Peter Whoriskey

The nation's switch to all-digital broadcasts has been more than a decade in the making. The federal government has spent nearly $2 billion to help people prepare. Broadcasters spent another $1.2 billion to run warning ads and millions more to upgrade equipment.

With millions of US viewers still apparently unprepared for the nation's switch to digital TV, hundreds of television stations across the nation are preparing to forge ahead with the transition anyway and drop traditional over-the-air broadcasts next week.

A wide array of public information remains largely invisible to the search engines, and therefore to the general public, because it is held in such a way that the Web search engines of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft can't find it and index it.

Discovering how people search for candidate information -- exactly what words they type into a search box -- is a budding science that is paying big dividends in the presidential race between Sen.

Craig Mundie is Microsoft's new chief strategic thinker, replacing Bill Gates in that role. He spoke recently about a number of Washington and technology issues: the failure of the U.S.

Google and Yahoo will delay implementation of their joint advertising deal to give antitrust lawyers at the Justice Department more time to review the agreement. The announcement is another sign that the Justice Department has developed significant concerns about the agreement, which would join two of the most dominant companies on the Web.

The video-sharing service YouTube is banning submissions that involve "inciting others to violence," following criticism from Sen Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) that the site was too open to terrorist groups disseminating militant propaganda.

The Justice Department issued a report yesterday establishing how and when it will crack down on misbehaving monopolies, but its approach was immediately assailed as too lax and the work of an administration willing to allow big business to run roughshod over consumers.

The transformation of words, songs and movies to digital media has provoked a number of high-stakes fights between the owners of copyrighted works and the companies that can now easily distribute those works via the Internet.

Internet giant Yahoo is set to announce today that it will allow users to shut off targeted advertising on its Web sites, a move that comes as a congressional committee continues to air concerns about consumer privacy.