A holiday hiatus for spammers appears to be over. Rustock, a network of malware-infected personal computers that is the world’s No. 1 source of spam and is believed to be controlled by Russian cybercriminals, stopped sending spam on Christmas Eve, causing global spam levels to plummet.
Lawyers for Sony Computer Entertainment have asked a San Francisco District Court judge to block the release of code that would enable the "jailbreaking" of the Sony PlayStation 3. SCEA filed suit against George Hotz (AKA "geohot") as well as "Bushing," Hector Martin Cantero, Sven Peter, and others alleged to be part of the FAIL0VERFLOW group of hackers that contributed to the release of the PlayStation 3's root key.
An influential group of European politicians is protesting the U.S. government's attempt to pry WikiLeaks-related information out of Twitter, saying that EU privacy rules may have been violated. The parliamentary maneuver expected tomorrow comes as London-based lawyers for WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange warned that their client could face illegal rendition to the United States, execution, or indefinite detention "at Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere," and a U.K. judge set a two-day extradition hearing to start on February.
Web sites hawking pirated software and other digital goods are luring in about 53 billion visits each year. That's according to a reporr released by MarkMonitor, a company that protects online brands for its corporate customers.
Apple's effort to trademark the name "App Store" has run in to opposition from Microsoft, which argues the phrase is too generic to register and would restrict competitors' ability to use of the term to describe their own services. A week after Apple launched its App Store for iPhone apps in 2008, the company applied for a trademark for "app store," a retail store offering "services featuring computer software provided via the internet and other computer and electronic communication networks," as well as other services, according to its application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Facebook Inc.’s settlement of claims that its founder Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for the social- networking company should be undone, former college classmates of Zuckerberg told an appeals court. The ex-Harvard University classmates, twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, asked a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco to void the 2008 agreement because closely held Facebook, based in Palo Alto, California, didn’t disclose an accurate valuation of its shares before agreeing to pay them $65 million in stock and cash. In the same year, a lower court ruled the accord was binding.
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.
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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.