Barack Obama in pictures

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  11 cool robots you may not have heard of - ...

• Who really was behind the SOPA protests?

  By Grant Gross | 04 February, 2012 04:54

  Some critics have blamed Silicon Valley tech firms for the massive online protests last month against two controversial copyright bills. Other groups have trumpeted the grassroots nature of the protests.

• White House: No comment on call to investigate MPAA for SOPA bribery

  By Grant Gross | 02 February, 2012 07:18

  The U.S. White House has declined to respond to a petition calling for authorities to investigate the head of the Motion Picture Association of America for bribery related to comments he made following successful online protests against two controversial copyright enforcement bills.

• White House CTO Chopra leaving his post

  By Grant Gross | 28 January, 2012 06:07

  Aneesh Chopra, who has served for the past two-and-a-half years as the first CTO for the U.S. government, is stepping down in early February.

• Sponsor: SOPA markup hearing to resume in February

  By Grant Gross | 18 January, 2012 09:39

  A hearing to amend and debate the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act should resume in February, its chief sponsor said, even in the face of new opposition to the copyright enforcement bill.

• Opponents step up pressure against SOPA, PIPA

  By Grant Gross | 18 January, 2012 07:28

  The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act being debated in the U.S. Congress still have major problems, opponents said Monday, even after the bills' lead sponsors promised to take out some much-criticized portions of the legislation.

• Ten IT news stories we'll read in 2012

  By Nancy Weil | 28 December, 2011 03:33

  Well, we erred in our 2011 predictions in not repeating a 2010 forecast that Carol Bartz would be ousted as Yahoo CEO -- it was bound to happen, we just called that one too early. Then again, we also predicted last year that Oracle would buy Salesforce.com and have decided not to repeat ourselves this year, so we'll see if we were just ahead on that one, too. Meanwhile, these are our predictions for the next 12 months:

• Copps announces resignation from FCC

  By Grant Gross | 07 December, 2011 08:19

  Michael Copps, a longtime member of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, will resign effective Jan. 1, or earlier, depending on Senate action, he announced Tuesday.

• 11 cool robots you may not have heard of - check 'em out

  By Michael Cooney | 18 November, 2011 08:57

  What do Mars, the Terminator, an ostrich and hair-washing have to do with each other? Ask the robots

• 10 IT agenda items for the first US CIO

  By Paul Venezia | 10 March, 2009 08:38

  Obama's appointment of Vivek Kundra marks an important first step for rectifying the nation's concerns about IT.

• Obama can't have a BlackBerry. Should your CEO?

  By Ephraim Schwartz | 10 December, 2008 09:27

  The press has been all over President-Elect Barack Obama's addiction to his BlackBerry and the possibility that he might have to give it up for reasons of national security. But no one in the media seems to be asking the most logical follow-up question: Is the cybertechnology that can compromise the future chief executive's BlackBerry also a threat to mobile devices being used every day by thousands of senior executives in corporate America?

• FAQ: Why Obama may give up his BlackBerry

  By Matt Hamblen | 08 December, 2008 09:14

  Could Barack Obama ever expect to continue using his BlackBerry once he officially becomes president?

• Hot search terms: Joe the plumber, 'lipness test'

  By Thomas Powell and Joe Lima | 28 October, 2008 12:16

  Google Trends provides some great insight into what people are thinking about, even if they don't always help us to understand what this insight means in terms of the candidates' positioning.

• Palin piques the blogosphere

  By Thomas Powell and Joe Lima | 28 October, 2008 12:15

  Blog mentions are, like search terms, something of a special case. They probably show the least conclusive representation of candidate support, because there is no way to assess whether such mentions reflect a preponderance of positive or negative evaluations of the candidates. Anecdotal evidence suggests that negative mentions of candidate A by blogs supporting candidate B, and vice-versa, are very common indeed.

• Friending Obama

  By Thomas A. Powell and Joe Lima | 28 October, 2008 12:15

  When you take a close look at the traffic patterns within the Web 2.0-based community, the popularity gap between the two presidential candidates increases. Obama's favored by a 4-to-1 margin compared with the 2-to-1 margin when we looked at other Internet Web traffic trends.

• US Election: What's in a domain name

  By Thomas A. Powell and Joe Lima | 28 October, 2008 12:15

  The tale told by other Internet traffic trends, also rings true when taking domain registration into account. Using DomainTools to query for domains, we saw 2,357 domains for Obama and 1,431 domains for McCain.

• Can the Web predict the next president?

  By Thomas A. Powell and Joe Lima | 28 October, 2008 11:15

  IT professionals have historically monitored network traffic patterns to better understand network usage, to expose security events, and to generally promote overall network health. Traffic analysis can likewise be applied to the Web to understand a wide range of behavior patterns ranging from social media networks to suggestion systems in e-commerce to even the current hot topic: the presidential race.