The four top recording companies made a settlement offer to Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the Minnesota woman who was found liable last summer of willful copyright infringement and ordered by a jury to pay $1.92 million in damages. And wasting little time, Thomas-Rasset's attorneys rejected the settlement offer almost immediately.
eHarmony Inc, which operates a website to help singles find relationships, said that it settled a class action lawsuit over same-sex matching. All claims against the company will be dismissed and a $2 million settlement fund will be established, eHarmony said, with $500,000 designated as a fund for claims by the class.
London police are setting up two specialist teams to deal with aspects of e-crime and ticketing fraud surrounding the 2012 Olympic Games. One of the teams will be dedicated to tackling e-crime related to the Olympics, such as attempted hacks on computer systems and fraud aimed at sponsors and prospective visitors.
In a report, Harvard assistant professor and security researcher Benjamin Edelman presented findings about a privacy flaw in the Google Toolbar, Web browser add-on software that makes Google Search more easily accessible through Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Google Inc. was asked by federal regulators to explain a $350 fee charged to people who drop a contract for the company's Nexus One phones on Deutsche-Telekom AG's T-Mobile network. The request came in letters sent by the Federal Communications Commission, which also asked AT&T Inc., Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp. about fees charged to customers who leave wireless contracts early.
China's most popular search engine Baidu has been cleared of piracy in a dispute with the music industry, the IFPI trade body for the music sector said. The IFPI said it was very disappointed with the ruling after a court in China decided that the search engine had not broken rules by linking to music downloads that infringe copyright.
The nation's escalating cyberbattles have outpaced the rush to find a deterrent, something equivalent to the cold-war-era strategy of threatening nuclear retaliation. So far, despite millions of dollars spent on studies, that quest has failed.
The Department of Transportation planned to announce new rules that will prohibit interstate commercial truckers and bus drivers from sending text messages while they are operating moving vehicles. Truckers and bus drivers who violate the rules, which are effective immediately, face civil or criminal fines of up to $2,750.
A Nebraska man has agreed to plead guilty in federal court in Los Angeles for his role in a denial-of-service attack against Church of Scientology websites, say prosecutors. Brian Thomas Mettenbrink of Grand Island, Neb., helped bring down the sites in January 2008 as part of the underground group Anonymous, according to court documents.
New York City can't use a federal racketeering law to accuse discount cigarette retailers of evading hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes on Internet sales, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled. The nation's highest court, voting 5-3, threw out the city's claims under the U.S. Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act in lawsuits filed in 2003 and 2004.
Many organizations are focused on stopping random hackers and blocking pornography when they should be concerned with bigger threats from professional cybercriminals, according to a new cybersecurity report. In a survey conducted last year of 523 IT and security managers, top-level executives, and law enforcement personnel, hackers were rated the biggest threat, followed by insiders and foreign entities -- probably because hackers are the "noisiest and easiest to detect," the 2010 CyberSecurity Watch Survey concluded.
The sites of Chinese Human Rights Defenders and four related groups were targeted by cyberattacks, the organization said. A distributed denial of service attack paralyzed the Chinese Human Rights Defenders site for about 16 hours, the organization said.
Even if its stand against censorship leads it to close its search engine in China, Google Inc. still hopes to maintain other key operations in the world's most populous Internet market. Google is negotiating to keep its research center in China, an advertising sales team that generates most of the company's revenue in the country and a fledgling mobile phone business as the company navigates the delicate negotiations with the government.
A tidal wave of spam has been predicted this year as cyber criminals are increasingly targeting social networks such as Facebook. The networking computer company Cisco estimated that worldwide spam volumes this year could rise by 30 to 40 percent compared with 2009.
Motorola has asked U.S. regulators to bar Research In Motion from the U.S. sale of its products, accusing the BlackBerry maker of infringing on five Motorola technology patents. Motorola, which has been losing market share to Canada's RIM for years, said most of RIM's products infringe on at least one of the patents, which cover technology for Wi-Fi, application management, user interface and power management.
A federal judge drastically reduced a nearly $2 million verdict against a woman found guilty last year of sharing 24 songs over the Internet, calling the jury's penalty "monstrous and shocking." U.S. District Judge Michael Davis reduced the $1.92 million penalty a jury imposed against Jammie Thomas-Rasset to $2,250 per song, or about $54,000.
An Italian decree that would require the vetting of videos with sexual or violent content could take effect as soon as February 4, according to reports. The government decree, which affects sites such as Google's YouTube, would also require sites that regularly upload videos to obtain a license to operate in Italy, the Associated Press reported.
China's Communist Party mouthpiece accused the United States of mounting a cyber army and a "hacker brigade," and of exploiting social media like Twitter or YouTube to foment unrest in Iran. The People's Daily accused the United States of controlling the Internet in the name of Internet freedom after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for more Internet freedoms in China and elsewhere in a speech.
Declaring that an attack on one nation's computer networks "can be an attack on all," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton issued a warning that the United States would defend itself from cyberattacks, though she left unclear the means of response. In a sweeping, pointed address that dealt with the Internet as a force for both liberation and repression, Mrs. Clinton said: "Those who disrupt the free flow of information in our society or any other pose a threat to our economy, our government and our civil society."
Microsoft issued a cumulative critical patch for Internet Explorer that fixes eight vulnerabilities, including a hole targeted in the China-based attacks on Google and other U.S. companies.
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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.