10:30 am EDT August 15, 2008 - A federal judge has sided with the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, ordering the students to continue to stay quiet beyond the original Tuesday expiration of their restraining order.

Presiding Judge George O'Toole, Jr. scheduled a hearing for that same Tuesday to debate the order's merits, and will decide then whether it should be modified or lifted altogether. As was reported initially early Thursday, copies of the presentation continued to be available on the Internet.

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The maker of a popular pre-paid cell phone today announced a program that will give low income Tennessee residents free cell phones and mobile service on a year-to-year basis.

Called SafeLink Wireless, the project is being led by the Tennessee Department of Safety, TracFone Wireless, and local nonprofit organizations. Eligible households will receive a free cellular handset with 60 or more minutes of airtime a month plus unlimited access to emergency services (911). Handsets will support standard cellular features such as voice mail, SMS, call waiting, as well as international calling.

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The biggest and most significant legal action against now-leading social network Facebook was filed on Tuesday, and will actually test the theory of whether its Beacon behavior sharing program constituted a criminal conspiracy.

On Tuesday, a group of 18 California residents including some who publicly complained last year that Facebook's controversial Beacon feature was sharing too much of their personal online habits with the rest of the world, sued Facebook and many of its more prominent Beacon partners, including Blockbuster and Overstock.com. They're not only claiming Facebook and its partners conspired to invade their privacy, but they're citing a California penal code that may have been originally intended to outlaw information-gathering Trojan horse programs, in a move which could leave Beacon's participants criminally liable.

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The Russia-Georgia conflict has US senators worrying about NASA's future in the International Space Station project. As it is now, US law may eventually prohibit NASA from enlisting the help of its only way into space after 2011.

Senators Bill Nelson (D - Fla.) and Barbara Mikulski (D - Md.) -- who is incidentally the chair of the Commerce, Justice, and Science Appropriations Subcommittee that funds NASA -- expressed concerns that if the conflict erodes US-Russian relations, NASA may have no way to reach the International Space Station.

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New independent data shows Facebook enjoyed 153 percent growth year over year, while MySpace remains essentially flat. The site's growth is biggest overall outside of the US.

Overall, Facebook attracted 132.1 million unique users in June, compared to 117.6 million for MySpace, according to data from comScore released this week. Another site that saw impressive growth was Hi5, which doubled its unique userbase to 56.4 million.

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The official marketing channel for the next edition of Windows was opened this afternoon, as Microsoft quietly raised the curtains on what it's positioning as an open channel for ideas regarding what the company should add to its next OS.

In their initial post to the "Engineering Windows 7" blog this afternoon, its two hosts -- Windows senior vice presidents Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky -- acknowledged that their company will indeed divulge the first engineering details about Windows 7, as it's still being called, on October 27 at the Professional Developers' Conference in Los Angeles.

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Intel this morning made available the updated Extended Host Controller Interface (xHCI) specification that will allow manufacturers to start work on USB 3.0 devices.

The xHCI spec describes the register-level host controller interface for USB 2.0 and above. As you may know, the host controller connects the computer with external peripherals, and the host controller interface allows the operating system to communicate with the controller. Intel is making the xHCI spec available under RAND-Z (Reasonable and Non-discriminatory licensing with zero royalties) terms today to companies that have signed the xHCI contributor agreement.

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If a bill now being considered by the California State Senate and Assembly becomes law, schoolyard bullies who use the Internet and text messaging to intimidate others may be expelled from school.

California Democratic Assemblyman Ted Lieu of Torrance, a Los Angeles suburb, introduced a measure to the Legislature in January 2007 in an effort to combat cyber-bullying, which he says has become an increasingly large problem with the pervasiveness of social networking.

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Armed conflict between Russia and Georgia has been paralleled by what many in the media have classed a "cyberwar," where Georgian Web sites have been crippled by DDoS attacks and defacements.

As Georgian government sites were rendered inaccessible this week, Poland, Estonia, and the United States hosted mirrors to provide supplementary outlets for information. Polish president Lech Kaczynski's official site says, "Along with military aggression, the Russian Federation is blocking Georgian Internet portals."

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In another apparent effort to streamline its services to focus on revenue, wireless carrier Sprint will stop providing the servers for e-mail service for its PCS phone customers, although it will let customers pick their own providers.

As a notice on its Web site indicates, Sprint will stop providing PCS Mail service on December 31. Giving customers plenty of time to make the transition, it's set up instructions and support for moving e-mail accounts, contacts, and even existing messages to Google's Gmail, AOL Mail, Yahoo Mail, or Windows Live Hotmail.

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It appears as if Twitter was unable to reach agreements with UK carriers to keep costs of its SMS tweets down. While users will still be able to send updates to a phone number, they will no longer be able to receive them on phones.

With Twitter's text option, a user's blog update could turn into dozens of text messages depending on who is following that particular user, which the Twitterer was not paying any additional fee for.

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When a developer distributes a modified version of open source code as his own without attribution to the original author, is that a copyright violation? Earlier, a district court said no. Yesterday, an appeals court strongly disagreed.

A typical copyright violation is the variety where someone makes money from the sale of a product or service whose idea or whose content belonged to someone else. The usual reason someone would license an idea or content to anyone else is in order to share in the proceeds. In the open source community, the motivation is different: The author seeks only credit, some measure of validation, and for others not to claim his work as their own.

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While the FCC continues to stall and postpone its debate over holding yet another auction for free broadband service spectrum, two bills certain to be debated in both houses of Congress may just get its attention.

After the US Federal Communications Commission's tremendous 700 MHz auction concluded earlier this year, some congresspeople were disappointed that it had not achieved one of its originally promised outcomes: the creation of a free, nationwide broadband service for public safety providers, and even for everyday consumers.

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Telecommunications company Alcatel-Lucent has extended the tender offer it made in June to buy Texas automation software company Motive.

The previous offer to buy all issued and outstanding stock in Motive was set to expire at midnight on August 12. Today, the company announced that it will extend the offer until September 10. As of last night, approximately 27 million shares had been tendered.

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Could everyone's VMware licenses really have expired on August 12? That's the question hundreds of major data centers found themselves asking, right after midnight when they realized they weren't rebooting or resuming.

In what appears to be a fault with its license validation, virtualized data clusters worldwide running on VMware's ESX hypervisor found themselves unable to boot yesterday. Admins received messages saying their licenses had expired, whether or not they actually had.

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