The United States is losing enough data in cyber attacks to fill the Library of Congress many times over, and authorities have failed to stay ahead of the threat, a U.S. defense official said. In a sobering assessment, the Defense Department's Jim Miller said more than 100 foreign spy agencies were working to gain access to U.S. computer systems, as were criminal organizations.
House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Va., wrote President Obama urging him to block the FCC from proceeding with an effort to reclassify some aspects of broadband as a telecommunications service, saying the move will hinder the nation's economic recovery. The letter was sent in response to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's decision to launch a proceeding that would reclassify the transmission component of broadband service as a telecommunications service under the Title II provisions of the Communications Act.
Facebook has joined the ranks of the most popular sites targeted by phishers, according to a study by Kaspersky Lab. Facebook's share of the phishing attacks that occurred from January through March this year was 5.7 percent, while more than 52 percent were masquerading as PayPal, 13.3 percent targeted eBay users, and 7.8 percent were fake HSBC messages.
A big victory for big music: A federal court has ruled in favor of the music labels in their fight against LimeWire, one of the most prominent filesharing services on the Web. Almost all of music available on the service -- 93 percent, according to a study used in the lawsuit -- and even more of the stuff actually downloaded -- 98.8 percent, via the same study -- was protected by copyright and shouldn’t have been there.
Music service Playlist.com, formerly known as Project Playlist, has reached a settlement with Universal Music Group, the largest of the four top recording companies. Universal agreed to drop the copyright lawsuit originally filed in 2008 against Project Playlist after the sides negotiated a business deal.
Despite reporting progress in combating the theft of business software, the overall rate of piracy increased two percentage points to 43 percent in 2009, according to the Business Software Alliance's annual global piracy study. "Installations of unlicensed software on PCs dropped in 54 of the 111 individual economies studied, and rose in only 19," according to the study, which was conducted for BSA by the IT research firm International Data Corporation.
In 1998, a hacker told Congress that he could bring down the Internet in 30 minutes by exploiting a certain flaw that sometimes caused online outages by misdirecting data. In 2003, the Bush administration concluded that fixing this flaw was in the nation's "vital interest." Fast forward to 2010, and very little has happened to improve the situation.
Google has defended its privacy practices following a letter of complaint from data protection commissioners around the world. The original letter expressed concerns on privacy issues surrounding Google's social networking tool Buzz and its Street View service.
Security research firm Matousec has published details of a technique for bypassing some of the protections offered by widely used Windows security software, including programs from McAfee and Trend Micro. However, the attack has serious limitations, including the requirement that the attacker must already have the ability to execute code on a system, Matousec acknowledged.
Dozens of sites with a range of quality and graphics now showcase song lyrics, raising the prominence of the words and sometimes providing significant revenue for the sites’ owners. For songwriters and their publishers, though, the ubiquity of lyrics on Web sites presents both opportunities and problems -- especially when it comes to getting some of the sites to pay royalties for use of the lyrics.
A coalition that includes firms that compete with Google says a proposed settlement aimed at allowing Google to create an online digital library violates U.S. treaty obligations aimed at protecting intellectual property. The Open Book Alliance, which includes Google rivals Amazon.com, Microsoft and Yahoo as well as some smaller publishers and writers groups, released an analysis of the proposed settlement between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers that claims the deal violates the Berne Convention's Protection of Literary and Artistic Works as well as the nondiscrimination provision of the World Trade Organization's agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).
The Center for Digital Democracy is raising concerns about proposals at the Food and Drug Administration to allow pharmaceutical companies to market drugs on social media and other Web sites. "We believe that the FDA must proceed very carefully as it works to develop rules regarding digital media marketing of pharmaceutical products," CDD Executive Director Jeff Chester said in a letter to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg and Principal Deputy Commissioner Josh Sharfstein.
A stray keystroke here or there has cost an unknown number of Apple Store shoppers dearly, according to security software vendor Symantec, as hackers have constructed a bogus Web site designed to steal the account numbers and PINs of gift card holders. This latest consumer phishing scam uses a typosquatted Web site disguised as an official Apple site to trick users into entering their card numbers and PINs in order check the available balance on gift cards for Apple products.
A British court has convicted Paul Chambers, 26, of sending a menacing Twitter message and fined him £1000 ($1500). On January 6, according to The Register, the closure of an airport in South Yorkshire due to poor weather prompted Chambers to tweet, "Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your s*** together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!"
Twitter users had a big shock when they checked into the micro-blogging service. Their follower and following numbers were at 0, meaning they were suddenly very unpopular or something was seriously wrong with the site.
A Facebook event invitation was sent to some of the over 2,300 friends of Jim Breyer, the Accel Partners venture capitalist who sits on Facebook's board of directors, asking "Would you like a Facebook phone number?" As it turned out, this was a scam: Users who entered their passwords in response to the spoof message from Breyer in turn had the whole thing sent to their friends' lists, too.
Google is suing a blues music label to seek a declaration that it has not facilitated the illegal distribution of copyrighted songs by providing links in search results. Google filed the suit against Blues Destiny Records in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to seek a judgment in a case dropped by BDR in late March.
Nokia Oyj, the world's top handset maker, broadened its patent fight with Apple to include the iPad, deepening the bitter legal disputes between the two smartphone rivals. The firms turned to the courts in the last year as Nokia battles Apple, which only entered the cellphone business in 2007, but has taken a sizeable share of the fat-margined, fast-growing smartphone market.
Four suspects have been charged with first-degree murder in connection with a home invasion that began with an ad on Craigslist, Washington state authorities said. The case began when James Sanders and his wife posted an ad on Craigslist offering a diamond ring for $1,050, said Pierce County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist.
The nonprofit group that manages the Internet's address system announced that the first non-Latin character domain names went live allowing those who speak Arabic to write some Internet addresses in their native language characters. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers said the new Internet addresses, also called domain names, will apply to the country-code Internet addresses belonging to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
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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.