Abracadabra! Bush Makes Privacy Board Vanish (Wired)

The Bush administration has failed to nominate any candidates to a newly empowered privacy and civil-liberties commission. This leaves the board without any members, even as Congress prepares to give the Bush administration extraordinary powers to wiretap without warrants inside the United States.

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First and 10: the technology behind the Super Bowl broadcast (Ars Technica)

The iconic images of pro football are low-tech, but technology dominates the sport and its broadcast. Here's a reprint of a classic article looking at the tech behind the most-watched television broadcast in the US.

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Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion (Reuters)

Microsoft Corp said on Friday it has offered to buy Yahoo Inc, the popular Web portal, for $44.6 billion in cash and stock, seeking to join forces against Google Inc in what would be the biggest Internet deal since the Time Warner-AOL merger.

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Making the Switch to iSCSI Storage (Campus Technology)

Client by client, iSCSI is claiming ground against fibre channel in the external storage wars. For Queensborough Community College in Bayside, NY, that day of reckoning came a week or so before Thanksgiving 2006 when the school's fibre channel storage system went down.

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Review: Autonet Mobile: Your Own Personal Hot Spot, Everywhere You Go (Wired)

Sure, on the outside it looks like a standard-fare, late-model Pontiac Grand Am rented from Avis. But in actuality, it’s your very own personal rolling WiFi hot spot: no wires, no weird antennas, no voodoo witchcraft. As long as you're within 100 feet of this candy-apple-red vehicle, connecting and surfing the net is easier than drifting into a power slide on wet pavement. The device that does it is the Autonet Mobile WiFi router.

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Apple, AT&T, 31 others sued for infringing on smart phone patent (Network World)

Last week, the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted a patent to Minerva Industries, a Los Angeles-based patent-holding firm. On the same day it received the patent, Minerva proceeded to sue 33 companies for patent infringement.

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