Videogame companies and investors are rushing to tap the promise of China's game market, but many of them are discovering that a slow-moving bureaucracy and rampant piracy remain significant hurdles. Diana Li, former chief executive of Shanda Interactive Entertainment Ltd.'s game unit, said hackers and other forms of piracy reduced the industry's profitability by roughly $1.5 billion last year.
Spanish criminals who stole bank details from computers around the world did not realize the power of the illegal network they had created which could have paralyzed an entire country's computer systems, police said. Police believe the men were not expert hackers and bought their virus program on the black market before using it to take over other people's computers in order to create a "botnet," a network of enslaved computers.
The U.S. National Broadband Plan set for release this month will not call for additional spending beyond the existing programs, a move likely to garner support from lawmakers, a Federal Communications Commission official said. The highly anticipated blueprint will be "revenue neutral" overall because spectrum auctions will compensate for any needed spending, said the official, who was not authorized to speak before the public release of the plan.
Apple seemingly made a point not to mention Google in the lawsuit recently filed against HTC. But a Google spokesperson sent out an unsolicited response to the situation, stating, "We are not a party to this lawsuit. However, we stand behind our Android operating system and the partners who have helped us to develop it."
Message to university presidents: Register your domain name. Mark G. Yudof, president of the University of California, was forced to let it be known that he was not, in fact, resigning, after a prankster posted a fake resignation letter online.
Authorities in Spain have arrested three men accused of operating a massive botnet composed of 12.7 million PCs that stole credit card and bank log-in data and infected computers in half of the Fortune 1,000 companies and more than 40 banks, according to published reports. The botnet "Mariposa," which means butterfly in Spanish, first appeared in December 2008 and grew to be one of the largest botnets ever, The Associated Press reported.
The United States, pushing to promote global Internet freedom, declassified some of its initiatives on safeguarding government networks as it pursues partnerships in the effort. The move comes as Washington has become more vocal in opposing other governments' censorship of the Internet and presses its argument that Internet access is a basic human right to express and gather online.
Germany's highest court overturned a law that let anti-terror authorities retain data on telephone calls and e-mails, saying it marked a "grave intrusion" into personal privacy rights and must be revised. The court ruling was the latest to sharply criticize a major initiative by Chancellor Angela Merkel's government and one of the strongest steps yet defending citizen rights from post-Sept. 11 terror-fighting measures.
A Google Inc. executive said that the company is still considering its next step in China -- seven weeks after it pledged to stop censoring search results there and threatened to pull out of the country altogether. Google Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Nicole Wong told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the company is continuing to investigate a hacking attack that emanated from China and attempts to snoop on dissidents' e-mail.
The European Commission said it plans to revise a law governing the provision of basic telephone and Internet services to Europe's most remote regions, bringing it up to date with modern technological demands. The current telecoms universal services law from 2002 ensures all European Union citizens have access to fixed-line telephone and basic Internet, regardless of their location.
A top Senate Democrat criticized the technology industry for its unwillingness to stand up to foreign governments that restrict access to online content, pledging to introduce legislation that would impose penalties on Internet companies that facilitate human rights violations in repressive regimes. "The bottom line is this: with a few notable exceptions, the technology industry seems unwilling to regulate itself and unwilling to even engage in a dialogue with Congress about the serious human rights challenges the industry faces," Dick Durbin, the chairman of the Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law and assistant Senate majority leader, said at a hearing on Internet freedom.
Apple said that it had filed lawsuits against HTC, the Taiwan-based phone maker, accusing it of infringing on 20 Apple patents tied to the iPhone. The suits, filed with the office of the United States International Trade Commission and the United States District Court in Delaware, say HTC violated patents covering the phone’s user interface, internal architecture and hardware.
A proposed class-action settlement by Facebook Inc. has come under fire for a strange reason: It is perceived by some to be overly charitable. As such, the deal has rekindled criticisms about an increasingly popular way to reach settlements in large cases.
Spam now accounts for close to 90 percent of all e-mail worldwide due to a surge in February, according to Symantec. Two botnets named Grum and Rustock helped push spam levels up 5.5 percent in February over the prior month, according to the security firm's report.
A new Europe-wide rule to prevent mobile phone users from building up large bills for surfing the Internet via their handset has come into force. Customers can now require their phone firm to cut them off when their bill reaches a certain level after accessing the internet in other European nations.
Four men accused of using a network of computers and automated software to buy up online tickets to concerts and sporting events and selling them at a profit were indicted on fraud, conspiracy, and computer hacking charges, federal prosecutors said. They allegedly made more than $25 million by re-selling more than 1.5 million of the "most coveted tickets" to performances by Bruce Springsteen, Hannah Montana, Bon Jovi, Barbara Streisand, and Billy Joel; shows including Wicked and The Producers; sporting events such as the 2006 Rose Bowl and 2007 Major League Baseball playoff games at Yankee Stadium; and tapings of the TV show Dancing with the Stars, according to the indictment.
The head of the global Internet addressing authority will visit China this week, according to people briefed on the matter, highlighting questions about China's Web censorship after it applied to offer domain names that end with Chinese characters. Rod Beckstrom, CEO of the California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), will visit China for two days in his first trip to the country since taking his current job in June last year, according to one of the people.
Chatroulette, a Web site that connects videochatters with a limitless number of "random strangers" from around the globe, is an Internet sensation -- but it poses unique dangers for minors and new challenges for law enforcement. Though users of the site must confirm that they are at least 16 years old and that they agree not to broadcast obscene, offending or pornographic material, some legal experts -- including one who saw the dangers firsthand -- say those barriers can be easily bypassed and can connect children with sexual predators and child molesters.
PayPal has received the green light from the Reserve Bank of India to resume bank withdrawals for settlements involving exports of goods and services, but personal payments remains suspended. In a blog post, Farhad Irani, head of PayPal Asia-Pacific wrote that RBI has allowed PayPal to resume bank withdrawals for the exports of goods and services.
Recent cyber attacks disclosed by Google Inc. could have been considerably more widespread than previously believed, security researchers familiar with the investigation said. A report by Alex Stamos of iSEC Partners Inc., a cyber security firm, states that the number of companies hit by attacks that bear a strong resemblance to those on Google could total more than 100 -- about three times the number previously reported.
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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.