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Craigslist has won the first round in its federal lawsuit against PadMapper and two other companies, which extracted and used real estate listings from the world's most popular classifieds site.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco on Tuesday rejected attempts by the defendants to dismiss Craigslist's lawsuit, which alleged a slew of unlawful acts -- including terms of use violations, copyright violations, trespass, and civil violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

"Defendants' continued use of Craigslist after the clear statements regarding authorization in the cease and desist letters and the technological … Read more

The Free Software Foundation, never a friend to digital rights management, has taken issue with its arrival in the Web standards world.

In a letter from the FSF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, and other allied groups yesterday, the group called on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to keep DRM out of the standards it defines.

"We write to implore the World Wide Web Consortium and its member organizations to reject the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) proposal," the groups said. "DRM restricts the public's freedom, even beyond what overzealous copyright law requires, to the perceived … Read more

Facebook is applying its "Hacker Way" to help youngsters be more responsible in the social-networking realm.

On Thursday, the company announced Project:Connect, a partnership between the social network, the MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla, and the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) that's designed to shed light on what it means to participate responsibly in digital environments. Together, the partners will host an all-day hackathon in New York on May 9.

"We need to give youth the tools they need to become engaged and responsible digital citizens," Connie Yowell, director of education at the MacArthur Foundation, said … Read more

Google has undertaken what appears to be a legal first: an open court challenge by a major Internet company to a warrantless electronic data-gathering technique used by the FBI.

The company asked U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco last week to grant a "petition to set aside legal process" in response to a national security letter it received from the FBI.

National security letters allow FBI officials to send a secret request to Web and telecommunications companies requesting "name, address, length of service," and other information about users as long as it's … Read more

Facebook and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have joined forces again to help develop more tech tools for education and learning. It's time for HackEd 2.0.

The tech giants will be hosting two all-day hackathons this month, a Facebook spokesperson told CNET. More than 20 teams of tech education enthusiasts, education experts, and top-notch developers will spend April 9 at Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters brainstorming, coding, and building apps. A similar event will take place on April 24 in Facebook's London office.

Those apps then will be judged by a panel of experts -- including … Read more

We're not quite sure what a next-generation condom would look like (gesture control? a tiny touch screen?), but we may find out sooner rather than later if the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation succeeds in its new quest.

The foundation is seeking new ideas that improve on condom design, which it describes as having seen "very little technological improvement in the last 50 years." The winning proposal gets a cool $100,000, and could potentially earn more in additional funding.

The foundation suggests that if a redesigned condom could enhance a sexual experience and not detract from it, more men would use one, therefore reducing disease transmission, unwanted pregnancies, and so on. The request also seeks ideas "that increase ease-of-use for male and female condoms, for example better packaging or designs that are easier to properly apply. In addition, attributes that address and overcome cultural barriers are also desired." … Read more

It's not exactly a secret where President Obama stands on a controversial Republican-backed cybersecurity bill: he's already promised to veto it.

But a cadre of Internet activists opposed to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act nevertheless created a petition to the president asking him to "stop CISPA" -- and it has crossed the 100,000-signature threshold necessary to secure a response from the administration.

In reality, there's little Obama can do to stop CISPA that he hasn't already done. The administration offered a stark warning in last year's veto threat, which talked … Read more

Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who committed suicide while facing the possibility of a felony criminal conviction, was prosecuted under a law that was never intended to cover what he was accused of doing.

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984 dealt only with bank and defense-related intrusions. But over the years, thanks to constant pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice, the scope of the law slowly crept outward.

So by the time Swartz was arrested in 2011, the tough federal statute meant to protect our national defense secrets covered everything from Bradley Manning's offenses to … Read more

Pinchas Gutter has told his story many times. Of the horrors of childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto. Of being ripped away from his parents and 10-year-old twin sister the day the family arrived at the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, never to see them again. Of barely surviving a brutal Nazi prisoner "death march" away from front lines and allied forces. Of his liberation in 1945.

The story never loses its power, its agony, or its moments of hope. Only this time it's not the 80-year-old Gutter who's telling his tale, but a Princess Leia-like full-body hologram of him. Gutter's digital representation is a product of New Dimensions in Testimony, a high-tech initiative to record survivors' first-person accounts for interactive 3D exhibits that live on long after the storytellers have passed. … Read more