global-mobile

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By Foo Yun Chee BRUSSELS (Reuters) – U.S. tech firm Disconnect has filed a complaint to EU antitrust regulators against Google's ban on its privacy app, accusing the Silicon Valley giant of abusing its dominant market position. Disconnect, set up four years ago by former Google engineers, says its app protects users of the Android operating system from invisible tracking and malware distributed through advertisements. It said Google had abused its position by blocking the app from the Google Play store last year, and had gained an unfair advantage over competitors by integrating its own privacy and security services into its own products.

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By Dan Levine and Lawrence Hurley SAN FRANCISCO/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration has been locked in internal wrangling over what position to take in high profile litigation between two American technology giants, Google and Oracle, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions. It faces an end-of-May deadline to decide whether to take sides in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court that will have wide implications for the technology industry.     The case involves how much copyright protection should extend to the Java programing language. Oracle won a federal appeals court ruling last year that allows it to copyright parts of Java, while Google argues it should be free to use Java without paying a licensing fee. Google, which used Java to design its Android smartphone operating system, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Chinese internet heavyweight Tencent Holdings Ltd apologized on Monday for rewarding WeChat app users who sent a message with the English phrase “civil rights” with a screen full of fluttering U.S. flags. The animation was intended to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States, and was only meant to be available to WeChat users in that country, wrote Tencent's WeChat team on their official microblog. A technical error allowed users elsewhere to see the U.S. flags on their screen, including in China