The findings – commissioned by Google and produced by law professor Eugene Volokh – essentially suggest that those complaining about Google favoring its own products in search results do not have a valid argument.

Google has denied such favoritism, but “even if it is assumed that Google engages or plans to engage in such prioritizing, that prioritizing would constitute the legitimate exercise of Google’s First Amendment right to decide how to present information in its speech to its users,” Volokh wrote in the report.

via Google Search Results Protected by First Amendment, Report Says | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.

Donoghue, the U.S. judge on the 15-member International Court of Justice, told a crowded room of University of Georgia students on Tuesday that the court’s role is to shape an often ambiguous body of international law, regardless of whether nations such as her own obey its decisions.

“It’s not like we’re looking through a telescope like an astronomer at distant stars. What we do shapes and defines the content of the field,” Donoghue said during the John A. Sibley Lecture at the UGA School of Law.

The International Court of Justice — also known as the World Court — was established by the United Nations’ charter in 1945. It rules from The Hague, Netherlands, on civil disputes between nations that consent to its oversight. (This is not the court that charged Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and Liberian President Charles Taylor; their prosecutions were handled by separate international criminal tribunals, also based in The Hague.)

Judges to the World Court are elected by the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council.

via Judge: World Court Is ‘Potent Force’ for Peace.

Brian Shields, a former Nortel employee, led the internal investigation into the breach and told the Journal that the hackers “had access to everything.” An internal report indicated that Nortel reset the passwords that had been taken but didn’t do anything else to keep the hackers out.

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In recent years, lawmakers and advocacy groups have made increased efforts to protects users’ privacy online. Here are some cases that helped stoke the debate about tracking and privacy on the Web.

Nortel, which filed for bankruptcy in 2009, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the story.

The report said that Nortel discovered the hackers in 2004, after an employee noticed some unusual downloads being made in the name of an executive. Shields told the paper that he found that the hackers have been using China-based Internet addresses for the transmissions. He said that he noticed unusual transmissions every month or so, but that Nortel decided to ignore his recommendations to enhance network security.

via Report: Chinese hackers breach Nortel networks – The Washington Post.

Autonomy provides software for enterprises to help find and make sense of data hidden away in documents and other files throughout their organization. It’s the largest software company by market cap in the U.K.

via REPORT: HP To Make $10 Billion Bid For Autonomy.

• The United States has pursued 3.5 foreign bribery enforcement actions for every one by all other countries combined since the year 2000.
• Top industries for anti-bribery enforcement are in the sector covering oil, gas, and coal, accounting for nearly 20% of all enforcement activity.
• There’s a near three-way tie for second place, with the aerospace/defense, manufacturing, and health care sectors each accounting for about 12% of enforcement activity.
• The largest number of enforcement actions involve alleged bribe payments to officials in China, Iraq, and Nigeria.
• While the U.S. was pursuing actions at a record pace, enforcement by countries other than the U.S. actually fell in 2010.

via TRACE Report Offers Global Anti-Bribery Enforcement Stats.

Globally, the smartphone market is up 73 percent from last year, with 107.7 million devices shipped in the last quarter. Of the 56 countries tracked by Canalys, Android topped 35 of them, with 51.9 million shipments overall.

Why the boost? Canalys pointed to strong Android support from major handset makers like Samsung, HTC, LG, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, ZTE, and Huawei. Android holds 85 percent of the market in South Korea and 71 percent in Taiwan alone.

Apple came in second place with 20.3 million iPhones sold and 19 percent of the market, which was enough to overtake Nokia’s Symbian platform and make Cupertino the world’s top smartphone vendor.

“The iPhone has been a phenomenal success story for Apple and a watershed product for the market,” Canalys vice president and principal analyst Chris Jones said in a statement. “It’s an impressive success story, given that Apple has only been in the smartphone market for four years. With the next-generation iPhone anticipated in Q3, it’s likely that Apple’s position will grow even stronger in the second half of the year.”

via Android on Nearly 50 Percent of World’s Smartphones, Report Finds | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.

Trend Micro said that the attacks on the other two email systems were apparently “separately conducted,” but the objectives were the same: obtain the logins and passwords of the user, as a foundation for staging future attacks.

On Wednesday, Google disclosed that hundreds of its Gmail accounts had been compromised, including personal email accounts used by reporters, activists, and government officials. The attacks appeared to have come from servers in China, Google said, although Chinese officials denied responsibility. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called the attacks “very serious”, and said the FBI had begun an investigation. The White House said Friday that no government email accounts were compromised in the attacks.

Phishing uses social engineering to try and persuade the victim to divulge personal details, including their username and password.

“The objective of the attackers appears to be to gain access to the target’s Webmail accounts in order to monitor his/her communications and, possibly, to stage future attacks,” Nart Villeneuve, a senior threat researcher for TrendLabs, said in a blog post. “In the recent case revealed by Google, the attackers used a phishing attack to gain access to the target’s Gmail account then proceeded to add their own email addresses to the “forwarding and delegation settings,” allowing them to send and receive email messages via the compromised accounts.”

via Report: Gmail Attacks Replicated on Hotmail, Yahoo | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.

Bloomberg reported Tuesday that the service would be available on the Sprint Nexus S across five different U.S. metropolitan regions: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Google has sent out announcements to a press event at 11:15 AM local time at Google’s New York offices on Thursday, advertised as a partner even where Google will show off its “latest innovations”.

Google representatives couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. NFC technology is also reportedly being used by the Apple iPhone 5. Three major U.S. wireless carriers recently announced their support for an NFC payment system called Isis, which would let Americans pay for items at retail stores with their mobile phones rather than using physical credit cards.

Google Eric Schmidt, then the company’s chief executive, showed off the NFC technology last November at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, running the “Gingerbread” version of the Android operating system.

NFC, or near-field communications, is a way for two devices to communicate small amounts of data when they’re placed about four inches apart. Similar technologies are used for “mobile wallet” services such as Japan’s popular Mobile Felica system, where a mobile phone stores encrypted credit-card data, transit pass information, or retail coupons, and can transmit them to readers at stores or train stations with a tap.

via Report: Google, Sprint to Launch NFC Payments Thursday | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.

Of 36 agents interviewed, 13 were deficient in at least some of the necessary capabilities, according to a U.S. Justice Department inspector general’s report released today. Five of the agents told the inspector general’s office that they viewed themselves as unqualified to conduct investigations of computer hacking involving national security.

“One agent told us that he was assigned his first counterterrorism intrusion case but he did not know how to investigate a national security intrusion case,” according to the report.

National security intrusions are the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s top cyber priority, the report said. Even so, the report found that the forensic and analytical capability of FBI field offices was “inadequate to support national security intrusion investigations.”

via FBI Agents Can Lack Skills to Investigate Computer Intrusions, Report Says – Bloomberg.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Twitter’s plans to enhance its overall appeal include welcoming new users with tweets from individuals in their specific geographic region, in part to dispel the image that the platform serves as little more than a soapbox for celebrities to broadcast their opinions.

via Report: Twitter deep into talks to purchase TweetDeck – FierceMobileContent.