California may end up leading the way in creating laws that could end the siphoning of personal data and surfing habits on the Internet by Web browsers and websites. State Sen. Alan Lowenthal introduced legislation that would create the nation's first formal do-not-track law, an idea that has been mulled over on federal levels for months.
Federal employees are already fretting about a side effect of a possible government shutdown: surrendering their work-issued BlackBerry devices. An administration official said that if the government can't avert a shutdown by the weekend, non-essential workers would be asked to report to work and turn over their BlackBerrys, laptop computers and other devices that allow them to access the office computer systems.
The Comodo Group, an Internet security company, has been attacked in the last month by a talkative and professed patriotic Iranian hacker who infiltrated several of the company’s partners and used them to threaten the security of myriad big-name Web sites. But the case is a problem for not only Comodo, which initially believed the attack was the work of the Iranian government. It has also cast a spotlight on the global system that supposedly secures communications and commerce on the Web.
Google has taken positive steps to combat online piracy and counterfeiting but needs to do more, according to the chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property. "The question isn't so much what Google has done as much as it is what Google ought to do," chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said during opening remarks at a hearing.
Symantec identified more than 286 million new threats in 2010, according to its annual threat security report. Not only were there more threats in 2010, the threats were more sophisticated than before, according to Symantec’s annual Internet Security Threat Report.
All it took was one email to swindle $8 million from publishing company Conde Nast. Papers filed by U.S. prosecutors in Manhattan said the publisher of magazines Vogue, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, was tricked into thinking it was paying its regular printing company but was in fact being billed by a man identified as Andy Surface in Texas.
A federal judge struck down an October 2010 decision that required Apple to hand over $625.5 million for patent infringement relating to its Spotlight, Cover Flow, and Time Machine software. Judge Leonard Davis upheld the patents from Mirror Worlds, but found that Apple did not infringe upon them with its products.
Switzerland's top administrative court backed the Swiss privacy watchdog and ruled against Google Inc.'s Street View map service in Switzerland, saying the service infringes privacy in a ruling. Switzerland's Federal Data Protection Commissioner Hanspeter Thuer and Google had been locked in a battle over the Web giant's popular Street View application ever since the mapping service went live there in 2009.
In what may only be a speed bump in a longer legal battle, a D.C. court of appeals has thrown out Verizon’s challenge to the Federal Communications Commission’s recent net neutrality rules, saying the company filed the lawsuit prematurely. Verizon launched the legal challenge before the rules, which were enacted in December, were filed in the Federal Registry.
Online music provider Pandora Media disclosed in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that it has received a subpoena related to a federal grand jury investigation about sharing customer information in its smartphone app. The company, which filed for an initial public offering with the SEC earlier this year, added the latest tidbit of information regarding the grand jury subpoena to its S-1.
The European Commission, which is urging governments on the Continent to consider using open-source software to make their computer systems more compatible, is negotiating with Microsoft to extend its use of the proprietary Windows operating system on 36,000 government computers, a spokesman said. Antony Gravili, a spokesman for Maros Sefcovic, the commissioner responsible for government administration, said the agreement covers 42 agencies and institutions that comprise the bulk of Europe’s central government.
Google said it is bidding $900 million on the patent portfolio of Nortel, the bankrupt communications technology company. The Internet search giant couched its bid as a preemptive strike to defend against patent litigation.
The man who created the first version of the uber-successful Madden NFL Football video game is suing Electronic Arts over tens of millions of dollars in owed royalties and potentially billions in profits over the franchise, which has sold more than 85 million copies in the more than 20 years since it hit the marketplace. Robin Antonick is demanding a jury trial in California, pressing claims in a lawsuit filed Wednesday that he has been cut out of the Madden franchise fortune.
More than one million website pages have been hit by a sophisticated hacking attack that injects code into sites that redirect users to a fraudulent software sales operation. The so-called "mass-injection" attack, which experts say is the largest of its kind ever seen, has managed to insert malicious code into websites by gaining access to the servers running the databases behind the Internet, according to the technology security company that discovered it.
For years now, big corporations and those with financial stakes in their Web presence have employed handlers to edit their online reputation -- often as part of the array of services offered by a large public relations firm, lawyers or image consultants. But as everyday people began living more of their lives online, whether it’s blogging about dinner or posting vacation photos on Facebook, the downside to oversharing online began to catch up.
News Corp.’s Fox Networks Group told Time Warner Cable Inc. to stop streaming cable channels including FX to its pay-TV subscribers’ iPads, saying such use isn’t authorized. The company sent a letter demanding the New York-based cable operator stop providing the channels, Scott Grogin, a Fox spokesman in Los Angeles, said today in an interview.
It began with a 7-year-old asking her mother to tie colorful “Jolly Rancher” candies to the ends of her braids, copying a hairstyle she had admired in a magazine, for school picture day. But the girl’s mother says a teacher posted pictures of the second grader on Facebook and then led online friends in mocking the hairdo. Now Chicago Public Schools says it’s investigating the incident.
JPMorgan Chase & Co., Kroger Co., Capital One Financial Corp. and TiVo Inc. said they were affected by a security breach that may have enabled an unauthorized person to see some customers' names and e-mail addresses. JPMorgan and Kroger disclosed the accessing of the data, which occurred at Epsilon, a Dallas-based provider of e-mail marketing services.
China's Baidu Inc. has reached a deal with a local music copyright association, in a step toward resolving years of tension with the music industry over the company's music-search service. The online search provider said it will begin to compensate songwriters belonging to the Music Copyright Society of China when users download or stream their songs from Baidu's website.
A lawsuit filed by H-W Technology claims Apple, Research in Motion, Google, and 29 other major technology companies are infringing on a patent it was granted in April of 2009. U.S. patent number 7,525,955, which had first been filed in March 2005, is described as an "Internet protocol (IP) phone with search and advertising capability."
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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.