Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google's Sergey Brin  —  Exclusive: Threats range from governments trying to control citizens to the rise of Facebook and Apple-style ‘walled gardens’  —  The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation …

What Amazon's ebook strategy means  —  It seems to me that a lot of folks in the previous discussion don't really understand quite what makes Amazon so interesting—and threatening, for that matter—to the publishing industry.  —  So I'm going to take a stab at explaining.

How the Tech Parade Passed Sony By  —  THE lights dimmed.  The crowd hushed.  The teleprompters flickered.  —  Kazuo Hirai stepped up and flashed a winning smile: it was show time.  The scene was oddly upbeat inside the Sony Corporation last Thursday as Mr. Hirai, the company's new chief executive, faced the cameras.

FCC Clears Google Over Wifi Eavesdropping But Fines It $25,000 For “Noncompliance” With Requests  —  The US Federal Communications Commission has cleared Google of any legal wrong-doing over its Street View cars that intercepted wifi transmissions.  That's the good news for the company.  The bad news?

Instagram Founders Were Helped by Bay Area Connections  —  SAN FRANCISCO — Past midnight, in a dimly lighted warehouse jutting into the San Francisco Bay, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger introduced something they had been working on for weeks: a photo-sharing iPhone application called Instagram.

Netflix CEO calls out Comcast on net neutrality  —  When most Comcast subscribers complain, it's a blip.  When the CEO of Netflix vents to his 120,000 subscribers on Facebook, it's a salvo.  Reed Hastings doesn't agree with Comcast's approach to net neutrality and caps — and he wants everyone to know it.

Netflix never used its $1 million algorithm due to engineering costs  —  Netflix awarded a $1 million prize to a developer team in 2009 for an algorithm that increased the accuracy of the company's recommendation engine by 10 percent.  But today it doesn't use the million-dollar code …

How former Microsoft tech chief Nathan Myhrvold could have created the iPhone  —  Myhrvold's ‘consumer computer’ vision in 1991, as published by Men's Journal.  —  Nathan Myhrvold is back in the national spotlight again, but in a very different way this time.  —  Myhrvold in his chef's garb

The Mobile Paradox  —  Google's stock declined by over 4% yesterday.  Many have put this down to the company's decision to create a non-voting class of stock as part of a control-retention exercise as the founders sell shares.  But more is going on here.  In the same week as Facebook acquired Instagram …

Steve Jobs movie starring Ashton Kutcher to cover Apple from 1971 to 2000, filming starts next month  —  We've got a few more details on the recently-revealed Steve Jobs movie starring Ashton Kutcher, thanks to a Neowin interview with the producer, Mark Hulme.

Hands-on: getting work done with Google's new Aura interface for Chrome OS  —  Google attempted to introduce a new approach to computing when it first launched Chrome OS in 2010.  The operating system consists of little more than a fullscreen Web browser perched atop a rigorously-hardened Linux environment.