The independent film studios suing thousands of alleged file sharers for copyright violations may soon face their own version of Jammie Thomas-Rasset. Attorneys representing some of the people accused of illegal file sharing told CNET that several have refused to settle with the indie studios -- which is what Thomas-Rasset did when she was accused of illegal file sharing by the music industry.
According to a U.N. report, the number of people worldwide with access to the Internet has doubled within the past five years and is expected to surpass 2 billion by the end of 2010. The report comes from the International Telecommunication Union, the Geneva-based telecommunications division of the U.N.
For more than month, the most sensitive personal information of nearly 3,000 members of the Mississippi National Guard was accidentally posted to the brigade's Microsoft SharePoint website, exposing their names, Social Security numbers, home and cell phone numbers to anyone with a browser.
Facebook announced that it has filed suit against two individuals and a company that it says are responsible for propagating deceptive spam offers across the massive social network, including some that encouraged members to spam their friends in turn. "This week, in a U.S. federal court in San Jose, California, we filed three lawsuits alleging violations of our terms and applicable law by defendants attempting to trick people on Facebook into signing up for mobile subscriptions and sending spam to their friends," a blog entry posted by Facebook's security team explained.
The storied domain name sex.com is set to be sold for $13 million, The Register has learned. Bankrupt Escom LLC sex.com's current owner, has sealed a deal to hand over the domain to a company called Clover Holdings Ltd, according to documents filed this week in a California court.
The American Civil Liberties Union argued that network neutrality rules barring broadband providers from discriminating against Internet content are "crucial" to protecting First Amendment rights. The ACLU released a new report that argued for rules that would bar broadband providers from "discriminating against information by halting, slowing, or otherwise tampering with the transfer of any data (other than for legitimate network management purposes)."
Law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, citing lapses in compliance with surveillance orders, are pushing to overhaul a federal law that requires phone and broadband carriers to ensure that their networks can be wiretapped, federal officials say. The officials say tougher legislation is needed because some telecommunications companies in recent years have begun new services and made system upgrades that caused technical problems for surveillance.
A class-action lawsuit accuses Zynga, a Facebook partner and social-games maker, of deliberately sharing personal data of Facebook users. The suit, filed in a San Francisco federal court Nancy Graf of St. Paul, Minn., accuses Zynga of sharing "Facebook data" of its 218 million users.
Students at California state universities are expressing frustration following news that the university system sent a cease-and-desist letter to a new Web site that lets pupils sell their class notes -- in violation of California law, the chancellor's office says. On NoteUtopia, students from about 100 colleges and universities around the country can buy, sell, or simply share their original class notes and reports, as well as handouts, exams released by the professor, and completed study guides.
Google has no plans to resume using its Street View cars to collect information about the location of Wi-Fi networks, a practice that led to a flurry of privacy probes after the company said it unintentionally captured fragments of unencrypted data. The disclosure appeared in a report on Street View released by Canadian privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, who said that "collection is discontinued and Google has no plans to resume it."
A new study on parent-teen attitudes towards online privacy conducted by San Francisco-based privacy group Truste showed that 72 percent of the 1,037 parents with social-networking accounts monitored their teen's social-networking accounts regularly, with 35 percent checking every day. Another 10 percent of parents were even secretly logged into their teen's accounts.
The U.S. government is reviewing an Australian program that will allow Internet service providers to alert customers if their computers are taken over by hackers and could limit online access if people don't fix the problem. Obama administration officials have met with industry leaders and experts to find ways to increase online safety while trying to balance securing the Internet and guarding people's privacy and civil liberties.
Attacks on computer networks are among the biggest emerging threats to the UK, the government has said in its new national security strategy. The report highlights cyber crime, alongside terrorism and a flu pandemic, among the key dangers to UK security.
Two congressmen asked Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg for more details about the way applications on the social network handle user information, which has raised privacy concerns. U.S. Reps. Edward Markey (D., Mass.) and Joe Barton (R., Texas) sent Mr. Zuckerberg a letter expressing concerns that "third-party applications gathered and transmitted personally identifiable information about Facebook users and those users' friends."
Many of the most popular applications, or "apps," on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information -- in effect, providing access to people's names and, in some cases, their friends' names -- to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found. The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook's strictest privacy settings.
Microsoft is vastly expanding its efforts to prevent governments from using software piracy inquiries as a pretext to suppress dissent. It plans to provide free software licenses to more than 500,000 advocacy groups, independent media outlets and other nonprofit organizations in 12 countries with tightly controlled governments, including Russia and China.
Five of Russia's Internet giants have said they cannot be held responsible for copyright violations on their sites and urged rapid changes to outdated laws, in an unprecedented joint statement. The search engines and mail providers, including the Russian unit of Google, said that the legal framework had not kept up with the rapid expansion of the Internet in Russia over the last year.
Google said that it remained on course to begin its Street View mapping service in Germany this year despite the thousands of people who have asked the company to delete their properties. Germany's consumer protection minister, Ilse Aigner, has said "several hundred thousand" Germans have asked Google to remove their properties from Street View.
A Slovakian antivirus company with its American headquarters in San Diego is trying to make good cybersecurity just as much a part of the local fabric as good beaches and Chargers football. Eset launched the Securing Our eCity program with the San Diego Chamber of Commerce two years ago to offer free workshops to consumers and small businesses on how to stay safe online.
A Canadian federal court ruling allows Amazon.com Inc. to patent its "one-click" order process for online shopping, overturning an earlier decision by the federal patent commissioner. The ruling follows a decade-long legal battle by the search-engine giant, which has sought to patent single-click ordering as a proprietary invention.
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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.