Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal issued the equivalent of a subpoena, demanding access to personal data improperly collected by Google Inc. for its Street View mapping service. Blumenthal said in a statement that his office has issued a civil investigative demand in cooperation with the Department of Consumer Protection, as a result of Google's refusal to provide access to e-mails and other data that the company has said was collected inadvertently.
A plan to give wireless networks more flexibility than their landline counterparts in proposed Internet rules is being questioned by Federal Communications Commission member Mignon Clyburn. In remarks prepared for a conference, Clyburn said it was essential that wireless networks "grow in an open way just as our wired ones have."
The author of a WikiLeaks-related e-book has removed the publication from Amazon amidst a controversy surrounding its sale. "We did not remove the title, and are verifying that it was removed from sale by the author," an Amazon spokesman said via e-mail.
Dutch authorities said that they have arrested a 16-year old hacker involved in the pro-WikiLeaks attacks on the Web sites of MasterCard and PayPal. The Dutch National Prosecutors Office said that the teen, who was not named, was arrested by a high-tech crime team.
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, famously portrayed by Armie Hammer in The Social Network, aren't finished with their legal action against Facebook. The 29-year-old twins, seemingly unsatisfied with their $65 million they won in 2008, are embroiled in ongoing litigation against Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg claiming that they were lied to about the company's value, according to recently leaked court documents.
Targeting Amazon and its retail partners, cybercriminals are using a phony Amazon receipt generator to print bogus receipts, and then are asking for refunds from the retailer, claiming that the items they ordered were never received.
Las Vegas copyright enforcement company Righthaven LLC filed its second copyright infringement lawsuit over Denver Post material, this time suing a big target: Drudge Report operator Matt Drudge. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for Nevada, charges a Nov. 18 Denver Post "illustration" called "Transportation Security Administration agents perform enhanced pat-downs" was posted without authorization the same day on the Drudge Report website as well as the drudgereportarchives.com site.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) hasn't folded yet in his effort to make Internet poker legal, Reid spokesman Tom Brede tells Washington Wire. Mr. Brede said in an e-mail that Mr. Reid is "still working on" passing the online poker bill.
A senior Department of Homeland Security official said that the U.S. government is seeing a rise in cyber attacks aimed at taking over control systems that operate critical infrastructure, such as industrial facilities and pipelines. Greg Schaffer, assistant secretary for the DHS Office of Cybersecurity and Communications, said the government is tracking more and more cyber attacks that have a greater level of sophistication and are tailored to target specific types of industrial infrastructure, such as power grids.
The explosion of blogging, tweeting and other online diversions has reached into U.S. jury boxes, raising serious questions about juror impartiality and the ability of judges to control courtrooms. A Reuters Legal analysis found that jurors' forays on the Internet have resulted in dozens of mistrials, appeals and overturned verdicts in the last two years.
Customs officials in Shenzhen, a southern Chinese city just across the border from Hong Kong, recently caught 14 housewives trying to carry 88 iPads and 340 mobile phones into China, in a bust worth 950,000 yuan, or roughly $143,000, the Guangzhou Daily reported. One woman had 65 mobile phones strapped around her waist and over 20 more in a handbag, according to the newspaper.
Intellectual Ventures, the big investment firm that has bought up 30,000 patents and headed by Microsoft's former chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold, filed three separate patent infringement suits against nine companies. The three suits cover security software, standard memory and flash memory chips, and field-programmable gate array chips (specialized chips used in products including cellphones, aerospace and defense weaponry, and medical imaging equipment).
The European Commission imposed fines on five South Korean and Taiwanese companies for fixing the prices of liquid crystal display panels in popular devices like flat-screen televisions, computers and notebook devices. The fines, totaling €649 million or $859.6 million, were related to violations dating back to 2001, when the companies started meeting to fix prices of LCD screens.
A small army of activist hackers orchestrated a broad campaign of cyberattacks in support of the beleaguered antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks, which has drawn governmental criticism from around the globe for its release of classified American documents and whose founder, Julian Assange, is being held in Britain on accusations of sex offenses. Targets included Mastercard.com, which stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks; Amazon.com, which revoked server space from the group; the online payment service PayPal, which cut off its commercial cooperation; the lawyer representing the two Swedish women who have accused Mr. Assange in the sex case; and PostFinance, the Swiss postal system’s financial arm, which closed Mr. Assange’s account after saying he provided false information by saying that he resided in Switzerland.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will likely approve a compromise network neutrality proposal from its current chairman later this month with the support of many large broadband providers, said Michael Powell, former chairman of the agency. Powell, a Republican, questioned the need for new net neutrality rules, but he suggested that long-term uncertainty over the proposed regulations has held back investment in the telecom industry.
The group that manages the Internet's domain name system is meeting in Catagena, Colombia, where its board is expected to take up a controversial proposal that could dramatically increase the number of generic Internet domain names available to users. The Commerce Department has raised several concerns with the proposal, which would expand the number of generic top-level domains, such as .com and .info, from the current 21 to perhaps hundreds or more.
The FBI has issued a "cyber crime alert" for a new Barbie doll that comes equipped with a tiny hidden video camera in her chest, saying the toy could be misused to make child porn. The report, issued by the FBI's Sacramento field office November 30 and titled "Barbie 'Video Girl' a Possible Child Pornography Production Method," warns that the doll's camera captures up to 30 minutes of footage that can be downloaded to a computer.
Microsoft Corp. said it will include a privacy feature in its Internet Explorer that would let users list websites that can't track them. It is similar to a key feature it dropped in an earlier version of the Web browser after a heated debate with advertisers.
A new virus is infecting Twitter users through the use of URLs shortened by the goo.gl service. The virus is spreading as a result of users clicking on links that start with http://goo.gl, Google's URL shortener.
Swirling rumors that pedophiles are behind a viral Facebook campaign are unfounded, according to a company spokesman. The campaign, which has been actively gaining momentum in the past month, urges users to swap a cartoon character for their usual profile picture and boasts more than 150,000 "likes" among its Facebook pages.
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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.