Government

Antiquated IT systems are soaking up federal technology dollars and creating risks for both bureaucrats and citizens, the GAO reported last week. More than 75 percent of the federal IT budget in 2015 went toward the operation and maintenance of nearly obsolete legacy systems that use outdated softwa...

Facebook this week said it would make several procedural changes to its Trending Topics feature to quell concerns that the results could be steered in a particular political direction, even though it has found no evidence of bias. The company will retrain workers in the Trending Topics department an...

Selling information technology to the U.S. government is never easy, and it's even harder when a vendor cannot highlight the qualitative differences it believes separates its competencies from other providers competing for the same work. Yet a major contracting tool federal agencies use in seeking I...

The United States Patent and Trademark Office earlier this week granted Google a patent for "Adhesive Vehicle Front End For Mitigation of Secondary Pedestrian Impact." The patent application, filed a year and a half ago, credits Google employees Alex Khaykin and Daniel Lynn Larner as the inventors o...

Google on Thursday filed an appeal with France's supreme administrative court over an order from a privacy regulator requiring it to scrub certain search results around the world under a law called "the right to be forgotten." The March order from the CNIL requires Google and other search engines to...

China reportedly is investigating the encryption and data storage features of technology products sold there by large foreign companies to determine whether the products pose a security threat. A committee associated with the Cyberspace Administration of China reportedly is conducting reviews that i...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week announced that the company would investigate allegations that its Trending Topics feature had an anticonservative bias. "We have found no evidence that this report is true," he said, referring to a news report earlier this month that kicked off the storm. The c...

Concern about online security and privacy are leading Americans to curtail online activity, the United States National Telecommunications and Information Administration reported last week. More than 41,000 households with at least one Internet user in July responded to several privacy and security q...

Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable last week announced that California regulators approved their planned merger following a series of hearings in which the companies agreed to open access to underserved communities. The California Public Utilities Commission voted unanimously to approve th...