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.

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) has continued to lobby the government to change its $466.7 million e-health record system to an “opt-out” model, arguing that the current “opt-in” model will undermine the system’s health improvement objectives.

Twitter now has the ability to censor tweets in specific countries, the social networking service announced on Thursday.

Although vendor-written, this contributed piece does not advocate a position that is particular to the author's employer and has been edited and approved by Network World editors.

CloudPassage is launching a new security product for virtual servers in public clouds such as Amazon Web Services that it says takes care of the all-important need for security when using services from infrastructure providers.

ARCEP, the French telecommunications regulator, has promised to investigate whether new network operator Free Mobile is still offering the level of coverage required by its license, following complaints by employees of rival networks. But it also warned the company's critics to stop whining, saying that the existing three network operators had all failed to meet their coverage obligations at launch.

Nintendo said Friday its next-generation Wii U game console will launch in time for the holiday season in the U.S., Europe and Japan.

Hewlett-Packard says it will make its webOS mobile operating system available to the open source community by September.

Jon Rubinstein, known for his role developing the original iPod for Apple and for running Palm, has left Hewlett-Packard, where he's worked since the company's acquisition of Palm.

Following last week's Backspin, reader Alex Gonzales (Sweetwater, Texas) wrote to me: "Just read your SOPA article and I guess I'm just not seeing the big picture. If the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) could put an end to online piracy and stop a lot of those damn viruses, maybe even stop hackers -- what's bad about that? You say bad for business, bad for Internet -- but how? How is stopping/policing the bad stuff on the Internet bad? Give me some real reasons as to why [SOPA/PIPA] is bad. And don't tell me to go read the SOPA/PIPA bills in their entirety."

In honor of National Data Privacy Day this Saturday, Jan. 28, we've put together a list of the 15 worst Internet privacy scandals of all time.

John Deere & Co., has moved about 800 software developers into an agile development process, and did so in just over a year.

HP announced on Wednesday that it plans to release the code behind webOS in September under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

In yet another sign that growing revenues are reshaping the vendor outlook in the network management sector, Gartner recently named vendor Silver Peak one of the leaders in its magic quadrant for the WAN optimization market.