Major websites are moving to limit the number of tracking technologies like "cookies" spreading on their sites, hoping to keep lucrative data about visitors for themselves -- and avoid privacy risks. More sites are counting the number of tracking tools -- software that can clandestinely monitor people's activities online -- that are being installed on the computers of people who visit the sites.
Facebook Inc., the world's biggest social-networking website, accused the owner of the Boston Phoenix newspaper and WFNX radio station of infringing two patents related to ways to manage information online. Facebook filed the complaint in federal court in Boston against Phoenix Media/Communications Group Inc. and its People2People Group, Tele-Publishing and FNX Broadcasting units.
The global debate over how access to the Internet should be determined and paid for has attracted free speech advocates, telephone network operators and big online businesses like Google and Facebook. This week, arguments over so-called network neutrality move to Brussels, where the European Commission and Parliament are holding a daylong meeting that is expected to draw speakers from industry, government and academia.
Millions of Americans signed up for broadband Internet access over the last decade, but "digital divides" persist between different income levels, ethnic groups and geographical areas of the country, according to a new government report. Some 63.5 percent of U.S. households had broadband Internet access at home in 2009, up from just 9.2 percent in 2001, the U.S. Department of Commerce reported.
The Royal Navy's website has been hacked by a suspected Romanian hacker known as TinKode. The hacker gained access to the website on 5 November using a common attack method known as SQL injection.
A Minneapolis mother is refusing to pay a $1.5 million fine for illegally downloading 24 songs, arguing she simply "can't." Jammie Thomas-Rasset has been battling the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for the last four years in one of the RIAA's "top 3" longest-running cases, an RIAA spokeswoman said, basically since the industry body discovered 1,700 songs in her shared folder on P2P site KaZaA.
"Jihadist content" on a U.S.-based website calling for action against British lawmakers who backed the Iraq War has been removed after Britain contacted U.S. authorities, police said. The RevolutionMuslim.com website printed the details after Roshonara Choudhry was jailed for life for stabbing former minister Stephen Timms twice during an advice surgery in east London in May in revenge for his support for the war.
Microsoft has adopted a hard-line stance against counterfeiting. It has set up a sophisticated anti-piracy operation that dwarfs those of other software makers; the staff includes dozens of former government intelligence agents from the United States, Europe and Asia, who use a host of "CSI"-like forensic technology tools for finding and convicting criminals. But the hunt for pirates carries with it a cost to Microsoft’s reputation.
The prospects for new net neutrality regulations seem somewhat dim these days, given the Federal Communications Commission's failure to move forward with a plan to reclassify broadband access as a telecommunications service. Nonetheless, neutrality advocates are continuing to push the FCC to forge ahead with new rules that would ban Internet service providers from degrading or prioritizing material.
The military's new Cyber Command, responsible for shielding 15,000 military computer networks from intruders, has become fully operational, the Defense Department said. More than 100 foreign intelligence organizations are trying to break into U.S. networks, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn wrote in the September/October issue of the journal Foreign Affairs.
Facebook Inc. told lawmakers it had taken steps to prevent the sharing of personal information about users, including temporarily suspending certain applications from its site. The statements came in response to a letter from U.S. Reps. Edward Markey (D., Mass.) and Joe Barton (R., Texas) to Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, after The Wall Street Journal reported recently that certain applications on Facebook were sending users' ID numbers to marketers, in violation of Facebook's policies.
The European Commission called for stronger protection of Internet users’ personal information, after news of data leaks at companies like Facebook and Google highlighted concerns about digital privacy. Viviane Reding, the justice commissioner, announced its intention to overhaul the European Union’s data protection rules to take account of the development of social networking, personalized advertising and other Web services that have raised privacy concerns.
In a long-awaited decision that could shape the debate over Internet taxes, a New York appeals court reinstated Amazon.com and Overstock's lawsuit claiming a state law forcing them to collect sales taxes was unconstitutional. A New York appeals court ruled 5-0 that "the dismissal of the entire complaint was premature" and that the lawsuit should continue.
Nokia Oyj shouldn’t be found liable of infringing Apple Inc.’s patents, the staff of the U.S. International Trade Commission said as a trial started. “The evidence will not establish a violation” of Apple patent rights, the staff, which acts on behalf of the public as a third party in the case, said in a pre-hearing memo.
A 23-year-old California man is in jail accused of breaking into more than 170 e-mail accounts of women and stealing explicit photos of them, as well as sending the photos to their e-mail contacts and posting them on their Facebook pages.
Continuing its campaign against the defenders of copyright law, Anonymous orchestrated a denial-of-service attack against the website of the U.S. Copyright Office today, knocking the site offline for half an hour and rendering it slow to unusable for a couple of subsequent hours.
British data protection officials said that Google had committed a “significant breach” of privacy laws when its Street View mapping service gathered e-mail messages, computer passwords and other personal information without the owners’ knowledge. Yet Google managed to avoid a fine, with the Information Commissioner’s Office accepting a promise from the company that it would take steps to avoid repeating what it has described as an inadvertent error.
A key Republican lawmaker indicated that Internet privacy could be a legislative priority in the next Congress, as a growing number of data breaches draw increased attention from federal regulators. Rep. Joe L. Barton (Tex.), ranking GOP member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, signaled the legislative push in a statement about his correspondence with Facebook executives on privacy issues.
A mother of four reacted sardonically to a federal jury's decision today on how much she owes the Recording Industry Association of America for copyright infringement damages. The Minneapolis jury determined Jammie Thomas-Rasset was responsible for $1.5 million in damages for distributing 24 songs on the KaZaA peer-to-peer file sharing network.
In a lively and sometimes testy Supreme Court argument over a law banning the sale of violent video games to minors, the justices struggled to define how the First Amendment should apply to a new medium. The law would impose $1,000 fines on stores that sell violent video games to people under 18.
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