The ongoing fight between Time Warner Cable and Viacom over whether the former has the right to include Viacom channels on their iPad app is getting more serious... and more litigious. TWC has filed a request that a New York District Court rule its existing carriage agreement with Viacom allows it to stream Viacom's channels on the iPad.
Convicted hacker Albert Gonzalez, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to the massive hacks at TJX, Heartland and numerous retailers, now claims that he thought he was authorized and directed by the government to carry out the illegal activities. In a petition filed last month, first reported by Wired, Gonzalez informed the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts that he would like to withdraw his guilty plea and asked the court to vacate its sentence.
The U.S. Justice Department dismissed as "absurd" any privacy and free speech concerns about its request for access to the Twitter accounts of WikiLeaks volunteers. In a 32-page brief filed in federal court in Virginia, prosecutors characterized their request for a court order as a "routine compelled disclosure" that raises no constitutional issues.
Hewlett-Packard sued a former high-ranking executive who had left to join rival Oracle to stop him from sharing hundreds of documents HP claims he stole from the company. HP claims Adrian Jones, its former head of enterprise sales for the Asia region, stole documents and e-mails on a USB device which contained proprietary and valuable information about HP's products and customers.
Time Warner Cable sought a court ruling affirming its rights to deliver programming of Viacom over its cable systems, according to a lawsuit. The lawsuit said Viacom had threatened legal action against TWC for transmitting Viacom services to TWC cable subscribers who wish to use iPads in their homes as an additional screen to watch their cable service.
Google Inc. and the Justice Department are close to agreeing a legal settlement to avert a court challenge to the company's $700 million acquisition of flight-data company ITA Software, according to people familiar with the matter. Though it isn't finalized, the proposed agreement would allow some government antitrust monitoring of its operations for the first time, potentially setting a benchmark for any future acquisitions by Google.
Social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter can be valuable assets for law enforcement agencies, helping them alert the public, seek information about crimes and gather evidence about the backgrounds of criminal suspects. But the Internet can also get police departments into trouble.
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.
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