China is satisfied that U.S. Internet giant Google is complying with Chinese laws after it tweaked the way it directs users to an unfiltered search page, a senior official said. The comments from a Ministry of Industry and Information official largely echoed previous Chinese statements, but are still likely to be seen as good news for the company as Beijing has been coy about its long-term future in China.
CCTV reported that Baidu and other search engines had profited from promoting three websites offering counterfeit drugs that duped more than 3,000 people in China, according to the People's Daily newspaper. Baidu declined to comment on the accusation.
Apple Inc. answered congressional questions about the ways it collects users' precise location information from its mobile devices and computers, highlighting users' ability to opt out of data collection, but acknowledging that it collects and stores "batched" user location data that is not directly associated with a particular identity or device.
Blogetery.com, a blogging platform that claimed to service more than 70,000 blogs, was shut down after FBI agents informed executives of Burst.net, Blogetery's Web host, late on July 9 that links to al-Qaeda materials were found on Blogetery's servers, Joe Marr, chief technology officer for Burst.net, told CNET. Sources close to the investigation say that included in those materials were the names of American citizens targeted for assassination by al-Qaeda.
Security organizations raised Internet threat levels to warn users that they expect widespread attacks using exploits of a just-acknowledged critical bug in all versions of Windows. The Internet Storm Center (ISC) pushed its Infocon threat indicator to "Yellow," a rare move, while Symantec also bumped up the status of its ThreatCon barometer to "Elevated."
Blogetery, a Wordpress platform, has seen its entire community shut down by its host, BurstNET. Subsequent statements by BurstNET indicated that the service was suspended at the request of an unidentified law enforcement agency.
The agency responsible for protecting consumers in the U.S. says defending the interests of teenagers in the online world presents "unique challenges." The deputy director of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission laid out some of those challenges in testimony before a U.S. Congress subcommittee on consumer protection.
Apple has yanked the iChatr app from the App Store, an application designed to bring the functionality of the popular Chatroulette service to one's mobile device. According to the developer, SKJM, "The iChatr application has currently been removed from the App Store due to reports of a number of users exposing themselves during the random video chat sessions."
Jason Chen, the Gizmodo editor whose computer equipment was seized in April as part of an investigation into a missing prototype iPhone 4, has voluntarily agreed to turn over information to authorities. The agreement between Chen and the San Mateo County District Attorney's office, which calls for the DA to drop attempts to search Chen's property, puts an end to the dispute over whether the search of Chen's computer gear was lawful.
A patent infringement lawsuit filed against Amazon.com was a procedural move and not a new lawsuit, according to Discovery Communications Inc., which filed the complaint. Earlier, Reuters reported that Discovery Communications filed a lawsuit accusing Amazon.com Inc of infringing patents covering electronic book delivery and security with its Kindle e-book reader.
Half of Americans who have a profile on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are worried about their privacy, according to a new poll. The Marist survey showed that people over 60 are the most worried about privacy, and women are more concerned than men.
The FCC launched an effort to tap the Universal Service Fund to establish a $400 million program aimed at extending broadband service to rural healthcare providers, CongressDaily reported. The changes, consistent with goals laid out in the commission's 10-year national broadband plan, are aimed at expanding eligible applicants from 9,800 healthcare providers to 12,000 by including providers who may not operate within hospitals, such as skilled nursing facilities, off-site administrative offices and data centers, and renal dialysis centers.
Former security company Finjan has filed a lawsuit against five companies -- McAfee, Symantec, Webroot Software, Websense, and Sophos -- claiming they are in violation of its patents. Finjan is asking for financial damages and an injunction to stop the five security companies from selling software allegedly tied to the patents.
Mozilla has disabled and added to a block list a Firefox add-on that stole log-in information when users visited Web sites, the company says. The software, called Mozilla Sniffer, had been downloaded about 1,800 times in the approximately five weeks it was available on addons.mozilla.org, Mozilla reported in a blog post. Read the article: CNET News
Chinese social networking websites that provide Twitter-like services have suddenly reverted to testing mode and access has been spotty amid reports of a government clampdown. Although Twitter has been banned for more than a year in China, Chinese Internet companies have been quick to fill the void, providing microblogging services that allow users to post frequent updates and follow other posters.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit said the FCC's rules on indecency are too vague and violate the First Amendment, undermining the government's primary tool for policing civility over the airwaves. The ruling questioned how the FCC can single out broadcast TV while most American families subscribe to cable or satellite TV, watch Internet video on cellphones, and play lifelike video games with few standards of decency.
Google broke Australia's privacy law when it collected private information from wireless networks, the country's privacy commissioner said, following an investigation into the Internet giant's "Street View" mapping service. Several other countries are investigating Google over the data collection, and there are growing concerns from regulators and consumer watchdogs worldwide that Google isn't serious enough about people's privacy -- a charge the company denies.
A company called XPRT Ventures says transaction system PayPal knowingly incorporated XPRT's e-commerce technology, for which it had filed for U.S. patents, into its own patent applications back in 2003 -- and has served parent company eBay with a $3.8 billion lawsuit.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts says it's joining a group of other organizations in a legal challenge to a new state law that was intended to ban distribution by the Internet of "matter harmful to minors." The plaintiffs said the law may have been intended to protect children from sexual predators on the Internet, but its effect was much broader, effectively banning from the Internet anything harmful to minors, including material that adults have a right to view.
The U.S. Defense Department and State Department are allowing greater use of Facebook and Twitter, while warily noting that social media can be a boon for spies and "compromise operational security." The State Department released a manual saying that personal use of Facebook and Twitter is permitted on work computers, and the agency "will not arbitrarily ban access to or the use of social media."
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