News & Opinion

A federal appeals court ruled that a gossip website was not responsible for libelous content from an anonymous third party posting. The posting said a former Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader had sex with half the team and as a result had sexually transmitted diseases. The Communications Decency Act of 1996 protects websites from liability for content by third  parties. The ex-cheerleader is planning to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case. (Cincinnati.com, June 17,

A California court of appeals will render a judgment this summer in a case involving a Pauma, California school district charged with not informing the public about an action to demolish depression-era federal barracks. Community activists say that the demolition of the Civilian Conservations Corp buildings were never posted on an agenda. (Valley Roadrunner, June 18, 2014, by Kim Harris) Santa Rosa officials are embroiled into a dispute over the extent to which city council

The U.S. Supreme Court will issue a finding on a  thorny issue, the circumstances  under which Facebook threats are protected under the First Amendment. Federal courts ruled in the case of Pennsylvania man that his rants threatening to kill his wife were not protected. The man said his postings were not serious and therapeutic. (VentureBeat, June 16, 2014, by Barry Levine) The Court faces a challenge in bringing clarity to the law in the Internet

CloudFlare, a web security company, is initiating Project Galileo to protect news gathering, political and artistic speech on the web. CloudFlare is providing their protection technology against denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) free of charge. (CSO, June 14, 2014, by Lucian Constantin of IDG News Service) The attacks overload websites with requests for information thereby putting them out of service. News organizations have been particularly prone to suffer from DDoS. CloudFlare intends to offer protection to a

A federal district judge ordered the Obama administration to cough up more information on its secret spying on U.S. citizens by collecting phone records. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers told the Justice Department to produce 66 pages of documents for her review so she could judge if the records were wrongly withheld. (Computerworld, June 13, 2014, by Stephen Lawson of the IDG News Service) Rogers found the government had failed to make their case for withholding