IDG News Service, John Ribeiro, Olusegun Ogundeji

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.

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.

SimpleAir in Texas said Thursday it had settled its patent infringement litigation against Apple, and entered into a confidential license agreement by which Apple had taken a license to its patents.

Records of the district court in Texas show that Apple and SimpleAir filed Thursday before the court a joint motion stating that they had entered a confidential settlement and license agreement dated May 16, and asking for an order dismissing with prejudice all claims and counterclaims asserted between the two parties. The court granted the motion.

Chinese communications equipment company Huawei Technologies has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission against patent company InterDigital, claiming it is abusing its patents allegedly essential to the 3G (UMTS) standard, it said Thursday.

Describing InterDigital as a non-practicing entity, Huawei said in a statement that the U.S. company is seeking to leverage its declared 3G standards essential patents to force Huawei into a "discriminatory, unfair, and exploitative" license.

Bharti Airtel has invested about US$165 million to acquire a 49 percent stake in Qualcomm's Indian entities that hold broadband wireless licenses, with the Indian mobile operator eventually taking full ownership, the companies said Thursday.

The deal gives Bharti Airtel, which has already started rolling out fourth generation (4G) services in India, access to more spectrum and service areas in which to roll out the service.

The U.S. government has sided with monopoly rather than competition in bringing a case of e-book price-fixing against Apple, the company said in a filing on Tuesday before a federal court.

The Department of Justice filed in April an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and five large publishers, accusing the companies of working together to raise prices of e-books, in retaliation for competitor Amazon.com pricing most e-books at US$9.99 beginning in late 2007.

Google is now allowed under U.S. export control rules to offer downloads in Syria of its mapping software Google Earth, photo sharing software Picasa, and its Chrome browser, it said Wednesday.

The company saw U.S. export restrictions similarly relaxed in January last year to allow it to offer downloads of these products in Iran. As a condition of its export licenses from the Treasury Department, Google had to block IP addresses associated with the Iranian government.

The U.S. Department of Justice said Tuesday it was looking into the unauthorized access of a website server in its statistics wing, after hacker group Anonymous claimed to have collected and released 1.7GB of data from it.

In the operation, described by Anonymous as "Monday Mail Mayhem", the group claimed it had hacked the United States Bureau of Justice, presumably a reference to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, a part of the DOJ.

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said Monday that its application system for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) has reopened, more than a month after it was brought down because of a software glitch.

Registered applicants can now log in, review and submit their applications on the TLD Application System (TAS) which will stay open until 23:59 GMT on May 30, ICANN chief operating officer Akram Atallah said in a statement. Two-hour maintenance windows have been scheduled on three days, he added.

So.cl, an experimental research project from Microsoft that combines social networking and search to promote learning, is now accepting all users interested in joining the site.

The social networking site, pronounced "social," is however not positioned to replace existing full-featured search and social networking tools, and uses a minimal set of features, Microsoft said on the So.cl website.