The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss -- the former Harvard University classmates of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg -- can't undo their settlement over the social networking site. The appeals court ruled that the twins were savvy enough to understand what they were agreeing to when they signed the agreement in 2008, a deal that called for a $20 million cash payment and a partial ownership of Facebook.
Google falsely claimed that a version of its hosted services for government agencies was certified under a government security standard, according to court documents. Microsoft noticed the false claim in a court filing and quickly pointed it out on its legal and government affairs blog.
Government officials are imposing significant conditions on Google Inc. as they allowed the Internet search leader to proceed with its $700 million purchase of airline fare tracker ITA Software. The purchase will establish the Internet search giant as a key player in online travel.
Federal securities regulators are weighing demands to make it easier for fast-growing companies to use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to raise money by tapping thousands of investors for very small amounts of shares. The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking at adapting its rules to encourage Internet-age techniques for small companies raising capital.
The House of Representatives voted to reject Internet "neutrality" rules that were adopted last year to keep big Internet service providers from blocking certain traffic. House Republicans, in a 240-179 vote, pushed through a measure disapproving the Federal Communications Commission's rules.
Public interest groups are keeping the option of lawsuits against the Federal Communications Commission on the table to fight for stronger Internet "neutrality" rules, an executive at a public interest law firm said. So-called net neutrality rules adopted by the FCC in December would prevent network operators from blocking lawful content but still let them ration access to their networks.
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.
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