Here in the SFist Tech Labs, we're committed to two things: science, and our readers. So we'd never let anything like the debilitating headache we've been going through for the past 18 hours or so keep us from bringing you the links to tech news you deserve. While we read the symptoms on BBC's health page, you can follow along. Throbbing Pain Ars Technica is reporting on a new California bill that would ban......

Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google — the companies that internet wags are now calling "The Gang of Four" — were subjected to a verbal smack-down on Wednesday in a hearing about those companies' involvement with known Communists. CNet News.com has a transcript of the hearing, in which California Representative Tom Lantos grills a representative from each company, repeatedly asking "are you ashamed." Fitting in with the internet theme of the proceedings, Lantos invoked Godwin's......

More takes on the launch of Google.cn: the company's response on the Official Google Blog, and protests from the Students for a Free Tibet Blog. Elinor Mills of CNet News.com posted her roundup on her CNet blog. Ars Technica covers a few other Google-related stories this week: Ken Fisher gives his review of Google Video, his disappointment with the service, and what he thinks is the company's reasoning for introducing it early. Nate Anderson......

This week saw contention between Google and the US Department of Justice, as the Bush Administration asked a federal judge to force Google to comply with a subpoena for search records. (Link to CNET News.com; they've also aggregated their complete coverage of the story). The records are intended to be used to support the validity of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. AOL, MSN, and Yahoo were also asked to turn over records, and......

One of the bigger stories in tech news last week was John Seigenthaler's editorial in USA Today blasting a "false, malicious 'biography' that appeared under [his] name for 132 days on Wikipedia, the popular, online, free encyclopedia whose authors are unknown and virtually untraceable." That scandal, plus a less intense scuffle over the history of podcasting and the influence of vee-jays thereon, prompted Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales this week to change the site's policy and......

Advances in technology have permitted a slight change in the SFist Tech format: look for briefer Roundup articles on Friday, like this one. The more long-winded, dense and impenetrable posts you're used to seeing will happen throughout the week, focused on one topic at a time. Intel is jumping on the home media center bandwagon with its new VIIV technology, specifically aimed at creating media PCs. SFGate's take explains how Intel is having to......

Thanks to Engadget, who reads CNet News, who read Matier and Ross (we've given up), we find out that Waldo, a medicine-delivering helper robot at the UCSF Medical Center went bonkers, zooming down a hall into a treatment room and scaring the living daylights out of a patient with cancer (which is saying something, since once you have cancer, what the hell else is there to be afraid of, really?): At the end of......

Sfist speaking at the State of Bay Area Online Journalism panel....