The Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, asking a court to force the agency to take action against Google over planned changes in the company’s collection of personal data.

EPIC, in briefs filed Wednesday, asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to require the FTC to enforce a 2011 privacy agreement between the agency and Google over the company’s fumbled rollout of its Buzz social networking service.
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European regulators have asked search giant Google to delay the March 1 overhaul of its “terms of service,” those documents every website has — and hardly anyone reads — that control your online privacy.

Google has several documents governing the terms of service for its various websites, such as Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps and others. The company plans to consolidate those terms into one document governing all its services, saying it offers greater transparency and simplicity for consumers.
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As promised, Microsoft on Wednesday shipped version 1.0 of the Kinect for Windows SDK and runtime and said partners have started selling the Kinect hardware.

The Kinect motion and voice sensor was initially designed for use with Microsoft’s Xbox gaming console. But it soon became clear that developers wanted the chance to build new kinds of applications using the sensor. Microsoft has been letting people build Kinect apps for PCs, but only for non-commercial use. This release of the SDK (software development kit) means that developers can launch commercial products using the sensor.
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Symantec has retracted its don’t-use-pcAnywhere recommendation to owners of the remote access software.

Last week, the company took the highly unusual step of telling pcAnywhere users to disable the program based on a 2006 source code leak and this month’s claims by members of Anonymous that they were mining the stolen code for vulnerabilities.

Symantec spokesman Brian Modena declined to declare the now-patched pcAnywhere as safe to use when asked that question multiple times, but hinted that the fixes the company has released were sufficient.
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A court in California rejected Oracle’s bid to use a fraud claim to undo an agreement to support the Itanium processor, that it is said to have made with Hewlett-Packard.

“The alleged fraud did not prevent Oracle from participating in the negotiations or deprive Oracle of the opportunity to negotiate,” Judge James P. Kleinberg of the Superior Court of California, Santa Clara County said in a 21-page ruling on Monday.

The Judge was referring to HP’s settlement agreement in 2010 with Mark Hurd, former CEO of HP, who later joined Oracle as president. Although Oracle was not a party to the previous litigation by HP against Hurd, its participation in the Hurd litigation settlement negotiations was extensive, he added.
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Users of Megaupload - including the law-abiding - are set to lose all their data as early as this week.

The popular file-sharing site - one of the 100 most-visited websites on the internet - was closed down nearly two weeks ago by the Department of Justice. The DoJ claimed it had generated more than $175 million in criminal proceeds for its owners through violation of copyright.

According to reports, federal prosecutors have said that data could start being deleted on Thursday, according to several reports. Because Megaupload’s assets have been frozen, it’s no longer able to pay Carpathia Hosting and Cogent Communications, the companies that store data on its behalf.
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In less than a year, famed PS3 hacker George Hotz has gone from trending news topic to the “Where Are They Now?” files.

To some, he was the guy who managed to crack the PS3’s security and in essence set of a chain that led to the collapse of the system’s entire online network.

To others, he was an idol in the world of iPhone hacking, making the term “jailbreak” a household word and enabling countless people to manipulate the otherwise iron-clad device.

But to a much smaller group, he was a coworker. At the end of June, it was reported that Hotz accepted a job at Facebook, although no details were ever spilled about what his role was at the social networking giant. For a while, though, it was as though he was a normal guy with an office job, making an honest living.
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