In a hearing Thursday, a federal magistrate judge seemed to agree with disability advocates that forcing CNN to provide closed captioning on its Internet videos doesn’t violate the First Amendment, since closed captioning doesn’t require the news organization to summarize, distill or change its content.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday decided to stay out of two hot First Amendment debates, one testing the limits of student speech on the Internet, and the other on prayer at public government meetings.

An opinion published by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel in late December has opened the way for state lotteries to sell tickets via the Internet. And now people are wondering if poker, casinos and other online gaming enterprises can be far behind.

A Connecticut man has been charged with hacking into GeneSimmons.com, the website of the KISS rock band’s bassist. Authorities said Kevin George Poe has been linked to Anonymous, the activist Internet collective that has launched cyberattacks on Visa, MasterCard and the Church of Scientology.

In an order that includes an homage to the ’60s songwriter Arlo Guthrie and that, thanks to the Internet, has gone national, a Georgia judge has taken one of the nation’s largest banks to task in a foreclosure case, saying, “Sometimes, only the courts of law stand to protect the taxpayer.”