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The situation casts light on the low-tech backbone of a high-tech project -- the casual laborers who are rounded up by subcontractors, sometimes bused across state borders to job sites and set to work digging ditches. Predominantly Hispanic, they work with few guarantees and often no benefits, and they typically are hesitant to come forward with problems, according to lawyers and advocacy groups.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced it has filed a challenge on Tuesday to an illegitimate patent from Clear Channel Communications. The patent - for a system and method of creating digital recordings of live performances - locks musical acts into using Clear Channel technology and blocks innovations by others.
In Congress this week, two sides presented their cases in front of a Senate committee that's considering revising a 10-year-old telecommunications bill. The topic was Internet neutrality: the idea that all bits coursing along the Web should be treated equally.
The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.
Months of investigation by The New York Times revealed a level of contacts and financial support to the military not fully disclosed by Freeport, despite years of requests by shareholders concerned about potential violations of American laws and the company's relations with a military whose human rights record is so blighted that the United States severed ties for a dozen years until November.
Technology companies borrow a page from The Gap, Nike, and others.
Anatole France in 1894 wrote, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." In somewhat less literary language, Microsoft has just said the same thing.
Microsoft Corp. has shut down a popular Chinese-language blog that has run edgy content potentially offensive to Chinese authorities, amid China's continuing efforts to control information on the Internet.
The pashmina bubble that buoyed the garment industry in the late 1990s has burst. Fashion trendsetters have moved on, leaving a glut of cheap Chinese knock-offs in their wake.