Regulators' new rules for Internet lines are likely the start of a greater effort by the government to more closely oversee such channels, broadband industry lobbyists said. The Federal Communications Commission's new rules are "an initial foray" by the agency to police Internet lines, but changes may need to be made in the future as the Internet develops said Rick Whitt, Google Inc.'s top policy lawyer, during a panel at the Consumer Electronics Show.
The number of spam e-mail messages circulating on the Internet tumbled at the end of December after the world’s largest spamming operation mysteriously went dark on Christmas Eve. A network of malware-infected computers known as the Rustock botnet, which is widely believed to be Russian-operated and had been responsible for about half of all spam globally, “appears to have completely gone off the map and is yet to resume,” said Matt Sergeant, senior anti-spam technologist at MessageLabs, a unit of the security-software maker Symantec.
China's largest online auction site is selling around 50,000 iTunes accounts linked to stolen credit cards, China's GlobalTimes.com has learned. "Of course these accounts are hacked, otherwise how could they be so cheap?" a rep told GlobalTimes.com, but refused to explain how the accounts were obtained.
Facebook and two groups representing state attorneys general and chief information officers have reached an agreement aimed at resolving state concerns over the social media site's terms of service. The National Association of State Chief Information Officers and the National Association of Attorneys General said the agreement will apply to states already on Facebook, and they expect it will serve as a model to be used by other states as they move to set up pages on Facebook.
U.S. regulators are asking software developers in an "Open Internet Challenge" to create apps that let Internet users know when their service provider -- fixed or mobile -- is interfering with content. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is trying to get consumers to help police Internet service providers for network management abuses such as slowing bandwidth-hogging content from movies.
Google scored a small victory in its government contracting race with Microsoft when a federal judge ordered the Interior Department to rethink an e-mail services contract it plans to put up for bid. Google had said the proposed terms were unfairly designed against it, arguing in a lawsuit in November the Interior Department acted in an "arbitrary and capricious" manner by only considering proposals based on Microsoft technology.
Key websites of the Tunisian government have been taken offline by a group that recently attacked sites and services perceived to be anti-WikiLeaks. Sites belonging to the Ministry of Industry and the Tunisian Stock Exchange were amongst seven targeted by the Anonymous group.
Skype's partner in China, TOM Group, said the Web-based calling service is complying with Chinese law, even as a crackdown on illegal Internet telephone providers could complicate Skype's operations in the country. The comments from TOM Group, which is 51 percent owned by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing, came as potential investors in Skype's planned $1 billion initial public offering year fret that any ban on Internet telephone services in China could exclude the company from of the world's largest Internet market.
An appeals court sided with Uniloc in its patent-infringement lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. A lower court ruled that Microsoft did not infringe a Uniloc patent designed to prevent software piracy.
Microsoft confirmed an unpatched vulnerability in Windows just hours after a hacking toolkit published an exploit for the bug. A patch is under construction, but Microsoft does not plan to issue an emergency, or "out-of-band," update to fix the flaw.
A security researcher who created a tool he used to find numerous bugs in major browsers has released it to the public, saying the importance of its distribution is heightened by the leak to the Web of an unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer. Michal Zalewski, a Google security researcher based in Poland, announced in a blog post that he was releasing a tool called "cross_fuzz" and said its distribution was a priority because at least one of the vulnerabilities discovered by the tool appears to be known to a mysterious third party.
LimeWire, the popular file-sharing service that allows people to transfer music, movies and TV shows free of charge over the Internet, is looking to get court-ordered subpoenas that require third parties to open up about their dealings with the record industry. After U.S. District Court Judge Kimba Wood delivered what was essentially a death penalty for LimeWire for copyright violations with an injunction against the company in October, the case moved onto the next question: How much money should LimeWire pay the record industry for its misdeeds?
The United States International Trade Commission has announced that it will launch an investigation into various chips and memory controllers and products that contain them, including PC motherboards, modems, routers and computers, following a complaint filed by Rambus Inc.
A team of 15 to 20 top Bank of America officials, led by the chief risk officer, Bruce R. Thompson, has been overseeing a broad internal investigation to protect against an attack by WikiLeaks -- scouring thousands of documents in the event that they become public, reviewing every case where a computer has gone missing and hunting for any sign that its systems might have been compromised. It has also sought advice from several top law firms about legal problems that could arise from a disclosure, including the bank’s potential liability if private information was disclosed about clients.
Microsoft's Malware Protection Center issued a warning that it has spotted malicious code on the Internet that can take advantage of a flaw in Word and infect computers after a user does nothing more than read an e-mail. The flaw was addressed in November in a fix issued on Patch Tuesday, but with malicious code now spotted in the wild, the protection center apparently wants to be sure the update wasn't overlooked.
The FBI raided a Dallas firm last month and seized two hard drives from a server officials suspect was used to coordinate attacks against PayPal for cutting off payments to WikiLeaks, according to an FBI affadavit published by The Smoking Gun. According to the affadavit, members of the hacker group Anonymous used Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to coordinate attacks against corporations who cut off relationships with WikiLeaks under the moniker "Operation Payback."
More than 60,000 Web sites were shut down and about 350 million pieces of pornographic and indecent content were eliminated from the Internet in 2010, China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported. Police investigated 2,197 cases involving 4,965 people suspected of disseminating pornography via the Internet or cell phone in violation of China law, according to the report.
Recently, twin brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss considered dropping their effort to unwind a settlement agreement with Facebook, and went as far as drafting a statement to that effect, according to people close to the case. They decided, though, to keep fighting.
China may soon ban Skype, the government's official newspaper said, potentially putting the popular Internet chat and phone service in the same boat as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. According to the People's Daily, Chinese authorities have said that only China Telecom and China Unicom will be allowed to provide Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services to customers.
Those obsessed with where Google ranks their Web site have a new topic to mull over: cloaking. Google's Matt Cutts, in charge of much of the search giant's antispam efforts, tweeted that Google plans to take a closer look at the practice of "cloaking," or presenting one look to a Googlebot crawling one's site while presenting another look to users.
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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.