Reuters

Russia's upper house of parliament approved a law that will impose stricter rules on bloggers and is seen by critics as an attempt by President Vladimir Putin to stifle dissent on the Internet.

The Federation Council overwhelmingly approved the tighter controls on Russian blogs and websites that attract more than 3,000 daily visits, under legislation the government says is needed to formalize the definition of blogging in Russian law. Opponents say the law will enable Putin to silence opponents who are rarely given air time on the mostly state-controlled or pro-Putin television channels, and have instead used the Internet to organize protests against the former KGB spy.

"The new policy is to restrict free information exchange, restrict expression of opinion, be it in written text, speech or video. They want to restrict everything because they're headed towards the 'glorious past'," Anton Nosik, a prominent Russian blogger and online media expert, told Reuters.

With 61 million users, Russia is Europe's fastest-growing Internet audience, according to a 2013 report by industry body comScore, and blogs have been seen by Putin's opponents as one of the few popular platforms beyond the Kremlin's reach.

A coalition of liberals and conservatives is lashing out at the US Securities and Exchange Commission for pushing back against legislation that would force government agencies to get warrants before they access the e-mail of people under investigation.

The group, Digital 4th launched www.notwithoutawarrant.com, a website urging the public to lobby the White House to support sweeping changes to federal privacy laws proposed in Congress in 2013.

In a conference call with reporters, the group singled out the SEC for stalling the reforms. It also called on President Barack Obama to respond to a petition with more than 100,000 signatures in support of the bill, saying the SEC's opposition has caused the White House to ignore a groundswell of support.

For Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, who wants to build the world's largest mobile Internet company, criticism of his operations from regulators in his home market could not come at a worse time.

The feisty entrepreneur is lobbying skeptical Washington officials to let him buy a second US mobile operator, saying he would help to break up a cozy US wireless oligopoly.

Son says he is an outsider who stirred up a price battle that benefited consumers after he took over Vodafone's failing Japanese operation in 2007. So it must be galling to hear regulators in Tokyo chide his SoftBank Corp, along with NTT DoCoMo, Japan's mobile industry leader, and No.2 KDDI Corp, for lack of competition in the domestic smartphone market.

"You could say the mobile market is an oligopoly of the three big companies," Communications Minister Yoshitaka Shindo said at a regular news conference in April. His ministry is preparing long-term proposals to bring lower prices and faster services, including fostering growth of mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), cut-rate providers that lease network access from the big carriers.

The sniping will not help Son's plans to acquire T-Mobile US.

Social network giant Facebook has won US antitrust approval to buy Oculus VR, a two-year-old maker of virtual reality goggles, the Federal Trade Commission said.

Brazil's Senate unanimously approved groundbreaking legislation that guarantees equal access to the Internet and protects the privacy of Brazilian users in the wake of US spying revelations.

President Dilma Rousseff, who was the target of US espionage according to documents leaked by former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden, plans to sign the bill into law.

She will present it at a global conference on the future of the Internet, her office said in a blog. The legislation, dubbed Brazil's "Internet Constitution," has been hailed by experts, such as the British physicist and World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, for balancing the rights and duties of users, governments and corporations while ensuring the Internet continues to be an open and decentralized network.

To guarantee passage of the bill, Rousseff´s government had to drop a contentious provision that would have forced global Internet companies to store data on their Brazilian users on data center servers inside the country.

Americans with accounts on President Barack Obama's health insurance enrollment website, HealthCare.gov, were advised that their passwords had been reset to guard against the "Heartbleed" bug, in a message posted on the site.

The warning marks the latest fallout from the widespread security bug, which surfaced in March and allows hackers to steal data online without a trace.

A message on HealthCare.gov said users who visited the website would need to create a new password to access their accounts. "While there's no indication that any personal information has ever been at risk, we have taken steps to address Heartbleed issues and reset consumers' passwords out of an abundance of caution," said the message.

A planned merger of Sprint and T-Mobile US could prompt US regulators to rewrite rules they are now weighing for a 2015 auction of airwaves, according to sources familiar with the proposed plan.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler has proposed restrictions on how much the biggest carriers, Verizon Communications and AT&T, could bid in the major auction of television spectrum scheduled for mid-2015. However, as in many other proceedings, the FCC's rules would be based on the "current market structure." Any changes or proposed changes in that structure that could undermine the goals of the auction would prompt a review and potential edits, said sources briefed on the proposed rules. That means if SoftBank Corp, Sprint's parent company, moves ahead with its goal of merging the No. 3 wireless carrier with No. 4 provider T-Mobile, the FCC could eliminate the reserve set off for smaller competitors, sources said.

Edward Snowden and reporter Glenn Greenwald, who brought to light the whistleblower's leaks about mass US government surveillance in 2013, appeared together via video link from opposite ends of the earth for what was believed to be the first time since Snowden sought asylum in Russia.

A sympathetic crowd of nearly 1,000 packed a downtown Chicago hotel ballroom at Amnesty International USA's annual human rights meeting and gave Greenwald, who dialed in from Brazil, a raucous welcome before Snowden was patched in 15 minutes later to a standing ovation. The pair cautioned that government monitoring of "metadata" is more intrusive than directly listening to phone calls or reading emails and stressed the importance of a free press willing to scrutinize government activity.

Amnesty International is campaigning to end mass surveillance by the US government and calling for Congressional action to further rein in the collection of information about telephone calls and other communications.

The personal data gathering abilities of Google, Facebook and other tech companies has sparked growing unease among Americans, with a majority worried that Internet companies are encroaching too much upon their lives, a new poll showed.

Google and Facebook generally topped lists of Americans' concerns about the ability to track physical locations and monitor spending habits and personal communications, according to a poll conducted by Reuters/Ipsos from March 11 to March 26. The survey highlights a growing ambivalence towards Internet companies whose popular online services, such as social networking, e-commerce and search, have blossomed into some of the world's largest businesses.

Now, as the boundaries between Web products and real world services begin to blur, many of the top Internet companies are racing to put their stamp on everything from home appliances to drones and automobiles. With billions of dollars in cash, high stock prices, and an appetite for more user data, Google, Facebook, Amazon and others are acquiring a diverse set of companies and launching ambitious technology projects. But their grand ambitions are inciting concern, according to the poll of nearly 5,000 Americans. Of 4,781 respondents, 51 percent replied "yes" when asked if those three companies, plus Apple, Microsoft and Twitter, were pushing too far and expanding into too many areas of people's lives.

President Barack Obama's plan for overhauling the National Security Agency's phone surveillance program could force carriers to collect and store customer data that they are not now legally obliged to keep, according to US officials.

One complication arises from the popularity of flat-rate or unlimited calling plans, which are used by the vast majority of Americans. While the Federal Communications Commission requires phone companies to retain for 18 months records on "toll" or long-distance calls, the rule's application is vague for subscribers of unlimited phone plans because they do not get billed for individual calls. That could change if the Obama Administration pushes through with a proposal to require carriers -- instead of the NSA -- to collect and store phone metadata, which includes dialed numbers and call lengths but not the content of conversations.

Under the Administration's proposal, the phone companies would be required to turn over the data to the NSA in response to a court-approved government request. US officials said the carriers might be forced to create new mechanisms to ensure that metadata from flat-rate subscribers could be monitored. They said these issues will require further discussion between the White House, Congress and industry.