A new border patrol policy made public late last month is raising hackles at the Center for Democracy and Technology. The civil liberties group is urging Customs and Border Patrol to scrap rules that would allow the retention of information about American citizens entering or leaving the the U.S.—whether by land, sea or air—for up to 15 years.

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Portfolio reports: Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen sees the next battle—in the palm of your hand.

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A promising new protocol for securely and easily transferring data between websites is now ready for prime time. All contributors, including Google and Yahoo, have signed a covenant not to sue over OAuth implementations, freeing it for use by virtually anyone.

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After years of dispute and litigation, the patent infringement lawsuit between Sony, Microsoft, and Immersion has come to a close, as Immersion has agreed to pay Microsoft $21 million of Sony's dollars.

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Is there really enough room for another local entertainment and review site? The Onion thinks there is, and has decided to launch a beta of its new site, Decider, to compete with the likes of Yelp and CitySearch. There's no satire here though, just clean lines and an easy-to-use interface.

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Northwestern University is the latest school to adopt the University of Michigan's open source Be Aware You're Uploading program. Turns out that simple e-mail notifications can make a real difference.

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NVIDIA's first expo shows off new display technology, price cuts on models we've seen before, and a number of companies touting their ideas for sprucing up the content we've all seen before. One of the best, in fact, is a Firefox plug-in—you don't necessarily need deep pockets to come up with a good idea.

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A new prototype from Mozilla Labs provides a rich, interactive command interface for the Firefox web browser. It offers tight integration with remote web services and can easily be extended to support additional functionality.

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Internet Explorer 8 will include new privacy features to help safeguard personal information. Designed to stop both fellow computer users and websites alike from snooping on your browsing behavior, the new features are a boon for the privacy-conscious. Advertisers might not be so pleased, however.

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An academic from the University of Amsterdam is seething after the European Commission requested several reports from him, then utterly failed to mention them as it proposed a 45-year copyright term extension that he had argued against.

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California recently listed gallium arsenide, a common material in LEDs, as a human carcinogen. Ars looks at the studies behind that listing, and what effect California's decision may have on the semiconductor industry.

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Get FISA Right, the group of socially-networked civil libertarians that formed to pressure Barack Obama on warrantless wiretapping and telecom immunity, is turning its Argus eyes toward John McCain and his Republican allies in Congress, and urging supporters to pool online donations for ad buys targeting the GOP.

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As the kids go back to school, Ars takes a look at the state of P2P on campus. Sure, Big Content is still sending out letters and serving up lawsuits, but how some schools are responding to P2P's legal and technical impact on their networks may surprise you.

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The RIAA may win its battle against the unlicensed music discovery service Muxtape. But an open source version that can be installed and run from any server means that everyone can share their favorite mixes now.

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Intel's new Classmate PC reference design includes a tablet mode with touchscreen support. An Intel ethnographer explains that tablet technology brings micromobility to the classroom and makes computers a more streamlined part of the education experience.

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Nintendo and Sony's portable gaming units may be all the rage these days, but the newest open source handheld called the Wiz is raising eyebrows. The specs look nice, and you can play classic games via emulation.

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Fans of social news site reddit will be pleased to know that, if they choose to become "redditors" themselves, they can now completely customize their own reddit with whatever design they please, in addition to plopping it onto a custom domain name.

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A few months after rejecting the RIAA's argument that making a file available over a P2P network is copyright infringement, a judge is handing the labels a victory after the defendant reformatted his hard drive, nuked his KaZaA installation, and downloaded and used a file-shredding program.

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Ars Technica has given EA's free to play PC title Battlefield: Heroes quite the play test. The verdict? It's easy to play and much fun, although we're still left wondering what we'll be asked to pay for.

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Google Suggest debuted as an experiment four years ago to make searching more efficient before ever striking the Return key. If you don't see it on Google.com, be patient—it's coming.

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