-powered app for public transit directions. Apple CEO Tim Cook publically apologized for the Maps app and said the company is working to make the app better. But in the meantime, if you need public transit directions, you're going to have to rely on third-party apps from the App Store.

Before you start sifting through hundreds of transit apps, I put together this collection so you can get the help you need right away. It's important … Read more

Apple is well known for making roadkill out of third-party applications with features it's added to iOS over the years. Though in taking out one key feature from its new Maps application, the company has also given smaller developers a chance at big exposure.

For proof of that, look no further than Embark, a Bay Area company that has a dozen localized transit apps for cities like New York, San Francisco, and London. Since iOS 6 launched last week, the company says it's seen its biggest spike of downloads and activity yet, including 1.3 million trips planned … Read more

commentary California lawmakers have taken an encouraging step to keep government from tinkering with the mechanics of the Internet. As first reported by CNET in June, SB 1161, which passed last week, prohibits the state's Public Utilities Commission from imposing new regulations on "Voice over Internet Protocol and Internet Protocol enabled services," except when specifically authorized by the legislature or by federal authorities.

SB 1161, which is only four pages long, was approved in May by an overwhelming bipartisan majority of the state's Senate. On August 22, it cleared the state Assembly by a margin of … Read more

AT&T has temporarily disabled a frequency emitted by 16 towers that were found to be interfering with police and firefighter radio communications in Oakland, Calif., the San Francisco Chronicle reported today.

The towers were causing radio failures, particularly when a police car was within a quarter to half a mile of one of them, said David Cruise, Oakland's public safety systems adviser.

After the U.S. Federal Communications Commission confirmed the interference, AT&T shut down the 850MHz frequency for 2G customers on the towers last Friday, but the carrier left the 1,900MHz and 700MHz … Read more

Some people have raised red flags regarding AT&T's limits on the use of FaceTime on the upcoming iOS, alleging the restrictions could go against Federal Communications Commission rules.

"Over-the-top communications services like FaceTime are a threat to carriers' revenue, but they should respond by competing with these services and not by engaging in discriminatory behavior," senior staff attorney at Public Knowledge John Bergmayer said in a statement. Public Knowledge is a nonprofit organization that works on Internet law.

The "discriminatory behavior" that Bergmayer is alluding to is AT&T's newly announced … Read more

This is one of those moments when people might ask, "what did we do before smartphones?"

Google announced today that its Maps feature now has public transit schedules for more than 1 million bus, train, subway, and tram stops around the world -- encompassing nearly 500 cities.

"Public transportation information is especially useful when it's in the palm of your hand," Google Maps software engineer Christopher Van Der Westhuizen wrote in a blog post today.

In addition to reaching 1 million public transport schedules, Google also launched an update to its Google Maps for Android … Read more

Google announced on the company's blog today that sites that generate too many take-down notices will find themselves pushed down in the search rankings. Takedown notices are the documents that owners of copyrighted material file in order to request the deletion of unauthorized copies of their work from Web sites.

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Web site owners must remove unauthorized files once they've received a legitimate takedown notice. … Read more

A Facebook engineer took to Reddit late Monday to apologize for inadvertently blocking Imgur, one of the most popular image sharing sites on the Web, from the social network.

Users were prevented from posting any Imgur links to their profile pages and timelines on Monday, and were greeted by a Facebook error message telling them the links were being "blocked for being spammy or unsafe."

The false positive may have gone unnoticed by Facebook's estimated 950 million users late on Monday night, but the block was enough to provoke a backlash from users of Reddit, the hugely … Read more