A coalition of self-described public interest groups is urging federal regulators to investigate wireless provider MetroPCS for blocking certain Internet content. In a letter, the groups accuse MetroPCS of violating recently enacted net neutrality rules that prohibit anti-competitive blocking and degrading of competing online services and are enforceable by the Federal Communications Commission.
Two prominent WikiLeaks supporters in the Netherlands and Iceland are consulting U.S. lawyers about ways to stop the Justice Department getting their Twitter records in a probe into the leak of secret documents. Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch Internet activist who worked with WikiLeaks last year, said he and Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of Iceland's Parliament, want to quash a December 14 U.S. court order requiring Twitter to turn over their account records to U.S. prosecutors.
Microsoft turned to a new defensive measure to help users ward off ongoing attacks exploiting a known bug in Internet Explorer. As expected, the company also patched three vulnerabilities in Windows.
The U.S. Senate judiciary committee will take another crack at arming the government with broad antipiracy powers. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the judiciary committee's chairman, said that the government must take action against "online criminals" who harm American jobs by obtaining the nation's intellectual property without paying for it. Leahy made the statements as he laid out the committee's agenda for this session of Congress.
According to a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Tunisian government appears to be breaking into the Facebook, Google, and Yahoo accounts of dissidents and journalists. Hackers with unusual levels of access to Tunisia's state-control network infrastructure have managed to gain access to Facebook accounts belonging to individuals such as journalists Sofiene Chourabi of al-Tariq al-Jadid (New Path; a newspaper affiliated with the opposition Movement Ettajdid party) and independent video journalist Haythem El Mekki, while gaining the passwords of others.
Companies like Google that digitize artworks and books from public bodies should allow other companies and institutions to commercialize those materials after seven years, three experts advising the European Commission said. The experts, including Maurice C. Lévy, the chairman and chief executive of Publicis, a communications and advertising company based in Paris, also encouraged the emergence of additional innovative companies besides Google to help digitize Europe’s cultural heritage.
Research In Motion Ltd. said it will implement Internet filtering in Indonesia "as soon as possible," after a minister threatened to shut down Internet browsing on BlackBerry smartphones if the company didn't block websites that have pornography. It will be the first time the company will apply Internet filtering in any country, according to a RIM executive in Indonesia.
As Internet services -- allowing people to store e-mails, photographs, spreadsheets and an untold number of private documents -- have surged in popularity, they have become tempting targets for law enforcement. Many Internet companies and consumer advocates say the main law governing communication privacy -- enacted in 1986, before cellphone and e-mail use was widespread, and before social networking was even conceived -- is outdated, affording more protection to letters in a file cabinet than e-mail on a server.
U.S. prosecutors’ demand that the microblogging service Twitter Inc. hand over data about users with ties to WikiLeaks amounts to harassment, said a lawyer for Julian Assange, the website’s founder. The Justice Department subpoena, approved last month in federal court and later unsealed, also violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable government searches, Assange’s lawyer Mark Stephens said today in a telephone interview in London.
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal from the country’s four largest music labels, refusing to block a suit accusing them of conspiring to fix Internet song prices. Units of Sony Corp., Vivendi SA, Warner Music Group Corp. and EMI Group Ltd. argued unsuccessfully that the allegations in the consumer complaint aren’t sufficient to suggest the companies engaged in misconduct.
Prosecutors investigating the disclosure of thousands of classified government documents by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks have gone to court to demand the Twitter account activity of several people linked to the organization, including its founder, Julian Assange, according to the group and a copy of a subpoena made public.
Google has taken a step to stop legitimate e-mail messages sent by its Apps customers from getting caught in spam filters. Administrators for Google Apps can now enable digital signing of those messages, which helps recipients verify that the messages came from a known, vetted sender, wrote Adam Dawes, a Google Enterprise product manager on a company blog.
Only hours after it launched, the Mac App Store ran into some serious piracy problems. Hackers claimed to have found a way to download pay apps for free from the new store by cutting and pasting code from free apps to paid apps.
President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said. It's "the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government" to centralize efforts toward creating an "identity ecosystem" for the Internet, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said.
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.
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