Internet

The days of tax-free Internet shopping may soon be coming to an abrupt end.

CNET has learned that two Republican senators are preparing to introduce new legislation that would allow states to force Amazon.com and other out-of-state online retailers to collect sales taxes.

Sens. Mike Enzi of Wyoming and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee are currently putting the final touches on their bill, which is backed by Wal-Mart Stores, Best Buy, Home Depot, and other companies that are currently required to collect sales taxes. It's a bipartisan concept: a related effort was embraced by Democrats including Sen. Dick Durbin … Read more

Controversy over a new copyright bill continues to grow in Washington, D.C., with both proponents and detractors signing up new allies and sharpening their rhetoric. Even pop icon Justin Bieber has made an appearance.

The Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, introduced last week in the House of Representatives to the applause of lobbyists for Hollywood and other large content holders, is designed to make allegedly copyright-infringing Web sites, sometimes called "rogue" Web sites, virtually disappear from the Internet.

That goes too far and hinders freedom of speech and innovation, the Consumer Electronics Association, NetCoalition, and the … Read more

PALO ALTO--A team of Stanford University researchers has bad news to report about Captchas, those often unreadable, always annoying distorted letters that you're required to type in at many a Web site to prove that you're really a human.

Many Captchas don't work well at all. More precisely, the researchers invented a standard way to decode those irksome letters and numbers found in Captchas on many major Web sites, including Visa's Authorize.net, Blizzard, eBay, and Wikipedia.

Their decoding technique borrows concepts from the field of machine vision, which has developed techniques to control robots by … Read more

The makers of a popular mobile browser called Dolphin HD confirmed that their software leaks the addresses of all Web sites a user visits, a potential privacy and security breach.

MoboTap, a Pasadena, Calif.-based mobile developer, told CNET today that Dolphin HD for Android transmitted the Web addresses back to the company's servers but that they were not stored. The addresses were used to determine whether to format Web pages in "Webzine" format, MoboTap said.

The privacy and security implications arise when a user connects to a secure Web site (usually shown by "https://" … Read more

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the California Democrat whose district includes the heart of Silicon Valley, is preparing to lead congressional opposition to the new Stop Online Piracy Act.

The antipiracy legislation, introduced yesterday in the House of Representatives to the applause of lobbyists for Hollywood and other large content holders, is designed to make allegedly copyright-infringing Web sites, sometimes called "rogue" Web sites, virtually disappear from the Internet.

"I'm still reviewing the legislation, but from what I've already read, this would mean the end of the Internet as we know it," Lofgren told CNET.

Lofgren, … Read more

Hollywood's lobbyists have launched a bold new anti-piracy offensive in Washington that will face strong opposition from Internet companies and users who worry it goes too far and jeopardizes free speech rights.

A dozen members of the U.S. House of Representatives today announced they've jointly introduced a new bill intended to make allegedly copyright-infringing Web sites, sometimes called "rogue" Web sites, virtually disappear from the Internet.

The bill, called the Stop Online Piracy Act (PDF)--although because the sponsors dubbed the Web-blocking portions the "E-PARASITE Act," it's likely to become known by … Read more

Nearly seven years after its founding, YouTube employees still fiercely debate where to draw the line between titillating content that may or may not be acceptable.

Including videos of man boobs.

"Recently we had the issue of man boobs--do man boobs need to be age-restricted or not?" Victoria Grand, YouTube's director for global communications and policy, said today, referring to that unfortunate medical condition caused by abnormal development of male mammary glands.

Man boobs, also known as gynecomastia, is an unlikely but popular category on YouTube, in part because mischievous uploaders may imply the exposed bosoms are … Read more

A few days ago, a conservative attorney named Leo Donofrio noticed something extremely odd about the U.S. Supreme Court opinions published on the Web site of Justia.com, a legal information startup.

The opinions weren't accurate. Donofrio, of East Brunswick, N.J., discovered that citations to a 1875 case defining a "natural-born citizen"--a phrase that has special resonance in discussions about President Obama's eligibility for the office--had been quietly removed before the 2008 elections.

Donofrio, who in 2009 tried to convince the Supreme Court that President-elect Obama was ineligible for office, quickly published his … Read more

WASHINGTON--For a few hours on Capitol Hill yesterday evening, it was October 1986 again, complete with legwarmers, an Apple IIc, pop rocks, Duran Duran, and cell phones the size of a cat.

The companies sponsoring this night of nostalgia include Google and Facebook, which are hoping to visibly highlight how out-of-date a law enacted 25 years ago today has become in an age of cloud computing, gigabit networks, and terabyte storage.

The law in question is the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a statute written in the pre-Internet era of telephone modems and the black-and-white Macintosh Plus. A coalition of … Read more