U.S. regulators proposed to make broadband access the focus of subsidized telecommunications for the poor and rural areas, a first step in tackling an ambitious plan to provide high-speed Internet to all Americans. The Federal Communications Commission unanimously proposed the shift in the goal of the Universal Service Fund despite a recent court ruling that called into question the agency's authority over the Internet.
YouTube has recently begun removing videos that feature content from Constantin Films' 2004 film, "Der Untergang" ("Downfall"), despite the fact that many of these videos are parodies and thus constitute fair use of the material. The "Downfall," or Hitler-parody, meme has been, arguably, a viral spate of publicity for Constantin Films in the past few years.
Technology companies and public interest groups are warning that an international trade agreement being drafted could expose Internet access providers, Web search engines and other online businesses to damaging legal risks. The U.S. and nearly a dozen trading partners released the current version of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, after mounting complaints that negotiations have happened behind closed doors. An eighth round of talks was held last week in New Zealand.
Google plans to publish data on the number of requests it receives from governments to either remove content or identify specific users. Google will host a page on its site that reveals the number of times a government has requested data on a specific user or asked Google to remove a piece of content from its network of sites, such as search, YouTube, or Blogger.
Brazil has supplanted Germany as the globe's No. 3 origination source of malicious net traffic, while India has zoomed to No. 5, according to rankings released today in Symantec's 2009 Global Internet Security Threat Report. The United States and China maintained the first and second spots respectively in the rankings as the top nations of origin for various types of cyberattacks in 2009 compared to 2008.
Three months after Eastman Kodak sued Apple for patent infringement, Apple has filed a countersuit that accuses the film and imaging company of violating two of its own digital photography patents. Apple accused Kodak of infringing patent 6,031,964, a "system and method for using a unified memory architecture to implement a digital camera device," and patent RE38,911, a "modular digital image processing via an image processing chain with modifiable parameter controls," according to details from the suit.
Ever since Google disclosed in January that Internet intruders had stolen information from its computers, the exact nature and extent of the theft has been a closely guarded company secret. But a person with direct knowledge of the investigation now says that the losses included one of Google’s crown jewels, a password system that controls access by millions of users worldwide to almost all of the company’s Web services, including e-mail and business applications.
Privacy officials from ten countries sent Google Inc. a letter demanding that the Internet giant build more privacy protections into its services, the latest sign of increasingly international anxiety over Google's power. The letter, reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, was signed by officials in Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and the United Kingdom.
Lower Merion School District employees activated the web cameras and tracking software on laptops they gave to high school students about 80 times in the past two school years, snapping nearly 56,000 images that included photos of students, pictures inside their homes and copies of the programs or files running on their screens, district investigators have concluded. In most of the cases, technicians turned on the system after a student or staffer reported a laptop missing and turned it off when the machine was found, the investigators determined.
Amazon.com filed a lawsuit to fend off a sweeping demand from North Carolina's tax collectors: detailed records including names and addresses of customers and information about exactly what they purchased. The lawsuit says the demand violates the privacy and First Amendment rights of Amazon's customers.
Google released comments it filed with the FTC on ways to enhance consumer privacy online as it finds its advertising practices and those of other online firms under increased scrutiny by privacy advocates. In its comments, Google outlined its support for self-regulatory standards that provide transparency, user control and security.
An Obama administration lawyer urged the Supreme Court to rule that employees usually have no right to privacy when they send personal messages on computers, cellphones or other devices supplied by their employer. Nationwide, most employers have adopted policies telling workers they have no right to privacy when they use computers and cellphones supplied by an employer, said Deputy Solicitor Gen. Neal Katyal.
Chinese online trading platform operator Alibaba.com Ltd. said its English-language platform in beta testing was attacked by unidentified hackers over the weekend and it believes its servers in the U.S. and China were the target. Over the weekend of April 16-17, "Alibaba.com's AliExpress platform was the target of malicious attacks by unidentified hackers using a variety of intrusion measures," the company said in a statement.
The FTC will host a June 2 workshop that will examine whether the commission should make changes to a law imposing certain requirements on Web sites aimed at children. The FTC is currently collecting comments on possible changes to its 2000 rule implementing the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
Paul Barrett, a minibus hire firm boss from Stanley, County Durham, has been convicted of bidding against items he was selling on eBay in order to drive up final prices. Barrett, 39, was found guilty of ten offences under consumer protection laws passed in 2008 and 2009 to bring UK law up to European Union standards.
Hundreds of Russian tourists were stranded in the Chinese border city of Heihe after a computer virus toppled an automated border control system. The border crossing was closed, stranding an estimated 2,000 Russians in the process, as a result of an unidentified malware infection, news agency RIA Novosti reports.
A judge in Ireland cleared the way for the implementation of a crackdown on Internet piracy, dismissing the Irish Data Protection Commissioner’s concerns that the plan could result in the invasion of privacy. The judge upheld the legality of an agreement between Eircom, the largest Internet service provider in Ireland, and the music industry.
Ending a chapter in one of the worst hacking cases in U.S. history, a federal judge handed down a five-year sentence to a 25-year-old man who helped steal tens of millions of credit card numbers. Damon Patrick Toey had already pled guilty to charges that he sold batches of stolen credit card data, called dumps, on behalf of convicted hacker Albert Gonzalez and helped him infiltrate the systems of a number of companies.
The system that school officials used to track lost and stolen laptops wound up secretly capturing thousands of images, including photographs of students in their homes, Web sites they visited, and excerpts of their online chats, says a new motion filed in a suit against the district. More than once, the motion asserts, the camera on Robbins' school-issued laptop took photos of Robbins as he slept in his bed.
The U.S. Justice Department has abruptly abandoned what had become a high-profile court fight to read Yahoo users' e-mail messages without obtaining a search warrant first. In a two-page brief, the Obama administration withdraw its request for warrantless access to the complete contents of the Yahoo Mail accounts under investigation.
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