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Update at 12:35 p.m.: Comments from a privacy advocacy group added.

Google apparently decided to keep it clean, in more ways than one.

The company has made a minor change to its home page, adding a link to its copyright line that leads to its Privacy Center. Google's decision, noted Thursday afternoon in a corporate blog and a public policy blog, was an attempt to quell a controversy over the posting of its privacy policy.

The attempt succeeded.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said Saturday that his group is "pleased" with the decision.

"This was not only required by California law (and Google is a California corporation) but is also the standard practice for commercial Web sites," he said in an e-mail.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center had joined with the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and the World Privacy Forum in leading the effort to press Google to make the change.

The timing of Google's announcement--the afternoon before a long holiday weekend--may have appeared suspicious to some. But Rotenberg noted that his group "helped draw attention to the 30-day time limit in the California law following notice. We literally counted to 30 after sending the letter. Day 31 arrived and Google posted the link."

(Credit: Google)

Saul Hansell, a reporter with The New York Times, first brought the issue to light in May when he asked whether the company was violating California law by not posting a link to its privacy policy ... Read more

Ask.com, the fourth-ranked search engine, has completed its acquisition of Lexico Publishing Group, which owns Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com.

Ask.com, a wholly owned subsidiary of InterActiveCorp, had announced the all-cash deal in mid-May. Financial terms of the deal, which closed Thursday, were not released. Lexico, a privately held company based in Long Beach, Calif., debuted in 1995 with Dictionary.com.

Altogether, Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com had more than 28 million unique visitors in March, according to Lexico.

In May, Ask.com said the acquisition would increase its unique monthly users by 11 percent to 145 million.

According to statistics-tracker Hitwise, Ask.com had 4.23 percent of the U.S. search market in May. Microsoft had 5.89 percent, Yahoo had 19.95 percent, and Google overwhelmed them all with 68.29 percent.

The German baby taken from his parents after they put him up for sale on eBay for a euro--apparently as a joke--is back home, according to the Associated Press.

"The child has been returned to his parents," prosecutor Johannes Kreuzpointer told the AP on Thursday.

The parents had told the authorities the posting had been a joke. Prosecutors eventually agreed and dropped their investigation into child trafficking, the news service reported.

The original ad that ran May 24 stated: "Offering my nearly new baby for sale, as it has gotten too loud. It is a male baby, nearly 28 inches long and can be used either in a baby carrier or a stroller." The parents, both in their early 20s and residents of Unterallgau, were not identified. The bid price, 1 euro, is equivalent to about $1.57.

Otto Gaschler, deputy chief of youth services in Unterallgau, told the AP that the posting was "like a game for them. They never thought that this stupid joke could have such an effect."

Gaschler said he didn't know how exactly how long the infant was away from home but said it was for several days. "The parents always had contact to their son," he noted. A social worker is checking on the family, he told the AP.

VeriSign, which runs the master database for the .com and .net domains, has replaced its CEO and president, who resigned suddenly earlier this week.

Jim Bidzos

(Credit: VeriSign)

The company said Thursday that William Roper had resigned as of Monday. Roper, who had served as CEO for just over a year, has been replaced on an interim basis by VeriSign's founder and chairman, Jim Bidzos.

Bidzos, who founded the Mountain View, Calif.-based company in 1995, has served as either chairman or vice chairman of the board of directors since its start. He was also the company's first CEO.

Roper had been working on whittling VeriSign down to its core Internet-services businesses.

"VeriSign remains committed to our strategy of focusing the company on its core businesses while continuing the divestiture of all non-core operations, which will proceed as planned," Bidzos said in a statement. "We appreciate Bill's contributions in implementing this divestiture strategy, which the board and the company are fully committed to continuing."

According to the San Jose Mercury News, Roper's decision to leave right now was voluntary, so to speak. "I don't think it was fair to have him around while we were looking for a replacement, so he chose to leave," Bidzos told analysts on a conference call.

With only a couple weeks to go before the 2008 E3 Media and Business Summit, video game publisher Electronic Arts is giving the press a sneak peek at its new video game lineup, including products resulting from its partnership with Hasbro.

Mr. Potato Head hosts EA's game Hasbro Family Night.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

In the forefront is the Hasbro Family Game Night video game for the Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 2, a result of the 2007 teaming of the board game company and the video game company. With Hasbro's Mr. Potato Head as host, EA said families can partake in classic versions of Connect Four, Boggle, Yahtzee, Sorry!, and Battleship, as well as versions of these games with new twists.

The game publisher will also debut a digital version of Sorry! Sliders, a board game that Hasbro will be selling this fall.

NCAA Football '09 is just one of the new "All-Play" games for Wii.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

Other games displayed by EA at recent coast-to-coast press events include Wii- and PlayStation-adapted games Boogie:Superstar, Littlest Pet Shop, a new Monopoly game, and Nerf N-Strike, which comes with a Wii remote and Nerf gun duo.

All the above titles will hit shelves during the fall of 2008.

Casual gaming aside, last week EA also announced a new lineup for its "EA Sports All-Play" series, which is introducing games specifically designed for the Wii. EA said the new games will level the playing field between ... Read more

A day before the United States celebrates its independence, we continue to question our individual freedoms online. In Thursday's Daily Debrief, CNET News.com Editor in Chief Dan Farber and I discuss a federal judge's recent ruling in the ongoing Google-Viacom lawsuit that orders Google to turn over YouTube user activity. This will include videos watched, IP addresses, and usernames as part of an ongoing copyright infringement case.

Understandably, this news is disconcerting for YouTube users. Sources tell CNET News.com, however, that if Viacom uses this information for anything other than investigating piracy issues, it will be held in contempt of court. Regardless, Farber makes the point that this ruling could now set a precedent for other online privacy and security battles. Representatives from the Electronic Frontier Foundation agree, arguing that this court order will slowly erode the online rights we have come to enjoy and appreciate. Sounds like fireworks of a different kind this Fourth of July.

A fresh look at Yahoo's search results Thursday by Hitwise Intelligence raises the question of whether Yahoo could survive just fine without its search engine.

Such a question is rather important to Yahoo investors, given the Internet search pioneer has given a cold shoulder to Microsoft, which has previously expressed interest in buying Yahoo's search assets. Yahoo, however, rebuffed the offer, noting in its investor presentation that selling its search assets, including its algorithmic search, would:

Jeopardize the Yahoo user experience and make it difficult for Yahoo to maintain search and display volume.

But Heather Hopkins, vice president of research for Hitwise, noted in her blog that Yahoo's valuable sites would not necessarily fair poorly without Yahoo's search engine.

Hopkins took Yahoo's top 20 U.S. Internet properties for the month of June and ranked them, based on user traffic.

As expected, Yahoo Mail represented a 37.5 percent slice of the traffic pie, followed by the main Yahoo site with 30.6 percent and Yahoo search with 12.l percent.

Then Hopkins compared whether these top 20 sites were getting their users by way of a Google search or a Yahoo search. In all but six of the top 20 sites, more users were coming to Yahoo's top 20 sites by way of a Google search--even to its popular Yahoo Mail and Yahoo.com.

Yahoo Answers showed the disparity the most, with 49 percent of its U.S. traffic coming from Google in ... Read more

Viacom is getting its hands on some of YouTube's sensitive user data as a result of the copyright infringement lawsuit the conglomerate filed a year ago.

The two companies are in the discovery part of the case and must make certain information available to each other. On Wednesday, a federal judge ruled that Google must turn over YouTube user activity--videos watched, IP addresses, and usernames.

Google responded on Thursday in a statement to the court's order.

"We are pleased the court put some limits on discovery," Google said in the statement, "including refusing to allow Viacom to access users' private videos and our search technology. We are disappointed the court granted Viacom's overreaching demand for viewing history. We are asking Viacom to respect users' privacy and allow us to anonymize the logs before producing them under the court's order."

CNET News.com reported that Viacom is under strict instructions from the court not to use the data for anything other than proving the prevalence of infringement on YouTube.

Viacom, therefore, is forbidden from targeting individual users in the manner of the Recording Industry Association of America's lawsuits against individuals found to be downloading illegal music.

The case is important to Internet users because it could help define the scope of the safe harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That's the part of copyright law that Google and other Internet service providers claim protects them from being held responsible for the actions ... Read more

Got dial-up and don't want to give it up? You're not alone.

An estimated 10 percent of Americans are surfing the net via dial-up connections, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

And a lot of those people apparently see no compelling reason to change. The report indicates that those users are not itching to make a change to a speedier broadband connection in large part because, they say, broadband is too expensive.

Of this dial-up group, 35 percent cited the cost issue, while 19 percent say nothing will ever prompt them to change. Another subset--14 percent--say they're still on dial-up because broadband is not available in their neighborhoods

The Associated Press, in its posting on the report, cited this assessment by the report's author, John Horrigan: "That (resistance to change) suggests that solving the supply problem where there are availability gaps is only going to go so far."

The survey collected information from 2,251 U.S. residents, between April 8 and May 11.

Earlier this week, AOL said it would be raising the subscription fee for its dial-up service by 20 percent, starting at the end of July.

After navigating some rough seas, Sony's Electronics division has been starting to right the ship.

Over the past year, the company has been forced to rethink its product lineup and catch up to competitors in some cases, but now the Japanese electronics giant's U.S. division is looking ahead and betting big on the future of flat-panel televisions and high-definition media.

CNET News.com sat down with the head of Sony Electronics' U.S. operation, Stan Glasgow, to talk OLED (organic light-emitting diodes) TVs, Blu-ray Disc, the importance of the PlayStation 3, consumer electronics, and the dwindling margins for manufacturers and retailers on notebook PCs.

During our chat, Glasgow made it clear that Sony is only focused on TVs when it comes to the impossibly thin OLED technology and that soon the company's 3mm-thin TV will be even thinner. And, though the company just won a long and drawn out format war with HD DVD, Glasgow spoke openly about the limits of Blu-ray and what the medium still lacks. Plus, he sounds pretty high on the mini-notebook concept, even if he won't admit the company is developing a product yet.

Stan Glasgow, president of Sony Electronics USA

(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)

The following is an edited and condensed version of the interview.

Q: You have an 11-inch OLED and said you'd be putting $200-plus million into the next stage of investment. How big are we talking here in terms of screen sizes?
Glasgow: ... Read more