Sarah Palin, speaking to reporters after testifying against a Tennessee man accused of breaking in to her personal e-mail account, dismissed the defense's argument that the incident was nothing more than "silly prank." "I don't think an illegal action like this is a prank," Palin said after the courtroom appearance in Knoxville, Tennessee.
As the country was sinking into its worst financial crisis in more than 70 years, Security and Exchange Commission employees and contractors cruised porn sites and viewed sexually explicit pictures using government computers, according to an agency report obtained by CNN. "During the past five years, the SEC OIG (Office of Inspector General) substantiated that 33 SEC employees and or contractors violated Commission rules and policies, as well as the government-wide Standards of Ethical Conduct, by viewing pornographic, sexually explicit or sexually suggestive images using government computer resources and official time," said a summary of the investigation by the inspector general's office.
U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk disappointed some at the Consumer Electronics Association dinner Wednesday night by failing to discuss the draft Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement released the same day, which has come under fire by some consumer advocates for failing to shut the door on harsh punishments for copyright infringers. In a keynote address, Kirk reitered the Obama administration's commitment to combating copyright breaches and intellectual property theft.
The National Security Agency has been conducting its 10th annual Cyber Defense Exercise, a competition that pits students from a series of military academies against each other -- and against the competition's leaders at NSA -- in a bid to see who has the best cyberdefense skills. The idea? To "build and defend computer networks against simulated intrusions by the National Security Agency/Central Security Services Red Team."
Data protection authorities from a range of countries held a teleconference to discuss how they can work together to protect what they see as a steady erosion of privacy by social networking services, and the European Union too is studying what role it can play. They may not be able to hold the social networking wave back, but policymakers are looking at what they can do to limit what they see as the "Big Brother"-like role of some sites.
The Obama administration is supporting a compromise on patent overhaul legislation unveiled last month by Senate Judiciary Committee leaders, CongressDaily reported. In a letter to Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and ranking member Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said the compromise "improves the reported bill and incorporates critical elements of patent reform."
Zeus, a virus that steals online banking details from infected computer users, is more powerful than ever, warns a web security company. Trusteer says it has spotted the Trojan virus in one of every 3,000 of the 5.5m computers it monitors in the US and UK.
North Carolina's Department of Revenue called a lawsuit filed against the agency by Amazon.com Inc. "misleading," and said it wasn't violating the First Amendment rights of shoppers by asking for data to aid in tax collection. The state said that in its effort to collect sales taxes it routinely requires "general information" about transactions with out-of-state retailers, including the purchaser's name, address and the item's purchase price.
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.
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