The Stop Online Piracy Act has officially been put on hold.

Hackers in China have found a way to infiltrate supposedly secure smart cards used by U.S. government employees, according to security company AlienVault.

YouTube is in talks with at least three of the four top record companies about renewing the video service's music licenses, sources close to the discussion told CNET.

While software may not be the glitziest of categories on display at

Incoming Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson will get a $1 million salary this year, plus another $1.5 million cash bonus and stock awards that could be worth as much as $22.5 million, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing the company made this afternoon.

Iranians have lost the right to surf the Web anonymously at Internet cafes as the government reportedly moves closer to its ultimate goal of replacing the global network with a censored national intranet. The Iranian Cyber Police published new rules on Wednesday designed to allow officials to know exactly who is visiting what Web sites. Before they can log on, Iranians are required to provide their name, father's name, address, telephone number and national ID, according to an Iranian media report cited by Radio Free Europe. Cafe owners will be required to install security cameras and to keep all data on Web surfers, including browsing history, for six months. The rules, which come as the country prepares for parliamentary elections in March, are a deterrent to activists who might want to use the Internet cafes to organize protests. Calls to boycott elections distributed via social networks or e-mail will be treated as national security crimes, the Iranian judiciary announced last week, according to a report today in the Wall Street Journal. Government officials claim they need to control access to the Internet to counter what they say is a "soft" cultural war being waged by Western countries to influence the morals of Iranians. Monitoring Web surfers is an interim measure until the government is done building out its own domestic intranet that is "halal," or pure. Initially, the Iran intranet will run in tandem with the Internet before the global Web is shut off to the 23 million Internet users in Iran, according to reports. Payam Karbasi, spokesman for Iran professional union Corporate Computer Systems, told Iranian media that the domestic network, which was announced last March, would be launched in coming weeks, the WSJ reported. Iranians have reported that during the intranet tests this week, Internet connections have slowed down and Web sites have been blocked. Access to VPNs (virtual private networks) Iranians use to access sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have also been affected, reports said. Widespread protests over purported fraud in the 2009 election, which brought President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back to office, prompted the Iranian government to cut off access to opposition Web sites and mobile telephone networks. But protesters flocked to Twitter and Facebook to skirt the communications crackdown, to spread videos and news and to organize demonstrations. Tor and other tools were then used to get around government shutdowns of those sites. Some of the extreme censorship measures adopted by Iran have also been used in Libya and in China, which deploys the "Great Firewall" to keep objectionable content out of the country. China also requires identification to use Internet cafes in Beijing, and has a history of shutting down blogs as well as allegedly meddling with Gmail and targeting activists with cyber attacks.

It's still no Facebook, but Google+ usage by people in the United States surged 55 percent from November to December, Experian Hitwise said.

Seven LCD manufacturer including Samsung and Sharp this month agreed to pay $553 million to settle lawsuits that claimed the companies were colluding with one another to fix the prices of their panels for use in consumer electronics.

Marc Andreessen's view of the world boils down to software.

Steve Jobs will be honored with a Grammy for helping to transform the way music is distributed and consumed.

AT&T said today that it has withdrawn its bid to acquire T-Mobile USA in a deal worth $39 billion.

In a high-profile but strikingly limited legal victory for Apple, the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled today that HTC has violated only one of the Cupertino, Calif.-based company's patents.

Google is serving up Ice Cream Sandwich with a new base version that promises several improvements and bug fixes for the Android operating system.

It's just one browser version during one particular week, and only one research firm is making the claim--but according to StatCounter, Google's Chrome 15 is the world's most popular browser.

British Telecom filed a lawsuit against Google on Thursday, alleging that Android and other services violate six of the telephone company's patents.