Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

Judge orders Google to comply with FBI's secret NSL demands A federal judge tells the company to comply with the FBI's warrantless National Security Letter requests for user details, despite ongoing concerns about their constitutionality. by Declan McCullagh  May 31, 2013 6:00 AM PDT A federal judge has ruled that Google must comply with the FBI's warrantless requests for confidential user data, despite the search company's arguments that the secret demands are illegal. CNET has learned that U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco rejected Google's request to modify or throw out 19 so-called National Security Letters, a warrantless electronic data-gathering technique used by the FBI that does not need a judge's approval. Her ruling came after a pair of top FBI officials, including an assistant director, submitted classified affidavits. The litigation taking place behind closed doors in Illston's courtroom -- a closed-to-the-pu...

Texas Could End Up Leading the Country on Electronic Privacy A bill waiting for Gov. Rick Perry's signature would set up even stricter protections for user data than current federal law. By Brian Fung Updated: May 29, 2013 | 4:42 p.m. May 29, 2013 | 3:18 p.m. Despite having lost his bid for the presidency, Texas Governor Rick Perry now finds himself again in a position of (potential) national leadership. On the way to his desk is a bill that would put Texas far ahead of the rest of the country when it comes to protecting consumers' electronic privacy. Unless Perry takes action to veto it, the legislation would fix a legal loophole that currently lets law enforcement seize opened emails (or unopened emails older than 180 days) with little more than an administrative subpoena. Under the new law, which passed the state House on Monday and the state Senate on Tuesday, investigators would need to get a search warrant before asking businesses to hand over consume...

Windows 8.1 paints over the problems with Windows 8 Mark Hachman @markhachman May 30, 2013 9:32 AM Phew. Maybe Windows Blue (or Windows 8.1, as Microsoft is now officially calling it) won't be so blah after all. But Microsoft is betting big that a fresh coat of paint will be enough to bring users back into the fold. On paper, at least, Microsoft's disclosure of some of the new key features within Windows Blue take some definite strides forward, with entirely new components, such as Internet Explorer 11, anchoring the new release. Microsoft hasn't abandoned its original vision. Rather, it’s just compromised it a bit by delivering features that users have been clamoring for. Look, Microsoft is saying. Windows 8 is friendly. What Microsoft still isn't overtly acknowledging, however, is that there are two groups of users: those who have seen Windows 8, have been baffled, and have walked away; and a second group, who understand how Windows 8 works and wh...

Ads on Facebook dropped after appearing next to offensive posts May 28, 2013 7:56 pm By Robert Budden, Chief Media Correspondent Major advertisers including Nissan and Nationwide have suspended Facebook marketing campaigns after their ads appeared alongside offensive posts, highlighting the risks of a new form of “targeted” advertising. The cancellations follow complaints on Twitter and from women’s rights organisations over the publication of misogynistic content, including images of abused women, on the social networking site. Targeted advertising identifies that a person is likely to buy a particular product, and then automatically places ads for that product on whatever page he or she visits. Adverts for Japanese carmaker Nissan, Nationwide, the UK’s largest building society, Unilever’s Dove skincare brand, were automatically placed next to the offensive images that Facebook users either sought out or stumbled upon accidentally. To the companies’ embarrassm...

Google Rolling Out Tabbed Inbox for Gmail By Chloe Albanesius May 29, 2013 01:13pm EST Google on Wednesday unveiled a revamped Gmail that features a tabbed inbox to help you prioritize your messages. On the desktop, the tabs will appear atop your Gmail inbox. You can select the categories; in Google's example, the search giant picked Social, Promotions, and Updates alongside Primary, which is reserved for your most important messages. Notifications about tagged photos on Facebook, mentions on Google+, or requests from LinkedIn, for example, would appear in the Social tab. Groupon or LivingSocial deals would show up in the Promotions tab, and that email from Mom would be displayed under Primary. "Your inbox is organized in a way that lets you see what's new at a glance and decide which emails you want to read when," Google said in a blog post. Tabs will extend to mobile, too. On Android and iOS, users will see Primary mail when they sign in, bu...

Google Translate says 'Hola!' to Chrome The latest Chrome beta for Android integrates Google Translate support directly into the browser, just like it does with its desktop counterpart. by Seth Rosenblatt  May 24, 2013 12:55 PM PDT Not only is Google Translate not dead, its powers of mildly accurate, often-amusing, and on-the-fly translations are in the process of being gifted to Chrome 28 Beta for Android. If you load a foreign language Web site in the beta, which landed in the Google Play Store on Thursday, a bar will appear at the bottom of the screen with a button to translate the site. Tap the button, and voila! It will appear in a different language. The accuracy of the translation is another issue. However, Google spokeswoman Roya Soleimani said, "Google Translate works through statistical machine translation. We have 71 languages now, and while there will always be varying levels of accuracy, if you have a good translation, it's better than...

Is This Google X's Plan to Wire the World? By Brad Stone May 23, 2013 Google (GOOG) Chairman Eric Schmidt’s April 13 tweet was bold, ambitious, and a bit inexplicable. “For every person online, there are two that are not,” wrote the co-author of the book The New Digital Age. “By the end of the decade, everyone on Earth will be connected.” Commenters were flummoxed by Schmidt’s prediction. There are many parts of the world without reliable telecommunications infrastructure. How do you wire parts of Africa—or the Indonesian archipelago? In my conversations with Astro Teller, Google X’s excellently named director of moonshots, for this week’s cover story on Google X, I asked whether extending broadband Internet access throughout the world would be a problem deserving of attention from the top-secret lab. Teller gave nothing away, but it was clear from his answer that there’s plenty of passion for that particular goal inside his organization. “Having everyone connect...