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Microsoft Corporation


Self Description

July 2002: "Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT") is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software -- any time, any place and on any device.

Microsoft was founded as a partnership on April 4, 1975, by William H. Gates III and Paul G. Allen, and incorporated on June 25, 1981. Headquartered in Redmond, Wash., the company operates subsidiary offices in more than 60 foreign countries and employs nearly 49,000 people worldwide." http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/corpprofile.asp
"Fiscal Year ending June 30, 2001: Net revenue $25.30 billion, Net income $7.35 billion"
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/inside_ms.asp#financial

Third-Party Descriptions

March 2013: 'The words that are subject to being monitored, which Knockel updates almost daily on his department’s website, range from references to pornography and drugs to politically sensitive terms, including “Human Rights Watch,” “Reporters Without Borders,” “BBC News,” and the locations of planned protests. (The system he traced does not involve voice calls.) Knockel says his findings expose a conflict between Microsoft’s advocacy of privacy rights and its role in surveillance. Microsoft, which bought Skype in 2011, is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, a group that promotes corporate responsibility in online freedom of expression. “I would hope for more,” Knockel says of Microsoft. “I would like to get a statement out of them on their social policy regarding whether they approve of what TOM-Skype is doing on surveillance.”'

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-08/skypes-been-hijacked-in-china-and-microsoft-is-o-dot-k-dot-with-it

January 2012: "Google vs. Microsoft Moving on, there's Microsoft [11] (which last updated its privacy in August of last year -- I must have missed the news coverage). The company actually has a general privacy policy, along with supplemental privacy information for sixteen different services, including Bing, CRM Online, Office.com, Messenger, Windows Live, and Zune."

http://ifwnewsletters.newsletters.infoworld.com/t/7964635/121634393/608757/0/

August 2011: 'Shortly after the report by Stanford's Jonathan Mayer surfaced last week, Microsoft announced that it would stop the use of the so-called super cookies on MSN. A few days after the UC Berkeley report was published, Hulu announced in a blog post: "Upon reading the research report, we acted immediately to investigate and address the issues identified. This included suspending our use of the services of the outside vendor mentioned in the study."'

http://www.cio.com/article/688362/Browsing_and_Privacy_How_to_Not_Get_Tracked

July 2011: 'So Android, like every large software product on the planet, infringes numerous Microsoft patents. And Microsoft is taking full advantage. They’re visiting Android licensees and giving the same sales pitch Reback remembers from a quarter century ago. “Do you really want us to go back to Redmond and find patents you infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us?” Once again, many of the targets are writing checks to make the problem go away.'

http://blogs.forbes.com/timothylee/2011/07/07/microsofts-android-shakedown/

May 2010: "On one side are companies like AT&T and Microsoft, which vociferously lobby against Google in the policy arena."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/technology/23goog.html

April 2010: 'Microsoft [9] is telling its U.S. customers that their personal data will remain in the United States. "Our goal is to be as transparent as possible about our commitment to the security of our customer's data and we understand that today maintaining data in the U.S. is an important requirement for many of our U.S. customers," said Susie Adams, Microsoft's federal CTO.'

http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/google-the-new-rome-520

February 2010: "Microsoft has managed to do what a roomful of secretive, three-letter government agencies have wanted to do for years: get the whistleblowing, government-document sharing site Cryptome shut down."

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/02/microsoft-cryptome/

February 2010: 'Note that I'm not talking about the one-time activation that you (or your PC manufacturer) performs on new Windows systems to authenticate them to Microsoft initially. I'm talking a procedure that would "check-in" your system with Microsoft at quarterly intervals, and that could take actions to significantly change your "user experience" whenever the authentication regime declares you to have fallen from grace.'

http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000681.html

October 2009: "But remarks made recently by Microsoft's top executive, as well as suspicions raised by customers and software consultants, suggest that Microsoft keeps its licensing complicated for a reason, and that it has no plans to make it any simpler in the foreseeable future."

http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/does-microsoft-complicate-its-licensing-purpose-258

August 2009: "In a bit of awkward timing, it was recently discovered that, two years ago, Microsoft filed a patent for clustering phylogenetics methods, which have existed for years, and are currently in use by just about anyone who does evolutionary biology. The filing has been compared to attempting to patent multiplication tables, and has the phylogenetics community on edge."

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/08/microsoft-trying-to-patent-technique-for-studying-evolution.ars

August 2009: "Here's an odd couple: Microsoft and the Linux Foundation. These two organizations, normally on opposite sides of almost any issue, agree that a new set of guidelines [1] making software vendors liable for knowingly shipping buggy software is badly off base. They claim that the guidelines are likely to lead to a flood of expensive lawsuits against both large commercial vendors and small-scale open source developers. What's more, it could impose expensive obligations to scour support forums and the like for notice of problems, a procedure that would be overly burdensome for small developers, say critics."

http://www.infoworld.com/t/software-licensing/watch-out-developers-here-come-lawyers-436

August 2009: 'A new report by KnujOn, an antispam company, and LegitScript, which verifies the legitimacy of particular online pharmacies, titled "No Prescription Required: Bing.com Prescription Drug ads" (PDF) claims that 89.7 percent of the prescription drug and online pharmacy search ads reviewed on Microsoft's adCenter led to rogue Internet pharmacies. The analysis of Microsoft's paid search results started in June 2008, when Microsoft's search engine was still Live Search (it became Bing in June 2009). The report claims that the rogue Internet pharmacies sponsored by Microsoft fell into four categories:'

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/08/90-of-bings-online-drug-ads-lead-to-rogue-pharmacies.ars

July 2009: "Whether or not click fraud is on the rise, it's certainly on online giants' radars. Last month Microsoft filed a lawsuit against three individuals that accuses them of running a click fraud scheme on its online properties, and earlier this month Facebook found itself the target of a class action lawsuit claiming that it charged advertisers for invalid clicks."

http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/22/click-fraud-vietnam-technology-security-click-fraud.html

April 2009: 'Laws that vary by state would no doubt be a headache for companies that sell products online across the country. In the coming days, Minnesota's House of Representatives is due to consider a bill introduced by Representative Jim Davnie that would levy a sales tax on digital downloads of e-books, music, movies, and even ringtones. The tax would affect a wide range of tech companies, including Microsoft (MSFT) and Apple (AAPL). "There's clear opposition from the IT industry," Davnie says. "Apple, Microsoft have been in my office." Microsoft declined to comment for this story. Apple couldn't immediately be contacted. Amazon.com Wants Tax Uniformity'

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2009/tc20090426_510375.htm

June 2009: "Silicon Valley technology firms have historically been slow to forge relationships with the federal government. Microsoft reluctantly built a lobbying engine here to take on an antitrust battle a decade ago, after 20 years of neglecting Washington. Google did not assemble a robust policy team until two years ago, largely to lobby the Federal Communications Commission in last year's $20 billion spectrum auction."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/18/AR2009061804043.html

June 2009: "AFTER an investigation that took more than a year, Microsoft has filed its first lawsuit over click fraud, where people manipulate clicks on a Web advertisement."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/business/media/16adco.html

December 2008: "BERLIN — Microsoft offered Monday to abide by a European privacy panel’s request that it reduce the length of time it kept records of Web searches if its rivals, Yahoo and Google, did the same."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/technology/internet/09privacy.html

November 2008: 'A federal judge in Seattle has ordered Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to testify in a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft that alleges the company misled consumers in a marketing campaign for its Windows Vista operating system in which computers sold with an older Microsoft OS were labeled "Vista Capable" when in fact they could only run a basic version of Vista.'

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/11/24/Judge_orders_Ballmer_to_testify_in_Vista_capable_case_1.html

September 2008: 'Microsoft has an idea for keeping children safe online: create "digital playgrounds," sites where visitors have to prove their age using digital identity credentials.'

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10031106-83.html

June 2008: "SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft, Google and PayPal, a unit of eBay, are among the founders of an industry organization that hopes to solve the problem of password overload among computer users."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/technology/24card.html

June 2008: "A variety of companies — from private health-care providers and insurance companies to big technology firms such as Microsoft and Google — are developing and launching sites, most of them free, that allow patients to keep personal health records. They can include everything from medical histories to test results, doctors' notes and prescriptions."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-06-11-online-medical-records_N.htm

June 2008: "BRUSSELS — The European Union’s competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, delivered an unusually blunt rebuke to Microsoft on Tuesday by recommending that businesses and governments use software based on open standards."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/technology/11soft.html

April 2008: "To head off the potential for government interference, Microsoft submitted a filing with the FTC detailing their approach to a privacy protecting mechanism, one that leaves the industry in a self-regulating state. Brad Smith, Microsoft's senior general counsel, commented in a statement:"

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/04/11/microsoft-proposes-privacy-framework-to-ftc

April 2008: 'As part of a push toward greater individual control of health information, Microsoft and Google have recently begun offering Web-based personal health records. The journal article’s authors describe a new “personalized, health information economy” in which consumers tell physicians, hospitals and other providers what information to send into their personal records, stored by Microsoft or Google. It is the individual who decides with whom to share that information and under what terms.'

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/business/17record.html

March 2008: "Web companies in the advertising business, which have spent the last few years busily courting advertising agencies to persuade them to shift their clients’ ad dollars to the Internet, are now lavishing their attention on Albany. In recent weeks, Microsoft and Yahoo have sent lobbyists to meet with Mr. Brodsky, and AOL, a unit of Time Warner, is planning a meeting. Unlike most Web companies, Microsoft favors legislation about online privacy and advertising practices and has lobbied federal lawmakers to establish regulations, said Michael Hintze, associate general counsel for Microsoft."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/business/media/20adco.html

March 2008: 'As far as I could find, the Microsoft AdCenter agreement does not contain such a provision. It bans “defamatory, libelous, slanderous content” of all sorts with no specific reference to Microsoft.'

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/googles-thin-skinned-lawyers/

February 2008: 'When Microsoft announced on Thursday that it was changing its business practices to be more open — specifically to release documentation on its APIs and protocols — many people reacted with disbelief. The European Commission, which has battled Microsoft for a decade over anticompetitiveness, said in very blunt terms that it didn’t believe Microsoft was sincere. After all, Microsoft has made the “open” promise before but never delivered.'

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/02/25/09NF-microsoft-new-leaf_1.html?

February 2008: "Apple has had a FileVault disk encryption feature as an option in its OS X operating system since 2003. Microsoft added file encryption last year with BitLocker features in its Windows Vista operating system. The programs both use the federal government’s certified Advanced Encryption System algorithm to scramble data as it is read from and written to a computer hard disk. But both programs leave the keys in computer memory in an unencrypted form."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/22/technology/22chip.html

February 2008: "In a direct slap in the face to consumers, tech industry giants including Microsoft, AT&T, and Verizon are frantically engaged in an effort to kill pro-consumer provisions in a data breach notification bill currently being considered by the Indiana State Senate."

http://www.cnet.com/8301-13739_1-9865076-46.html

February 2008: "Microsoft's bid for Yahoo could provide more choice for big online advertisers living in a Google-centric universe but could hurt small- and mid-sized Internet publishers by taking away one of their options for selling ads on their Web sites."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/01/AR2008020103155.html

January 2008: "Rather than depending on patents, large information technology companies can increasingly rely on their market power and cross-licensing relationships. As a result, they are trying to rein in huge patent settlements like the $612.5 million award that NTP Inc. won from Research In Motion, the maker of the popular BlackBerry wireless device, or the $1.52 billion award that Lucent briefly won against Gateway Inc. and Microsoft. (It was recently overturned.)"

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/business/13stream.html

October 2007: YouTube, which has been sued by many parties for hosting videos alleged to violate copyright, this week started using a filter to try to identify such content before copyright holders notice it. A group of other content holders, including NBC Universal and Microsoft, yesterday announced standards for how companies should deal with material that people post online.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/18/AR2007101802453.html

October 2007: The latest iteration of the immensely popular space epic, Halo 3, was released nearly two weeks ago by Microsoft and has already passed $300 million in sales.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/us/07halo.html

September 2007: Europe’s second-highest court delivered a stinging rebuke to Microsoft Monday, but the impact of the decision upholding an earlier antitrust ruling may extend well beyond the world’s largest software maker to other high-technology companies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/technology/18soft.html

September 2007: In recent days, Windows Update (WU) started altering files on users' systems without displaying any dialog box to request permission. The only files that have been reportedly altered to date are nine small executables on XP and nine on Vista that are used by WU itself. Microsoft is patching these files silently, even if auto-updates have been disabled on a particular PC.

http://windowssecrets.com/comp/070913#story1

July 2007: LOS ANGELES, July 5 — In what may be one of the costliest consumer warranty repairs in history, Microsoft announced on Thursday that it would spend up to $1.15 billion to repair failing Xbox 360 game machine consoles.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/06/business/06soft.html

June 2007: Allegations by Google that Microsoft's new operating system unfairly disadvantages competitors has revived antitrust accusations against Microsoft and opened a front in a bitter war between the two technology giants.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/11/AR2007061102177.html

June 2007: According to documents in the federal case, the plaintiffs claim that Microsoft had invested $200 million in Best Buy and agreed to promote the electronics retailer's online store through its Internet portal, MSN. In return, Best Buy allegedly agreed to promote Microsoft's service and other Microsoft products in its stores and advertising.

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1180688739517

April 2007: For large tech companies, which are pushing several of the most substantial changes, a recent court case involving Microsoft exemplifies much of what's wrong with the current law. In February, a federal jury ordered Microsoft to pay $1.52 billion to Alcatel-Lucent for infringing two patents for the MP3 technology used to play digital music on computers, portable players and other mobile devices. Even if Microsoft was in the wrong, critics say, the damages, the largest ever in a patent case, were outrageous and reflected profound flaws in how judgments are calculated.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/17/AR2007041701687.html

May 2007: Of all the companies I tested, Microsoft's all-in-one security and maintenance package, Windows Live OneCare, has the most-hidden automatic subscription-renewal policy and is the most difficult to learn how to cancel.

http://windowssecrets.com/comp/070517/

May 2007: But now there's a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it's being cast by Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500). The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft's patents. And as a mature company facing unfavorable market trends and fearsome competitors like Google (Charts, Fortune 500), Microsoft is pulling no punches: It wants royalties. If the company gets its way, free software won't be free anymore.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/index.htm

January 2007: A Microsoft representative confirmed that users may buy an OEM copy of Windows Vista at a substantial discount, provided they adhere to the terms of the license – which, incidentally, may mean providing support for family members.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2087792,00.asp

August 2006: Microsoft is working on a new reparations strategy, known internally as a customer incentive program, for those customers with volume licensing programs who will be negatively affected by the delay in the release of Windows Vista and Office 2007.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2000814,00.asp

February 2006: BRUSSELS, Feb. 23 -- Faced with the prospect of large daily fines for not complying with European antitrust orders, Microsoft Corp. plans to argue in a hearing next month that regulators keep changing their minds about what they want the software giant to do to comply.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/23/AR2006022301033.html

February 2006: Microsoft chose not to host e-mail services in China, but it has acknowledged being unprepared in December when it complied with a government request to delete the blog of a Chinese journalist. It drafted a policy on handling such requests afterward.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/18/AR2006021801397.html

November 2005: Microsoft I can understand. The company is a fan of invasive copy protection -- it's being built into the next version of Windows. Microsoft is trying to work with media companies like Sony, hoping Windows becomes the media-distribution channel of choice. And Microsoft is known for watching out for its business interests at the expense of those of its customers.

http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,69601,00.html

November 2004: By withholding these fixes, Microsoft has aligned its interests with those of the worst "black-hat" hackers. The Redmond corporation is using people's legitimate fears of infection as a blunt instrument — a Billy club — to sell more copies of its Windows XP software. This is truly despicable and unethical business behavior.

http://windowssecrets.com/041118/

October 2004: And Microsoft could use the help since it continues to have the daylights beat out of it in court by little Burst.com. As you may recall from earlier columns, Burst, a two-person dot-com survivor from Santa Rosa, Calif., where I used to live, has been suing Microsoft for two years for anti-trust, breach of contract, restraint of trade, and patent infringement. In the great panoply of Microsoft civil anti-trust lawsuits, Burst's might be the last, and for Microsoft, it has to be the worst because Redmond looks so bad. This week, the news from recently unsealed court documents is that Microsoft may have deliberately lied not only to Burst, but also to the other anti-trust litigants right up to and including the U.S. Department of Justice.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20041007.html

April 2005: Just as aside, I should mention here that such scrutiny is not a surprise, because Microsoft takes its COAs very seriously. So seriously, in fact, it prevailed upon Congress and President Bush last year to enact a law -- the Anti-Counterfeiting Amendments Act - that makes trafficking in standalone COAs a crime. Microsoft feels that too many sticky fingers in the distribution channel are ripping authentic Microsoft COAs off the boxes and selling them to software counterfeiters. So even having an authentic Certificate of Authenticity doesn't necessarily mean you're not a pirate, at least as far as Microsoft is concerned.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/foster/2005/04/26.html#a247

January 2005: In other words, we've heard this all before. And, at least in terms of protecting customers from counterfeit software, product activation obviously was a complete failure. Is there really any reason to believe that this new validation process will be anymore successful at guaranteeing that honest customers in the future don't unwittingly become one of the Windows' Genuinely Disadvantaged? I sure don't see it. And, given that neither activation nor validation is likely to deter the real software pirates, one has to wonder what anti-piracy process Microsoft will require next.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/foster/2005/01/28.html#a209

Relationships

RoleNameTypeLast Updated
Opponent (past or present) Burst Media Organization Dec 31, 2006
Opponent (past or present) Eolas Technologies Organization Feb 10, 2012
Member of (past or present) FairSearch.org Organization Dec 14, 2010
Owner of (partial or full, past or present) MSN Organization Jan 27, 2006
Owner of (partial or full, past or present) MSN (Microsoft Network) Source Jan 3, 2007
Owner of (partial or full, past or present) MSNBC Organization May 20, 2005
Cooperation (past or present) Opponent (past or present) Novell Organization May 14, 2007
Member of (past or present) Open Book Alliance Organization May 9, 2010
Owner of (partial or full, past or present) Razorfish Organization Jun 23, 2009
Opponent (past or present) RealNetworks Organization Dec 31, 2006
Opponent (past or present) Rembrandt IP Management Organization May 2, 2007
Owner of (partial or full, past or present) Skype Limited Organization Mar 9, 2013
Formerly Owned by (partial or full) Slate Source Feb 3, 2005
Possible/Unclear TurboHercules Organization Apr 21, 2010
Opponent (past or present) Visto Corporation Organization May 2, 2007
Organization Executive (past or present) James "Jim" Allchin Person Nov 26, 2008
Founded/Co-Founded by Organization Executive (past or present) Paul G. Allen Person
Organization Executive (past or present) Steve Ballmer Person
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) Rich Barton Person Dec 28, 2008
Opponent (past or present) Tony Bove Person Jan 18, 2006
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) Danah Boyd Person May 7, 2010
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) James Fallows Person Jan 26, 2008
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) Barbara Fox Person
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) Lloyd Frink Person Nov 3, 2006
Organization Executive (past or present) Melinda French Gates Person Nov 2, 2005
Organization Head/Leader (past or present) Founded/Co-Founded by Mr. William "Bill" Gates III Person
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) Prof. James Grimmelmann Esq. Person Oct 7, 2009
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) Dean Hachamovitch Person Aug 29, 2007
Director/Trustee/Overseer (past or present) Wilmot Reed Hastings Person Jul 6, 2012
Organization Executive (past or present) Robert Hohman Person Dec 28, 2008
Cooperation (past or present) Eric L. Howes Person Dec 16, 2005
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) Ann McLaughlin Korologos Person Sep 27, 2004
Research/Analysis Subject Woody Leonhard Person Oct 13, 2006
Organization Executive (past or present) Doug Levin Person Jan 21, 2006
Research/Analysis Subject Brian Livingston Person Oct 13, 2006
Organization Executive (past or present) Gregory "Greg" Maffei Person Sep 12, 2006
Organization Executive (past or present) Matthew Moog Person Feb 6, 2006
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) Craig Mundie Person
Organization Executive (past or present) Nathan Myhrvold Person Feb 17, 2010
Organization Executive (past or present) William H. Neukom Esq. Person Mar 16, 2013
Organization Executive (past or present) Ray Ozzie Person Feb 27, 2008
Opponent (past or present) Gary Reback Esq. Person May 23, 2010
Cooperation (past or present) Mark Russinovich Ph.D. Person Dec 16, 2005
Organization Executive (past or present) Howard Schmidt Person
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) Robert Scoble Person May 20, 2008
Organization Executive (past or present) Charles Simonyi Person Nov 24, 2003
Organization Executive (past or present) Brad Smith Esq. Person Apr 24, 2008
Employee/Freelancer/Contractor (past or present) David Solomon Person Dec 16, 2005
Opponent (past or present) Christine A. Varney Esq. Person May 23, 2010

Articles and Resources

275 Articles and Resources. Go to:  [Next 20]   [End]

Date Fairness.com Resource Read it at:
Mar 08, 2013 Skype's Been Hijacked in China, and Microsoft Is O.K. With It

QUOTE: a conflict between Microsoft’s advocacy of privacy rights and its role in surveillance....When Internet users in China try to access Skype.com, they’re diverted to the TOM-Skype site. While the Chinese version bears the blue Skype logo—and provides services for online phone calls and text chats—it’s a modified version of the program found elsewhere in the world. The surveillance feature in TOM-Skype conducts the monitoring directly on a user’s computer...

 BusinessWeek
May 31, 2012 Should Sex Offenders Be Allowed On Facebook? The discussion goes beyond that initial repulsive reaction

QUOTE: Many states have laws on the books that put an outright ban on registered sex offenders using social networks. Sometimes these laws extend to things like instant messaging services and the like....there’s a wave of challenges to state laws banning sex offenders’ use of social media, and the American Civil Liberties Union is stepping in to spearhead many of them.

 WebProNews
Apr 28, 2012 How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes

QUOTE: The growing digital economy presents a conundrum for lawmakers overseeing corporate taxation: although technology is now one of the nation’s largest and most valued industries, many tech companies are among the least taxed, according to government and corporate data. Over the last two years, the 71 technology companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index — including Apple, Google, Yahoo and Dell — reported paying worldwide cash taxes at a rate that, on average, was a third less than other S.& P. companies’.

 New York Times
Jan 26, 2012 How does Google's new privacy policy compare?

QUOTE: Much ado has been made about Google's new overarching privacy policy, but the company's not doing anything much different than Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, or Yahoo

 InfoWorld
Jan 23, 2012 Europe Weighs Tough Law on Online Privacy

QUOTE: Europe is considering a sweeping new law that would force Internet companies like Amazon.com and Facebook to obtain explicit consent from consumers about the use of their personal data, delete that data forever at the consumer’s request and face fines for failing to comply.

 New York Times
Oct 10, 2011 Secret Orders Target Email: WikiLeaks Backer's Information Sought

QUOTE: The court clashes in the WikiLeaks case provide a rare public window into the growing debate over a federal law that lets the government secretly obtain information from people's email and cellphones without a search warrant. Several court decisions have questioned whether the law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, violates the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

 Wall Street Journal, The (WSJ)
Aug 31, 2011 Hackers may have stolen more than 200 SSL certificates: Source say DigiNotar breach generated fraudulent certs for Mozilla, Yahoo and Tor, not just Google

QUOTE: Hackers may have obtained more than 200 digital certificates from a Dutch company after breaking into its network, including ones for Mozilla, Yahoo and the Tor project....Security researchers now wonder what else DigiNotar hasn't told users.

 Computerworld
Aug 22, 2011 Browsing and Privacy: How to Not Get Tracked: All modern browsers have built-in tools and add-ons to protect users from having their Web behavior tracked. But regardless, some sites still find ways to

QUOTE: Every time browser developers and others come up with a defense against tracking — the use of tiny bits of computer code that tells Web sites where you've been on the Internet — the other side ups the ante with a new trick. And it's happening again.

 CIO Magazine
Jul 15, 2011 App developers withdraw from US as patent fears reach 'tipping point'

QUOTE: App developers are withdrawing their products for sale from the US versions of Apple's App Store and Google's Android Market for fear of being sued by companies which own software patents - just as a Mumbai-based company has made a wide-ranging claim against Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo and a number of other companies over Twitter-style feeds, for which it claims it has applied for a patent.

 Guardian Unlimited
Jul 07, 2011 Microsoft’s Android Shakedown

QUOTE: Convincing engineers to pay more attention to patent applications necessarily means that they spend less time doing useful work, and that can be fatal to a young startup....The result is a transfer of wealth from young, growing, innovative companies like Google to mature, bureaucratic companies like Microsoft and IBM—precisely the opposite of the effect the patent system is supposed to have.

 Forbes
Jul 01, 2011 The Unselfish Gene

QUOTE: Why is this deep-rooted belief about human selfishness beginning to change? To some extent, the answer is specific to evolutionary biology. But similar ideas challenging the notion that people are born selfish have surfaced in several other fields, such as psychology, sociology, political science, and experimental economics. Together, these ideas are tracing a new intellectual arc in the disciplines concerned with human action and motivation.

 Harvard Business Review (HBR)
May 08, 2011 Suit Opens a Window Into Google

QUOTE: In the smartphone market....“Google has the same problem today that Microsoft had 20 years ago, when Windows started to take off in the personal computer market,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “It needs to maintain the integrity of its technology, and control it.”

 New York Times
Apr 27, 2011 Holding Companies Accountable for Privacy Breaches

QUOTE: Yet there seems to be no real repercussions for these companies when a person’s information stored online is exposed. “Today the only real hit a company takes when these data breaches happen is to the company’s image.”

 New York Times
Apr 26, 2011 Sony Says PlayStation Hacker Got Personal Data

QUOTE: An “unauthorized person” had obtained personal information about account holders, including their names, addresses, e-mail addresses, and PlayStation user names and passwords. Sony warned that other confidential information, including credit card numbers, could have been compromised.

 New York Times
Apr 23, 2011 Show Us the Data. (It’s Ours, After All.)

QUOTE: Companies are accumulating vast amounts of information about your likes and dislikes... The more they know, the more money they can make... Not only should our data be secure; it should also be available for us to use for our own purposes.

 New York Times
Apr 06, 2011 An Attack Sheds Light on Internet Security Holes

QUOTE: Governments that control certificate authorities and hackers who break into their systems can issue certificates for any site at will.

 New York Times
Apr 05, 2011 Google Antitrust Investigation May Be On FTC’s Agenda

QUOTE: Google has done much to advance its laudable mission to “organize the world’s information,” but we’re concerned by a broadening pattern of conduct aimed at stopping anyone else from creating a competitive alternative.

 WebProNews
Mar 31, 2011 Antitrust Cry From Microsoft

QUOTE: The litany of particulars in Microsoft’s complaint… includes claims of anticompetitive practices by Google in search, online advertising and smartphone software. But a central theme, Microsoft says, is that Google unfairly hinders the ability of search competitors — and Microsoft’s Bing is almost the only one left — from examining and indexing information that Google controls, like its big video service YouTube.

 New York Times
Mar 22, 2011 Judge Rejects Google’s Deal to Digitize Books

QUOTE: But citing copyright, antitrust and other concerns, Judge Denny Chin said that the settlement went too far. He said it would have granted Google a “de facto monopoly” and the right to profit from books without the permission of copyright owner... They also said no other company would be able to build a comparable library, leaving Google free to charge high prices for its collection.

 New York Times
Mar 07, 2011 Developers rage after Facebook blocks Google AdSense

QUOTE: Facebook created... an official list of acceptable ad providers that developers can use to make money with their Facebook applications. Notably absent from the list is Google's popular AdSense service, an omission that has developers on various forums up in arms. Also missing: Amazon.com, which offers an advertising API.

 InfoWorld

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