Microsoft filed a suit against TiVo in a San Francisco federal court, claiming that the Alviso, Calif., maker of digital video recorders illegally uses technology related to purchasing and delivering video and the ability to display programming information. Both are seen as an attempt to counter an earlier suit filed by TiVo against AT&T, which uses Microsoft's technology in its television service.
Five United States senators are publicly urging Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to move faster to support organizations that are helping people in countries like Iran and China circumvent restrictions on Internet use. In a letter written by Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, the senators ask Mrs. Clinton to quickly spend $45 million that has been earmarked over the last two years to support Internet freedom but has not been spent.
China's top search engine, Baidu, sued its U.S.-based domain name service provider Register.com after a cyber attack interrupted its web services. In the lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court in New York, Baidu said it sought damages under the Lanham Act for trademark infringement, breach of contract and negligence.
Months after Verizon Communications began issuing warnings to accused file sharers, the company has acknowledged that multiple offenses could result in a service interruption. "We've cut some people off," Verizon Online spokeswoman Bobbi Henson.
Bowing to pressure in Europe, Microsoft said that it would comply with regulators and discard all data collected on users of its Bing search engine after six months. John Vassallo, a Microsoft vice president and associate general counsel, said the company would introduce the changes over the next 18 months, aiming to satisfy a European advisory group that had been critical of how search engines collect and retain data on individuals for advertising purposes.
An American computer security researcher has found what he says he believes is strong evidence of the digital fingerprints of Chinese authors in the software programs used in attacks against Google. By analyzing the software used in the break-ins against Google and dozens of other companies, Joe Stewart, a malware specialist with SecureWorks, a computer security company based in Atlanta, said he determined the main program used in the attack contained a module based on an unusual algorithm from a Chinese technical paper that has been published exclusively on Chinese-language Web sites.
Samsung Electronics and Rambus said that they have reached an agreement settling all claims between them and the licensing of Rambus' patent portfolio for all Samsung semiconductor products. Under the agreement, Samsung will initially pay Rambus $200 million.
The Russian edition of Forbes has won the use of the domain name Forbes.ru and a record $300,000 in damages from a cybersquatter in a landmark court ruling, the magazine announced. Forbes and its Russian publisher, Axel Springer Russia, sued Landmark VIP Services, which advertises travel packages on Forbes.ru, for the unauthorized use of the magazine's trademark in its web address.
The founder of a Web site accused of being one of the world's biggest sources of illegally downloaded music was cleared of fraud by a British court. Music-industry group the BPI said the verdict in Britain's first trial for online file-sharing was "hugely disappointing."
At least two foreign journalists living in Beijing have had their Google e-mail accounts hacked, a journalists' advocacy group in China said. The hackers changed settings so that all Gmail messages would be forwarded to unfamiliar addresses.
France has echoed calls by the German government for web users to find an alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer to protect security. Certa, a government agency that oversees cyber threats, warned against using all versions of the web browser.
Google is investigating whether one or more employees may have helped facilitate a cyber-attack that the U.S. search giant said it was a victim of in mid-December, two sources told Reuters. Google, the world's most popular search engine, said last week it may pull out of the world's biggest Internet market by users after reporting it had been hit by a "sophisticated" cyber-attack on its network that resulted in theft of its intellectual property.
Federal Communications Commission officials have begun discussing alternative plans for regulating Internet-traffic management if a federal appeals court rules this spring that the agency doesn't have authority to control the way phone and cable companies handle traffic on their broadband networks. The discussions began less than a week after a U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit panel sharply questioned the FCC's jurisdiction in reprimanding Comcast Corp. two years ago when the cable company deliberately slowed some subscribers' web traffic.
India suspects that Chinese hackers attempted to gain access to Indian government information at the same time as they have been accused of targeting U.S. companies including Google Inc., according to a report. The Times of London quoted India's national security adviser, M.K. Narayanan, as saying of the attempted cyber attacks on his and other government offices: "People seem to be fairly sure it was the Chinese."
Europe's main security and human rights watchdog said that Turkey was blocking some 3,700 Internet sites for "arbitrary and political reasons" and urged reforms to show its commitment to freedom of expression. Milos Haraszti, media freedom monitor for the 56-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said Turkey's Internet law was failing to preserve free expression in the country and should be changed or abolished.
The German government has warned web users to find an alternative browser to Internet Explorer to protect security. The warning from the Federal Office for Information Security comes after Microsoft admitted IE was the weak link in recent attacks on Google's systems.
Telecommunications providers in Haiti will continue through to try to accommodate the enormous demand for phone and broadband services as they struggle to overcome massive damage to the island's infrastructure from the 7.0 earthquake. "The logistics and the security situation are really bad," says Paul Margie, U.S. representative for international relief organization Télécoms Sans Frontières (Telecommunications Without Borders).
A teenage girl who appeared topless in a "sexting" cell phone picture that was distributed among her middle-school classmates should face child-pornography charges, a Pennsylvania prosecutor argued before a U.S. appellate court. In the first U.S. case to test the constitutional status of "sexting," the American Civil Liberties Union countered that the incident does not come close to meeting the definition of child pornography which typically depicts graphic sexual acts with minors and is done for commercial gain.
The ongoing patent battle between Apple and Nokia escalated when Apple moved to block imports of Nokia cell phones to the U.S. Apple made its request in a complaint filed with the International Trade Commission, an independent federal agency that examines issues including unfair trade practices involving patent, trademark, and copyright infringement.
Do-it-yourself cybercrime kits are driving a surge in Internet-borne computer infections. DIY kits have been a staple in the cyberunderground for some time. But now they've dropped in price and become more user-friendly.
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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.