Google warned on Tuesday it will not hesitate to file antitrust complaints in the United States if high-speed Internet providers abuse the market power they could receive from U.S. legislators. The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee last week approved sweeping communications reform legislation that would make it easier for telephone companies like AT&T to offer subscription television to consumers. But it narrowly rejected attempts by some lawmakers to strengthen safeguards on Internet service, which had pitted high-speed Internet, or broadband, providers such as AT&T against Internet content companies like Google. The battle centered on whether broadband providers can charge more to carry unaffiliated content or to guarantee service quality, an issue called Net neutrality.

As the use of computers and the Internet in schools grows, so does the need for managing the learning process in networked classrooms. With NetSupport School 8.5 classroom management software, teachers and trainers are able to better instruct, monitor, quiz and support students in networked classrooms. The latest update of NSS includes student auto login, Internet co-browsing, new group features, new testing options and many key enhancements designed to maximize computer users’ productivity in the computer lab.

Seven men who spent months planning a multi-million pound raid on a computer company have been jailed. The London-based gang admitted conspiring to rob computer equipment from Comstor UK in Cirencester, Gloucs. The men were arrested last December by armed officers before they could enter the firm’s warehouse. In sentencing, Judge Alan Greenwood described the group as a professional criminal gang.

absolutePDF has released version 1.3.5 of its PDF generation library absolutePDF-Creator Easy. With this new release the library gains the ability to import existing PDF pages as a background for a new PDF page. This allows for big improvements in report generation: just create a complex background using your favorite PDF generation application (like OpenOffice.org) and import it into a new PDF file. Only fully conformant 1.4 PDF files may be reasonably imported, so this isn’t a generic PDF stamping tool. Nonetheless this new feature will help people create complex layouts for documents created from their applications.

A hacker broke into the Nebraska child-support computer system and may have obtained the names, Social Security numbers, and other information of 300,000 people and 9,000 employers, the state treasurer announced Thursday. The hacker got into a back-up computer server Wednesday morning for about 40 minutes and launched a virus, which state Treasurer Ron Ross said was immediately removed. Ross said the attack appeared to be routed through Australia from Asia. The State Patrol launched a computer forensic investigation.

U.S. lawmakers said Thursday they have learned of two more data breaches at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, even as the agency announced that law enforcement agencies had recovered stolen computer hardware containing the personal information of millions of U.S. military veterans. The House of Representatives Veterans Affairs Committee has learned of a May 5 incident in which a data tape disappeared from a VA facility in Indianapolis, and a 2005 incident in which a VA laptop was stored in the trunk of a car that was stolen in Minneapolis.

A laptop containing personal information from thousands of blood donors–including Social Security numbers and medical information–was stolen from a local office of the American Red Cross, but officials said the information was encrypted. The data included matching names and birth dates of donors from Texas and Oklahoma, as well as donors’ sexual and disease histories. The laptop was one of three stolen from a locked closet in the Farmers Branch office of the American Red Cross in May, but the two others did not contain the personal information. There was no sign of forced entry, said Red Cross spokeswoman Audrey Lundy.

A Utah judge has thrown out hundreds of claims made by SCO Group in its Linux lawsuit against IBM, finding that SCO failed to specify many of Big Blue’s alleged misdeeds. In a ruling filed this week in district court, Judge Brooke Wells agreed with an IBM motion to limit the scope of claims filed by SCO last year. The company launched its initial suit against IBM in 2003, claiming Big Blue’s contributions to the Linux operating system included Unix code owned by SCO. IBM doesn’t believe its Linux work infringed on any SCO copyrights, and it has questioned the validity of those copyrights.

On the heels of second-quarter earnings announcement that showed a significant increase in application sales, Oracle made two additional applications-related announcements that could have an impact on the market. Oracle co-president Charles Phillips announced June 26 during a press call that the company would rip and replace Siebel’s OnDemand hosting infrastructure: gone is IBM’s infrastructure to be replaced, not surprisingly, by Oracle’s. At the same time, Oracle announced that its long-awaited PeopleSoft Enterprise 9 ERP suite is available–this time with a little Oracle Fusion Middleware mixed in–and is a validation that the company plans to support PeopleSoft’s applications indefinitely, according to Doris Wong, vice president and general manager of the PeopleSoft organization within Oracle.

Continuing on its way to becoming a fully fledged IT infrastructure company, EMC picks up RSA to fill out its enterprise security lineup. EMC continues to collect smaller companies to pursue its strategy of becoming a fully fledged IT infrastructure giant. The corporation revealed June 29 that it is acquiring RSA Security for about $2.1 billion in cash, or $28 per share.