Two men described as "Internet trolls" have been charged with allegedly hacking AT&T's servers to obtain the information of 120,000 iPad users, including some boldface names like Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Obama's former chief of staff. The hack attack occurred during the initial release of Apple's tablet computer, court documents state.
Facebook is temporarily putting the kibosh on a new tweak that gave apps the ability to capture someone's cell number and address. The new change expanded on the information already available to third-party app developers based on a user's permissions.
A prominent Republican politician laid out a new conservative manifesto: How not to regulate the Internet. "We must defend against Washington's instinct to hyper-regulate all that is new and imperfectly understood," Rep. Marsha Blackburn said at the State of the Net conference.
The Italian antitrust authority said that it had ended an investigation into Google’s Internet news service after the company took steps to ease newspaper publishers’ concerns about control over their content and the sharing of advertising revenue. The Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers had complained to the regulator in 2009 about Google News, contending that its members were unable to remove articles from the service without pulling them out of Google’s main search engine, a move that would cost them advertising revenue.
A legal case pitting Internet search giant Google Inc. against Spain's privacy laws will be heard by a Spanish court, a Google spokeswoman said. The case, a significant test of tightening privacy laws in the developed world, stems from a 2008 Google challenge to Spain's Agency of Data Protection, a government organization that deals with complaints from citizens over the handling of their personal data on the Internet.
A tweak to Facebook's permissions and privacy settings means third-party developers can now access your home address and phone number, warned security firm Sophos. Facebookers now expressly grant third-party apps like Farmville and sites the right to see your address and phone number via the standard permissions dialogue -- although the social network maintained that the new changes would not provide access to the data of a user’s friends.
A proposed U.S. Internet "kill switch" to be used in the event of a cyberwar could actually cause more problems than it would prevent, a new report commissioned by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has argued. The report for the OECD by the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford looked at the potential of cyber-events to cause major disruption and found a tendency to exaggerated language, an over-reliance on military concepts of war and defence and plenty of confused thinking.
Research In Motion Ltd. is committed to Indonesia and will comply with the government’s request that it block pornographic websites on its BlackBerry browsers, RIM Southeast Asia Managing Director Gregory Wade said. Wade and other executives from Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM met with government officials in Jakarta to discuss the request, after Communication and Information Technology Minister Tifatul Sembiring said RIM has until Jan. 21 to begin filtering porn sites or face legal action including revocation of its license to operate in the country.
Las Vegas copyright enforcement company Righthaven LLC is now suing individual message-board posters, not just website operators. Righthaven, which files copyright infringement lawsuits over unapproved online postings of material from the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Denver Post, filed seven infringement lawsuits in U.S. District Court for Nevada, lifting its lawsuit total since March to at least 203.
Intel has reached a settlement with WiLAN over lawsuits alleging the chipmaker infringed on a string of wireless and Internet patents, sending WiLAN's shares surging. WiLAN said the deal would not lessen its resolve to go after Intel's co-defendants, including Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard.
Microsoft scored a notable victory in the war on so-called cybersquatters when Seattle federal district court judge Ricardo Martinez issued a 9-page opinion allowing Microsoft to proceed with what he called "a novel cause of action for contributory cybersquatting." Microsoft argued in an amended complaint that Digispace and yMultimedia "actively and intentionally induced others" to infringe and cybersquat on Microsoft trademarks by providing instruction on how to do so, purportedly as a way for squatters increase traffic to their own sites.
Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., plans to pick up where he and former Rep.Rick Boucher, D-Va., left off in the last Congress in trying to craft an online privacy bill. Stearns is reworking the draft bill he helped develop with Boucher, who was defeated in November, to address concerns raised about the measure in comments provided to the lawmakers last year.
A hacker sued by Sony for circumventing the PlayStation 3's protections against pirated software is claiming he had the right to alter the video-game console he had purchased legally. George Hotz, best known for hacking the Apple iPhone in 2007, was named as a defendant with two other hackers and 100 "John Does" in a complaint Sony filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.
The European Commission released the results of a survey it conducted that found while most software programs it tested do a good job of blocking kids from accessing certain websites, they are less effective at blocking access to social networking sites and blogs. The commission, the European Union's regulatory arm, analyzed 25 parental control tools for personal computers, three aimed at video game consoles and two for mobile phones and found that 84 percent are good at allowing parents to block access to certain websites, but at least 20 percent of sites offering "unsuitable" material for kids could pass through the filters, while blocking sites targeted for children.
The Justice Department is laying the groundwork for a potential court challenge to Google Inc.'s acquisition of a travel-software company that powers some of the most popular Internet airline-ticket search and booking sites, people familiar with the matter said. Justice Department staff lawyers have begun preparing legal documents for use in a possible court challenge to the $700 million deal for ITA Software Inc., but no decision to proceed has been made, one of the people familiar with the matter said.
European antitrust investigators are asking advertisers whether Google suggested they increase spending with the company in return for improved visibility in its Web search results. The investigators are also examining whether Google stymied companies who had tried to move their business elsewhere.
BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion wants 18-24 months to address security concerns raised by Indian agencies who have been demanding access to its corporate email services, two newspapers reported. The Economic Times and Mint cited minutes of a meeting between the company, the government and security officials held on December 29 as their source.
A California man has pleaded guilty to charges that he broke into the e-mail accounts of thousands of women, scouring them for nude photos that he then posted to the Internet. George Bronk, 23, was arrested in late October after police found evidence that he'd hacked into more than 3,200 e-mail accounts.
A federal grand jury in San Francisco has indicted a president of a Taiwanese technology company on a price-fixing charge. Ding Hui Joe, also known as David Joe, of Hannstar Display Corp. was charged with a participating in a global conspiracy to fix prices of thin-film transistor liquid crystal display panels, which are the flat display screens used in many laptop computers, cell phones and new TVs.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation asked the administrator of an Internet game to hand over records of communications by Jared Loughner, following a Wall Street Journal article describing disturbing messages the accused shooter wrote over a three-month period last year. In an interview, David McVittie, the administrator of the Web game Earth Empires, said he was contacted by the FBI, which requested the files, including 131 messages that Mr. Loughner wrote.
About : Legal Services | Doug Isenberg | Cases & Clients | Firm News
Resources : YouTube Channel | Daily News | Blog | Masterclass | Domain Dispute Digest
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.