Twitter has been ordered by a U.S. federal judge to turn over documents related to several people involved with WikiLeaks to the Justice Department.

Tonight, a Twitter spokeswoman responded to a request for comment on the situation:

“We’re not going to comment on specific requests, but, to help users protect their rights, it’s our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so. We outline this policy in our law enforcement guidelines.”

In an onstage interview I did with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo at a D@CES event last night in Las Vegas, he referenced the issue, but would not give any specifics.

While he said he could not talk about WikiLeaks specifically, he indicated that he disliked government mandates to keep things quiet and reiterated Twitter’s desire to connect people with useful information.

“We’re going to lash out at things that prevent us from doing that, as aggressively as we can,” said Costolo, who also used Twitter crackdowns in China as an example.

It might be a Herculean task to fight the federal government, which is aggressively going after WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

Some Web companies, such as eBay’s PayPal unit, have cut off WikiLeaks.

On the other hand, Twitter took legal action to unseal the court order, which allowed it to inform those involved, giving them 10 days to object. Otherwise, the San Francisco microblogging service would have had to turn over information without the knowledge of these users.

There will surely be more of these to other Web companies, with obvious candidates being Google and Facebook.

The order from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is ordering Twitter to fork over subscriber names, user names, screen names, mailing addresses, residential addresses and more of several people involved with WikiLeaks.

But you can read for yourself–here is the court order, as well as the unsealing order:

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Android shipments have been rising fast as phone makers Motorola and Samsung have hitched their smartphone wagons to the operating system while other brands, including HTC and LG, also ship significant numbers of the phones, while also using rival operating systems.

On Monday, Google debuted Gingerbread, the next version of Android and announced that the Samsung-built Nexus S would be the first phone to run the operating system. That evening, speaking at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference, Rubin showed off a prototype Motorola tablet running Honeycomb, a new version of Android built specifically for tablets.

Interestingly, Rubin said during his onstage appearance that he considers Android today as still geared primarily to early adopters.

And we’ve just added an exciting new speaker to the already top-drawer list: Daniel Ek, co-founder and CEO of Spotify.

For those living under a rock, Ek (pictured here with co-founder Martin Lorentzon) leads one of the most exciting music services on the Web right now.

In fact, the Swedish entrepreneur is shaking up how and where people listen to and consume music.

As MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka–who will be interviewing Ek onstage–recently wrote of Spotify’s efforts to bring its hugely popular (and legal) streaming offering to the U.S. market:

In Europe, where Spotify has been a very big success, listeners can stream an unlimited amount of music, on demand, without ever paying a cent. But in the U.S., rival streaming services like Rhapsody, MOG and Napster generally only offer a very brief trial period of a few days before requiring that a pay wall go up.

For the past two years, Spotify has insisted that free, unlimited streaming is the only way the service will work, because that’s Spotify’s most effective marketing technique. Subscribers who do pay up get benefits like ad-free music, and the ability to port their songs to mobile devices like iPhones.

But the labels, most notably Warner Music Group, have insisted that unlimited free streams only serve to strip away their product’s remaining value–if you can listen for free on Spotify, why would you ever buy another CD or iTunes single?

The whole mobile music space is a riveting one to dive into, of course, and we think Ek is the perfect person to help us do so.

Ek will appear Tuesday morning, December 6, but D: Dive Into Mobile opens on Monday, December 6, with an evening onstage interview with Google Android majordomo Andy Rubin.

The new conference represents the very first brand extension of our D: All Things Digital conference, now in its ninth year of grilling the big names in tech and media to sold-out analog audiences and scores more on the Web.

And, as always, there will be no PowerPoints, no panels and definitely no pontificating.

What there will be are unrehearsed, unscripted and unexpected interviews with top players, taking a big-picture view of the broader digital landscape.

But, unlike big D, D: Dive Into Mobile is topic-focused, drilling down deeply into the ubiquity of mobile technology and devices, and its implications for brands, organizations and consumers worldwide.

Offering a more intimate and focused conference setting, D: Dive Into Mobile will feature other industry heavyweights, including: Dan Hesse, President and CEO of Sprint Nextel; Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of Research in Motion; Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard; Joe Belfiore, Vice President of Windows Phone Program Management at Microsoft; Jon Rubinstein of Palm, now owned by Hewlett-Packard; Foursquare CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley; Google Ad Products Management head Susan Wojcicki; and AT&T Emerging Devices President Glenn Lurie.

D: Dive Into Mobile will be held at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco and, as usual, we’ll be liveblogging the whole thing and also posting highlight videos.

Along with Walt Mossberg, Kafka and I, Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret will be conducting the interviews.

You can sign up here for D: Dive Into Mobile.

No love notes in the cloud for Marc Andreessen, maybe–but everything else is fair game.

That’s one of the funnier exchanges in an onstage interview BoomTown did earlier this week with Andreessen, the well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur and now venture capital kingpin, and eBay CEO John Donahoe.

It took place at the PayPal X Innovate 2010 conference in San Francisco, in a keynote that focused a lot on the move to mobile payments and cloud computing.

And, according to both Andreessen and Donahoe, the smartphone is at the center of the action going forward, especially by shoving all the heavy lifting of information to the cloud.

While talking about music service, using Spotify as an example, Andreessen noted: “Everything should be configured to a social experience. Everything except love notes, or anything like that. That probably doesn’t belong in the cloud.”

I disagree, Marc! Love is lofty!

Interestingly, though, Andreessen–the man responsible for creating the invaluable Web browser–still thought it would remain as durable as ever going forward.

See him talk about all this and more in the longish video below, in which Donahoe also does a slip-’n’-slide on the stage’s carpet.

Here’s the video (don’t click on the main video screen or you’ll be jumped to another screen; click on the toolbar instead):

As the final posting of the onstage interviews at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, here is one of the sessions that generated a lot of news: The first major interview about the Palm Pre with Elevation Partners Managing Director Roger McNamee and Palm Chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein.

The pair are trying to remake Palm (PALM)–see the AllThingsD.com topic page on the Pre here–in a bet-the-company move to recover the Silicon Valley icon’s long-lost glory via innovation.

Palm is trying to muscle into a market with multiple competitors, such as Apple’s iPhone, Android from Google (GOOG) and many more.

In the session with Walt Mossberg and me, McNamee and Rubinstein talked about the new smartphone and its various features, including a controversial way of syncing with Apple (AAPL) iTunes.

Also, McNamee and I had a debate over the Pre’s mirror. Really.

Here’s the video of the full D7 session (along with a very funny intro video making fun of McNamee’s loose lips):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090710/roger-mcnamee-and-jon-rubinstein-full-d7-session/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090710/elevation-partners-managing-director-roger-mcnamee-and-palm-chairman-and-ceo-jon-rubinstein-the-full-d7-session/ http://allthingsd.com/20090710/elevation-partners-managing-director-roger-mcnamee-and-palm-chairman-and-ceo-jon-rubinstein-the-full-d7-session/#comments Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:21:06 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=15638

As the final posting of the onstage interviews at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, here is one of the sessions that generated a lot of news: The first major interview about the Palm Pre with Elevation Partners Managing Director Roger McNamee and Palm Chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein.

The pair are trying to remake Palm (PALM)–see the AllThingsD.com topic page on the Pre here–in a bet-the-company move to recover the Silicon Valley icon’s long-lost glory via innovation.

Palm is trying to muscle into a market with multiple competitors, such as Apple’s iPhone, Android from Google (GOOG) and many more.

In the session with Walt Mossberg and me, McNamee and Rubinstein talked about the new smartphone and its various features, including a controversial way of syncing with Apple (AAPL) iTunes.

Also, McNamee and I had a debate over the Pre’s mirror. Really.

Here’s the video of the full D7 session (along with a very funny intro video making fun of McNamee’s loose lips):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090710/elevation-partners-managing-director-roger-mcnamee-and-palm-chairman-and-ceo-jon-rubinstein-the-full-d7-session/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090701/steve-ballmer-full-d7-session/ http://allthingsd.com/20090701/steve-ballmer-full-d7-session/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:07:50 +0000 Kara Swisher http://d7.allthingsd.com/?p=2256

As most know by now, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer introduced the software giant’s relaunch of its search offering, dubbed Bing, onstage at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference.

You can see that here, as well as Ballmer demoing the product, which is Microsoft’s biggest and priciest attempt yet to catch archrival Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) in the search business.

It is a market where the typically dominant Microsoft (MSFT) is a mouse in comparison, although it is also trying to innovate.

That did not stop Ballmer from doing some roaring about Bing, in an interview with Walt Mossberg, as well as the status of other Microsoft products like its upcoming release of the Windows 7 operating system, an arena where Microsoft does rule.

Ballmer also talked about ongoing talks with Yahoo about a search partnership, and other Microsoft initiatives.

Here’s the video of Ballmer’s full D7 session (this video is missing a promotional video for Bing, which the audience saw, but that Microsoft did not give us video rights to use here):

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