John

A court in New Zealand has granted Kim Dotcom, founder of the Megaupload file-sharing site, access to documents which contain evidence against him, and are held by prosecuting authorities both in New Zealand and the U.S.

"A denial of the provision of information that could enable a proper adversarial hearing in my view would amount to a denial of the opportunity to contest and that would effectively mean that the process is one sided...," District Court Judge David J. Harvey said in his ruling on Tuesday.

If you're looking for a new laptop, a 46-inch HDTV or refurbished tablet, June will be a good month for you, according to the price watchers at DealNews.com.

Laptop deals during the month will be driven by the introduction of new models sporting Intel's Ivy Bridge processor, DealNews noted in its monthly "Best and Worst" report.

Downloads from Apple's App Store declined in April as the cost of landing loyal users increased, according to Fisku, an app ranking firm located in Boston.

Daily downloads of the top 200 free apps in Apple's App Store dropped by 4.9 percent to 4.23 million, down from 4.45 million in March, Fiscus reported Tuesday. The decline comes a month after Apple celebrated breaking the 25 billion mark in app downloads at the store.

With Instagram in the fold and Opera in its sights, will Face.com be the next big acquisition for newly minted public company Facebook?

Face.com is an Israeli company known for its "best in breed" facial recognition technology. When you're launching the kind of offensive that Facebook's mounting in the photosphere, it only makes sense to have top-shelf mug finding technology, like Face.com.

Have a question about digital photography? Send it to me. I reply to as many as I can--though given the quantity of e-mails that I get, I can’t promise a personal reply to each one. I round up the most interesting questions about once a month here in Digital Focus.

For more frequently asked questions, read my newsletters from February, March, and April.

A hack in July last year of a computer used by third-party services provider Serco to support the Thrift Savings Plan run by the U.S. Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board resulted in unauthorized access to the personal information of about 123,201 TSP participants and payees, FRTIB said Friday.

Serco and FRTIB were alerted in April by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that one of the computers used to service TSP had been the victim of unauthorized access. Besides shutting down the computer, FRTIB and Serco did forensic analysis to determine which people were affected, and enhanced the security, FRTIB and Serco said in separate statements. Serco confirmed that its computer had been affected.

The Indian arm of Anonymous is planning what it describes as non-violent protests against Internet censorship in various Indian cities, after some Internet service providers blocked file-sharing sites in the country.

The protests, planned for June 9, follow a court order in March directed at ISPs, meant to prevent a newly released local movie from being offered in a pirated version online. Some ISPs went ahead and blocked some file-sharing sites altogether, rather than the offending URLs.

Research In Motion, the ailing maker of the BlackBerry, is planning to cut at least 2000 staff as part of a global restructuring plan, according to reports.

The restructuring could begin in the next couple of weeks, and would affect staff worldwide, The Globe and Mail said citing several unnamed people close to the company. One person familiar with the company's plans said the layoffs may cut even deeper, the Canadian newspaper said on Saturday.

I remember when I discovered "Read It Later" (now called Pocket). This is great, I thought. It's like a DVR for reading. Unfortunately, like a DVR, the Read It Later queue can become a dead letter office for good intentions.

But what if instead of tagging material for later reading, you could tag it for later listening? Instead of having to set aside time to read an article in the future, you could layer it over another activity, like the time spent commuting to work or walking the dog?

Google has embarked on a final campaign to warn the remaining half million PCs it estimates could still be infected with the DNSChanger malware that they risk losing Internet connectivity on July 9.

Starting this week, any users of Google's search tools who are detected redirecting to DNSChanger's now substituted domains will be splashed the stark warning "Your computer appears to be infected" with an accompanying link offering remediation advice.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that an online service with more than 900 million members will attract some attention from the porn industry, as Facebook has through the years. That attention has spurred the social network to fight smut peddlers in court, with mixed results. Here's a brief history of Facebook's legal battles with the XXX set.

December 2007. Facebook sues SlickCash, a Canadian company specializing in Internet porn, for attempting to access the social network's servers at least some 200,000 times to obtain information on its users. According to AVN, an adult entertainment news website, that case was settled in April 2008.  Under the deal, a permanent injunction was issued against the individuals involved in the incident and they promised not to become members of Facebook for ten years following the date of the settlement.