Technology

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

Motorola phones will continue to face a ban on their sales in Germany.

On Thursday, the Munich Higher Regional Court rejected an appeal by Google-Motorola to lift the injunction of its Android phones. In May 2012, a German court ruled that the company had violated a Microsoft patent over SMS, ordering a sales ban against its phones in Germany. Google appealed the ruling, but the court was unswayed.

Dubbed "Communicating multi-part messages between cellular devices using a standardized interface," the patent in question relates to text messaging.

"We are gratified the court has affirmed the District Court'… Read more

Those of us who can never find our cars in a crowded parking garage may one day get a helping hand from Apple.

Published Thursday by the U.S. Trade and Patent Office, an Apple patent application called "Method for locating a vehicle" describes a technology in which your mobile device can talk to your car through a Bluetooth connection to confirm that it's parked somewhere nearby. The parking garage itself would also have its own wireless system to pinpoint the exact location of your car.

A map would then display on your phone to lead you … Read more

The HTC One now faces a setback over its supply of microphones.

Nokia yesterday won an injunction from an Amsterdam District Court preventing sales of the current microphone for HTC's new flagship phone. Manufactured by STMicroelectronics NV for the HTC One, the microphone uses components allegedly invented by Nokia and made exclusively for Nokia phones, Reuters reported today.

Nokia said that it dissassembled an HTC One phone to find that the "dual membrane HDR" microphone, which can record high-quality audio, is the same type used on its own phones.

"HTC has no license or authorization from … Read more

Amazon may be cooking up its own anonymous mobile payments system.

Published yesterday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the Amazon patent application appropriately dubbed "Anonymous mobile payments" describes a system that would let mobile users pay for items without having to reveal their name, phone number, e-mail address, or other personal details to the seller.

The invention follows in the footsteps of other mobile payment systems. However, Amazon takes it a few steps further.

Beyond shielding the personal information of the buyer, Amazon's system would use a special code, or temporary identifier, to conduct … Read more

Law enforcement officials could have something very different on their hands as they investigate the dual bomb blasts that struck the Boston Marathon finish line today: a potential abundance of photo and video evidence from the public.

Government surveillance, while growing, still misses more than it catches. But events with thousands of spectators offer the potential for a detailed crowdsourced record of what happened.

This public panopticon is changing how we see the world. February's Russian meteor was captured by many dash-cams mounted in Russian cars, but in this case the event is of profound interest to law enforcement … Read more

The Internal Revenue Service has declined to answer questions about whether it obtains a search warrant before perusing Americans' e-mail messages and other electronic correspondence.

CNET contacted the IRS last Wednesday morning to ask whether the agency's internal procedures require warrants signed by a judge. That was in response to newly disclosed internal IRS memos saying Americans enjoy "generally no privacy" in their e-mail, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and similar online communications.

Despite repeated queries, the IRS has not responded to last week's questions. Instead, an agency spokesman provided a statement saying:

STANFORD, Calif.--Issac Asimov's famous laws of robotics say machines may never harm humans. In Matt Groening's "Futurama" universe that takes place a millennium later, however, robots have become a bit less literal-minded.

"The three laws of robotics are actually built into many of the robots," said Patric Verrone, co-executive producer of "Futurama." "Some of them just choose to ignore them."

The best known example of "Futurama's" robot taxonomy is Bender, a foul-mouthed, alcoholic, cigar-smoking kleptomaniac who dreams about killing all the humans. But the universe of &… Read more

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has launched a new political action group, FWD.us, to focus on immigration reform.

Zuckerberg, who announced the move through an editorial in The Washington Post, called U.S. immigration policy "strange" for a nation of immigrants and "unfit for today's world."

As a result, a deep roster of tech executives have banded to together to push a bipartisan policy agenda to change how the U.S. approaches immigration. The group has vowed to work with members of Congress from both parties, the administration, and state and local officials. It plans … Read more