The FTC is seeking comment on whether changes should be made to rules imposing certain requirements on Web sites directed at children, including a mandate that they obtain parental consent before collecting personal information from children under the age of 13. In a Federal Register notice, the FTC said the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which went into effect in 2000, requires the agency to review the rules required by the law every five years.
The Google search engine has started automatically giving a suggestion of where to call after receiving a search seemingly focused on suicide. Among the searches that result in an icon of a red phone and the toll-free number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline are “ways to commit suicide” and “suicidal thoughts.”
The Foreign Correspondents Club of China said it had shut its website after a burst of hacker attacks, days after attacks on the Yahoo email accounts of some foreign journalists covering China were discovered. "We do not know who is behind the attacks or what their motivation is," the club's board said in an emailed statement explaining it had decided to shut down temporarily the site after two days of "persistent" attacks.
A lender which claims it is owed millions by the Sex.com domain name operator is asking a U.S. bankruptcy court to dismiss an involuntary bankruptcy case against the company, so it can resume a foreclosure auction, according to new court documents. The New Jersey lender, DOM Partners LLC, which said it loaned more than $4 million to Escom LLC to fund the website's operations, said in court papers that Escom shouldn't be in bankruptcy.
Upscale grocery conglomerate Whole Foods Market said that it is continuing to clamp down on a series of Facebook-based scams that entice users with a purported $500 gift card from the Austin, Texas-based supermarket chain.
Last month, John Doerr, one of America’s most celebrated venture capitalists, announced that he would step down from the board of Amazon.com, a company that he helped to finance and build. People with direct knowledge of the matter, who would not speak for attribution because they were not authorized to discuss it, now say Mr. Doerr’s decision was prompted by a Federal Trade Commission inquiry into the relationship between Amazon and Google, where Mr. Doerr is also a director.
A federal court of appeals denied Microsoft Corp.'s petition for a rehearing in a lawsuit over whether the software giant violated a Toronto company's patents. Last year, jurors awarded i4i Inc. about $290 million in damages when it found Microsoft's Word software violated one of its patents.
Microsoft filed a lawsuit claiming British video game accessory maker Datel Design and Development Ltd is illegally copying the software company's game console controllers.
A New York appeals court has ruled in eBay's favor in its longstanding legal dispute with Tiffany & Co. over whether the auction giant is responsible for policing the sale of counterfeit goods. The legendary jewelry company had alleged that trademark law requires eBay to keep tabs on the legitimacy of products sold on its platform and that the sale of counterfeit goods amounts to false advertising on eBay's part; the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that this is not the case.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, Democrat from Vermont and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he plans to hold hearings on "much-needed updates" to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 in the coming months. "While the question of how best to balance privacy and security in the 21st century has no simple answer, what is clear is that our federal electronic privacy laws are woefully outdated," Leahy said, in a statement.
Although open source advocates around the world celebrated a court victory March 30 when a Salt Lake City jury confirmed that the licensing rights to the Unix operating system belong to Novell and not to the SCO Group, the nearly seven-year-old legal dispute over IP is not yet over. There are still some dangling legal strings that need to be trimmed, and those won't happen for at least a few weeks -- barring any more appeals, of course, by the Lindon, Utah-based SCO Group.
The Transportation Department proposed a ban on text messaging at the wheel by interstate truck and bus drivers, following up on its call to reduce distractions that lead to crashes. The proposal would make permanent an interim ban announced in January by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, applying to drivers of buses and commercial trucks over 10,000 pounds.
China's comprehensive Internet filtering regime for political, social or religious content is complex and opaque -- creating precarious conditions for providers, the U.S. Trade Representative's official said in its annual report to the U.S. Congress. In a report compiled before Google Corp. moved its Chinese search portal to Hong Kong from China this month in a censorship dispute, the USTR said: "changes to Internet filtering can occur without warning or public explanation."
Private e-mail addresses that many Facebook users wanted to keep hidden were revealed publicly on a multitude of Facebook profiles, Gawker reports. The glitch lasted about 30 minutes before Facebook sealed the gap.
Cyberattacks were recently used to intimidate opponents of a mining project in Vietnam with ties to China, according to Google and McAfee. Malware that was disguised as a popular Vietnamese-language keyboard driver for Windows users was used to create a botnet, according to blog posts from Google's Neel Mehta and McAfee Chief Technical Officer George Kurtz.
In what appears to be a coordinated assault, the e-mail accounts of at least a dozen rights activists, academics and journalists who cover China have been compromised by unknown intruders. A Chinese human rights organization also said that hackers disabled its Web site for a fifth straight day.
Google Inc.'s search sites in China suddenly stopped working, and the U.S. Internet giant, after initially taking the blame for a technical glitch, reversed itself and said that it had concluded China was blocking users' searches with its "Great Firewall." The episode demonstrated how fraught with confusion the relationship between China and Google remains, and it could represent a sharp escalation of the country's battle with Google a week after the U.S. Internet giant stopped obeying Chinese censorship rules.
A jury has decided in favor of Novell Inc. in an ownership battle over Unix computer server operating systems. Following a three-week trial in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, the jury ruled that Waltham, Mass.-based Novell owns copyrights to Unix, even though it sold licensing rights for the technology in 1995 to The SCO Group of Lindon, Utah.
In a Wall Street Journal column, the CEOs of Google and Verizon wrote that the Federal Communication Commission's recently released National Broadband Plan deserves attention. "Connecting Americans in all parts of the country and in all walks of life can help lift society by connecting minds, stimulating ideas, and unleashing the creative potential of millions of Americans," they wrote.
The EU Commission wants member states to agree to block access to child pornography websites and impose tougher punishments on child abusers and human trafficking gangs, it said. The Commission, the EU's executive, is proposing a package of measures to strengthen the bloc's fight against child pornography, including harmonizing the prosecution of child abuse and human trafficking, and more severe punishments for both first-time and repeat offenders.
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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.