A looming change in the way officials define Internet service may soon prompt the Federal Communications Commission to change its mind and say that, in fact, it looks like consumers are doing just fine, thank you very much. The heart of the matter has to do with the minimum benchmark for Internet service, the subject of much political debate in recent years.
Russia's government denied using Facebook ads to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, saying in a statement it didn't even know "how to place an advert" on the social media giant. “We do not know... how to place an advert on Facebook. We have never done this, and the Russian side has never been involved in it,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, according to Reuters.
A global investor group called for an independent investigation into a cyber breach at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and urged the regulator to delay new data-gathering rules until it could assure investors that its computer systems were secure. Wall Street’s top regulator came under fire after admitting hackers had breached its database of corporate announcements in 2016 and might have used it for insider trading.
The Department of Homeland Security contacted election officials in 21 states to notify them that they had been targeted by Russian government hackers during the 2016 election campaign. Three months ago, DHS officials said that people connected to the Russian government tried to hack voter registration files or public election sites in 21 states, but this was the first time that government officials contacted individual state election officials to let them know their systems had been targeted.
After years of largely avoiding regulation, businesses like Facebook, Google and Amazon are a focus of lawmakers, some of whom are criticizing the expanding power of big tech companies and their role in the 2016 election. The attacks cover a smattering of issues as diverse as antitrust, privacy and public disclosure.
Twitter has confirmed it will meet with the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. The company tells Wired that it will speak with Senators about the prevalence of bot accounts, as well as the widespread dissemination of fake news and misinformation, on its platform.
Facebook will share the content and related information of the more than 3,000 ads it sold to Russian-linked accounts with the House and Senate intelligence committees, the company said. Facebook has already handed over copies of the ads and information about the relevant accounts to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is conducting an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, the country’s top Wall Street regulator, announced that hackers breached its system for storing documents filed by publicly traded companies last year, potentially accessing data that allowed the intruders to make an illegal profit. The agency detected the breach last year, but didn’t learn until last month that it could have been used for improper trading.
Amazon.com said it was reviewing its website after an investigation found that it could help users buy the ingredients to make a bomb using its “Frequently bought together” and “Customers who bought this also bought” features. Britain’s Channel 4 News found the online retailer’s algorithm was suggesting items that could be bought together to produce explosives, days after an apparently home-made bomb was detonated on the London Underground network.
Suspected Russia propagandists on Facebook tried to organize more than a dozen pro-Trump rallies in Florida during last year’s election, The Daily Beast has learned. The demonstrations -- at least one of which was promoted online by local pro-Trump activists -- brought dozens of supporters together in real life.
A suspected Iranian hacking group has been targeting aviation and energy companies in the United States, Saudi Arabia and South Korea since 2013, computer security company FireEye said in a report. The group seems largely to have engaged in stealth spying to give Iranian military and corporate interests information about possible enemies and competition.
The European Commission will outline different options for taxing digital companies as the 28-nation bloc seeks to raise money from an industry that it says provides less than it should to public coffers. The commission plan, a draft of which was obtained by Bloomberg, comes the week after European Union finance ministers discussed how to adjust levies for companies such as Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc. in a way that better reflects their economic activity and ensures they pay their fair share.
Twitter said that its internal controls were allowing it to weed out accounts being used for the “promotion of terrorism” earlier rather than responding to government requests to close them down. U.S. and European governments have been pressuring social media companies including Twitter, Facebook and Alphabet’s Google to fight harder against online radicalization, particularly by violent Islamist groups.
The Senate Commerce Committee took up a controversial online sex-trafficking bill, hearing testimony from victims' families who urged lawmakers to act. The hearing room was silent as Yvonne Ambrose tearfully told the panel about how her daughter, Desiree Robinson, was trafficked online and later raped and murdered.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey filed a lawsuit against credit reporting firm Equifax Inc. following a breach that exposed the personal data of up to 143 million people, including 3 million in the state. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, called the breach a “nightmare” and said credit reporting companies should not profit from monitoring or freezing credit arising from the hack.
The social media service Gab, which bills itself as Twitter for the alt-right, is on the verge of being booted from the Internet. Andrew Torba, CEO of the company, posted that “Gab's domain registrar has given us 5 days to transfer our domain or they will seize it.”
Google has offered to display rival comparison shopping sites via an auction, as it aims to stave off further EU antitrust fines, four people familiar with the matter said. Google is under pressure to come up with a big initiative to level the playing field in comparison shopping, but its proposal was roundly criticized by competitors as inadequate, the sources said.
The Internet has long had a reputation of being an anything-goes place that only a few nations have tried to tame — China in particular. But in recent years, events as varied as the Arab Spring, elections in France and confusion in Indonesia over the religion of the country’s president have awakened governments to how they have lost some control over online speech, commerce and politics on their home turf.
Users of Avast-owned security application CCleaner for Windows have been advised to update their software immediately, after researchers discovered criminal hackers had installed a backdoor in the tool. The tainted application allows for download of further malware, be it ransomware or keyloggers, with fears millions are affected.
British Prime Minister Theresa May said in an interview that she plans to raise the issue of the internet's role in terrorism this week at the United Nations. "One of the issues that we really need to be addressing, and I'll be raising this when I'm at the United Nations, is the question of the use of the internet by terrorists for terrorist planning," May told ABC's "This Week."
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The GigaLaw Firm helps companies of all sizes protect their brands online, using domain name dispute policies – such as the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) – and other legal tools available to copyright and trademark owners on the Internet.