Samsung has been cleared of false allegations lodged by a security specialist who claimed that keylogging software was installed on two of the company's laptops. It turns out that a misfiring antivirus program called VIPRE, made by the GFI Software company, falsely identified a Microsoft Windows directory as malicious software.
Chinese authorities found three companies linked to Google Inc. broke tax rules and are investigating possible tax avoidance, a Chinese state-run newspaper said, raising the risk of fresh pressure on the Internet search giant. Google, the world's largest Internet search company, confirmed the three companies were units, but denied the tax violations alleged in the Chinese-language Economic Daily.
Proposed changes to European rules on product returns could cost online retailers 10 billion euros ($14 billion) a year, denting growth and leading to higher prices for consumers, an industry body warned. IMRG, which represents internet retailers, said the cost of draft amendments to the European Union's (EU) Consumer Rights Directive, voted through last week, equated to 4 percent of the estimated value of Europe's e-commerce industry in 2012.
Microsoft plans to file a formal antitrust complaint in Brussels against Google, its first against another company. Microsoft hopes that the action may prod officials in Europe to take action and that the evidence gathered may also lead officials in the United States to do the same.
A panoply of big media giants sent a cease-and-desist letter to Zite, the Apple iPad news reader app. The Washington Post, AP, Gannett, Getty Images, Time, Dow Jones and many other media organizations were part of the action.
A security researcher says he discovered keylogging software installed on two brand-new Samsung laptops that could be used to monitor all activities on the computer remotely. Mohamed Hassan, founder of NetSec Consulting, discovered StarLogger software on Samsung laptops with model numbers R525 and 540 after running security scanning software on the systems when he bought them last month, he writes in a guest column in Network World.
Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc. have both hired linguists to serve as experts in the tech titan's ongoing battle over whether or not the government can grant a trademark for the term "app store." Microsoft filed its latest argument with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which included the opinions of a linguistic expert who supported the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant's argument that the term "app store" was generic and shouldn't be trademarked by Apple.
Google settled with the Federal Trade Commission over charges of deceptive privacy practices in its introduction last year of Buzz, the social networking tool in Gmail. Under the settlement, Google agreed to start a privacy program and undergo privacy audits for 20 years; it faces $16,000 fines for future privacy misrepresentations.
A new Amazon.com Inc. service that lets customers store songs and play them on a variety of phones and computers is facing a backlash from the music industry that could ignite a legal battle. Amazon's Cloud Drive allows customers to store about 1,000 songs on the company's Web servers for free instead of their own hard drives and play them over an Internet connection directly from Web browsers and on phones running Google Inc.'s Android software.
After complaints by Israeli government officials and Jewish organizations in the United States, Facebook took down a page by Palestinian supporters that called for violence against Jews and an uprising against Israel. The page, entitled “Third Palestinian Intifada,” began earlier this month as a call for peaceful protests in the occupied Palestinian territories on May 15, one of more than a dozen Facebook pages that have been used in recent months to mobilize uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa.
Researchers disclosed on a public security e-mail list three vulnerabilities in the Web site of security firm McAfee, whose site has been found to have bugs several times before. The YGN Ethical Hacker Group told the Full Disclosure list that it had reported the problems to McAfee on February 10 and two days later the company said it was working to resolve them.
Nokia Oyj filed a second complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission over claims that Apple Inc.’s iPhone and other products copied its technology, less than a week after Apple won a ruling in a similar case. The new complaint involves seven patents that Nokia said Apple is using “to create key features in its products in the areas of multi-tasking operating systems, data synchronization, positioning, call quality and the use of Bluetooth accessories,” the Espoo, Finland-based handset maker said.
As Middle East regimes try to stifle dissent by censoring the Internet, the U.S. faces an uncomfortable reality: American companies provide much of the technology used to block websites. McAfee Inc., acquired last month by Intel Corp., has provided content-filtering software used by Internet-service providers in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, according to interviews with buyers and a regional reseller.
Companies like Time Warner Cable and Cablevision buy the rights to beam channels to customers’ television sets. But do those rights extend to iPads? That question has divided the television industry in recent weeks, ever since Time Warner Cable started streaming several dozen TV channels to customers’ iPads.
For years the United States and Europe, with around 700 million Internet users between them, have diverged in their approach to policing the Web. But the two sides are converging in their Web privacy positions, partly through intensive meetings in recent months between regulators from Washington and Brussels.
An individual claiming responsibility for generating bogus SSL certificates for Google, Skype, Microsoft Live and Yahoo has identified himself, and surprise, it's not the Iranian Cyber Army. The Comodo attack was not the act of an organized, state-sponsored organization, but a lone hacker interested in bringing down the SSL root certificate system, according to a rambling message filled with grammatical and spelling errors posted online.
Cybercriminals are increasingly moving from stealing just personal data to capturing trade secrets and other corporate intellectual capital that they can easily sell through the underground market, according to a new report from McAfee and the SAIC. In the release of a new study, "Underground Economies: Intellectual Capital and Sensitive Corporate Data Now the Latest Cybercrime Currency", McAfee and the Science Applications International Corporate find that the theft of trade secrets, marketing plans, R&D data, and even source code is on the rise, especially as such information is often unprotected.
India will seek to block the internet's newly-formed red-light district after a global agency governing the web approved .xxx suffix for pornography websites, a senior government official said. "India along with many other countries from the Middle East and Indonesia opposed the grant of the domain in the first place, and we would proceed to block the whole domain, as it goes against the IT Act and Indian laws," said a senior official at the ministry of IT.
Some day soon, when pro-democracy campaigners have their cellphones confiscated by police, they'll be able to hit the "panic button" -- a special app that will both wipe out the phone's address book and emit emergency alerts to other activists. The panic button is one of the new technologies the U.S. State Department is promoting to equip pro-democracy activists in countries ranging from the Middle East to China with the tools to fight back against repressive governments.
A U.S. trade panel judge sided with Apple Inc. in a patent dispute with Nokia Corp., making an initial determination that technology used in popular devices like iPhones and iPods doesn't infringe on the Finnish cellphone maker's patents. James Gildea, an administrative law judge of the U.S. International Trade Commission, found that Apple didn't violate a range of Nokia patents.
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