U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech on Internet censorship Thursday and her call for an investigation into charges that Chinese-backed hackers attacked Google has met with a bristling and indignant response from Beijing. In a statement posted to China’s Foreign Ministry Web site, Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said the United States should “cease using so-called Internet freedom to make groundless accusations against China.” Read More »

If the bandwidth-guzzling iPhone is truly the “Hummer of cellphones,” as the New York Times dubbed it last year, you might figure that Apple’s coming tablet will swill data like an Airbus. That might be true eventually, but initially, analysts say, the tablet is not likely to put much strain on the mobile broadband infrastructure of whatever carrier it ends up with, whether Verizon or AT&T. Read More »

Oracle President Charles Phillips said Thursday that he had a long-running relationship with a woman whose picture seemingly appears alongside his on billboards in New York and other cities. Read More »

Web publishers love to grouse about Comscore’s traffic estimates. But many of them are much happier these days: A new measurement system is giving some sites a dramatic boost in Web visitors. Read More »

Will children who grow up in the age of excessive text messaging see their spelling and reading skills suffer as a result? Not necessarily, according to a new study from the British Academy. Read More »

Oracle said this morning that it has received unconditional regulatory approval from the European Commission for its acquisition of Sun. After the jump, the all-hands memo Sun CEO Jon Schwartz sent to employees following the announcement. Its gist: “Sun is a brand, Oracle is your company.” Read More »

Eric Schmidt’s tender feelings for Apple won’t stop Google from competing directly with Apple’s iPhone: The company spent much of the time on its Q4 earnings call discussing its large mobile ambitions–without talking about specifics, of course. Meanwhile, the search giant posted a big jump in quarterly revenue. But not enough for twitchy investors, who are pushing shares down in after-hours trading. Read More »

Is Howard Stern going to return to terrestrial radio? That seems highly unlikely given his obvious affinity for the…permissiveness of satellite. But the radio show host isn’t above threatening to return to earth as part of his contract negotiations. Read More »

A few thousand copies of GQ magazine in iPhone form won’t turn Condé Nast around. But it’s a start, and it’s a good bet that the company’s first Apple tablet apps will look awfully similar. Read More »

The New York Times may well be working with Apple Inc. on the launch of Apple’s tablet, but it appears Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. won’t be in San Francisco for the unveiling. Read More »

China has denied involvement in the recent cyber attacks against Google, but U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would like it to investigate them anyway. “Google’s review of its business operations in China has attracted a great deal of interest,” Clinton said during a speech this morning on Internet freedom at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. “We look to Chinese authorities to conduct a thorough investigation of the cyber intrusions that led Google to make this announcement.” Read More »

Today, BoomTown is loading the wife and kids, along with mom, into our tricked-out All Things Digital Winnebago and heading to Park City, Utah, for the 27th Sundance Film Festival. Now, what I know about independent filmmaking could fit neatly into a thimble, with room to spare. But what has brought me back there for five years running is the chance to introduce those auteurs gathered on the frozen tundra to a slice of what’s to come from the digital world. Read More »

How large is the market for crude monochrome E-Ink apps for the Kindle? We’re about to find out, because Amazon is finally opening up the e-reader to developers. The retailer unexpectedly announced the Kindle Development Kit this morning, inviting software developers to build “active content” for the device. Read More »

As social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter have expanded to include more of the online population, spammers and hackers have come along for the ride. Even the FCC chairman has seen his Facebook page taken over by a malicious program that sent spam to his friends. Read More »

Hard times? Sure, for mere mortals. But at Google, things are back to normal: The company signaled months ago that it had made it through the recession without much problem. Wall Street has gotten the message. It expects serious numbers from the search giant when it hands in its earnings report card this afternoon. Read More »