After enduring a week of bad press over its involvement with NSA spying programs, Google has written an open letter to the U.S. government asking for permission to publish more data on national security requests. Dear Attorney General Holder and Director Mueller Google has worked tremendously hard over the past fifteen years to earn our [...]

Successful entrepreneur and South African immigrant Elon Musk disclosed that he left Mark Zuckerberg’s political advocacy group FWD.us out of disgust with the organization’s cynical political tactics. Musk made the disclosure during an interview at All Things Digital (start at 56:30). WALTER MOSSBERG: Since we just touched on immigration, can you explain what happened with [...]

We all know that the leaders of the personal computer revolution were criminals. From Bill Gates hacking his school computer so he would mostly have female classmates to Steve Jobs’ first business being selling blue boxes that hacked AT&T’s phone network for free long distance calls. But this current crop of technologists are truly rotten [...]

So much for boot-strapping. Facebook Inc. is done with the pretense of Silicon Valley meritocracy and has moved on to Corporate American crony capitalism taking a multimillion dollar tax break according to Citizens for Tax Justice. Last year at this time, CTJ predicted, based on Facebook’s IPO paperwork, the company would get a federal tax [...]

Today I want to tell you three American stories. The first story is about one of the most celebrated American entrepreneurs of all time – Steve Jobs. When Jobs was a young adult he and his friend Steve Wozniak started a business centered around an innovative piece of technology. This piece of technology was called [...]

In a country full of stupid laws – written by corrupt politicians, refined by maniacal bureaucrats, and enforced by ruthless careerists – few are stupider than the current version of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. On the surface it seems sensible, first passed in 1986 as a basic legal protection against unauthorized access of [...]

A Superior Court judge has ordered the City of Newark to release emails that were exchanged about the $100 million pledge that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made to Newark schools in September 2010.

Facebook has bounced back a bit today on its initial stock offering, but it’s still way down from the IPO price. And the company – and those that helped bring it to NASDAQ – have much bigger problems: Morgan Stanley (MS) defended its role in Facebook Inc. (FB)’s initial public offering after a Massachusetts regulator [...]

This Eduardo Saverin story is just the kind of link-bait in which Chuck Schumer specializes. He would make a good search engine optimization chief at a website. But there is a larger point, and not just bad Facebook puns, to be made in the controversy over Facebook co-founder Saverin’s renunciation of citizenship to avoid tax [...]

In the space of a week, Facebook has gone from inking a deal with Goldman Sachs for a special purpose vehicle that would allow for investment in the company without financial disclosure, to a pledge to either go public in 2012 or submit all its financial disclosure information publicly. Facebook is more of a retailer [...]

With the worldwide coordination against Wikileaks, with the US Justice Department seeking prosecution and the State Department cracking down on its funding sources, with Julian Assange in jail and the press savaging Assange and Wikileaks (and inventing ticky-tack reasons to do so) for making them look bad, you just knew there would be a community-based [...]