Apple defended how it gathers and uses customer-location data in a letter to a U.S. House lawmaker as it prepares to testify at a Senate hearing on mobile privacy. "Consumers are increasingly demanding accurate location information from their handheld devices," including directions to the nearest coffee shop or gas station, Bruce Sewell, Apple's general counsel wrote in a letter to Representative Mary Bono Mack, a California Republican.
Several privacy and civil rights groups voiced support for an online do-not-track bill introduced in the U.S. Senate, saying the legislation would give Web users control over their personal data. Senator John "Jay" Rockefeller's bill would create a national do-not-track mechanism, a "crucial civil liberties protection for the 21st century," said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
A group of hackers that planned an attack against Sony's servers this weekend was unable to execute its plan. CNET has learned that publication of the group's plan may have caused Sony to secure the remaining servers this group claims it had access to, shutting off any avenues for another attack.
Google Inc. lost an attempt to overturn a Belgian ruling that blocked it from publishing links to local newspapers on its online news service. The Court of Appeal in Brussels on May 5 upheld a 2007 lower court ruling that forced Google to remove links and snippets of articles from French- and German-language Belgian newspapers from Google.com and Google.be.
Sony offers U.S. PlayStation and Qriocity customers up to $1 million dollars in identity theft insurance. In a letter posted online, Sony Chairman and CEO, Howard Stringer, apologized for the inconvenience and concern caused by the recent security breach.
Skype plans to push out an important update to its Skype for Mac software that will fix a big that could be leveraged by hackers looking to build a self-copying worm program. Details of the flaw haven't been made public, so it's unlikely that anyone is going to write a worm any time soon.
A draft House bill with bipartisan support would prohibit companies from tracking children on the Internet without parental consent, restrict online marketing to minors and require an "Eraser Button" that would allow parents to eliminate kids' personal information already online. The draft of the "Do Not Track Kids Act of 2011" -- released by Rep. Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican -- would go well beyond existing federal law.
With Red Hat on the verge of becoming the first billion-dollar company focused exclusively on open source software, it has attracted quite a bit of attention -- from lawyers waving patents. Red Hat doesn't need a legal team as big as Microsoft's, but it does spend a lot of time in court, particularly in the Eastern District of Texas, a hotbed of patent lawsuits filed by what Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst and others call "patent trolls."
A federal appeals court is issuing a clear warning to employees: Violate your employer's computer-use policy and be fired. With that in mind, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the firing of a Wisconsin high school biology teacher and union president for viewing thumbnail images of porn for one minute.
A lawyer for Mozilla reported that the company received a takedown request from the Department of Homeland Security for a "MafiaaFire" Firefox add-on that the developer is not acceding to, yet. Harvey Anderson, who works at Mozilla as its vice president of legal affairs and its general counsel, said that the DHS had recently contacted the company to remove the MafiaaFire add-on, which automatically redirects Firefox users to a new domain, if and when authorities seize the original sites, as they have done before.
LastPass, an online password management provider, is forcing its users to change their master passwords after detecting what it described as a "traffic anomaly" on one of its database servers. In a blog post, LastPass said it first noticed a network traffic irregularity when looking at the logs for one of its non-critical systems.
Sony Chief Executive Officer Howard Stringer apologized to users of its PlayStation Network, breaking his silence on one of the biggest Internet security break-ins ever, but failing to provide a date when services would resume. Stringer's comments come after he faced criticism of his leadership since Sony revealed hackers had compromised the data of more than 100 million accounts.
An entrepreneur and over a dozen hip-hop artists are suing CBS over its part in contributing to piracy. The suit, filed by FilmOn founder Alki David in federal court, accuses CBS's CNET arm of exacerbating piracy problem by distributing LimeWire software on its website.
A new California lawsuit accuses Apple, Google, Adobe Systems, Intel, and other tech companies of violating antitrust laws by allegedly conspiring to fix employee pay, as well as working out "no solicitation" deals with one another. The suit, which seeks class-action status, was filed with the California Superior Court in Alameda County and alleges that because senior executives from Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm, and Pixar "entered into an interconnected web of express agreements to eliminate competition among them for skilled labor," affected employees from those companies are entitled to compensation.
Apple released its promised software update for its mobile devices to fix a problem that enabled the iPhone and iPad 3G to collect customers' locations. Last month, the company explained why the devices collected location information, saying it did not track its customers.
A powerful arm of China's government said that it had created a new central agency to regulate every corner of the nation's vast Internet community, a move that appeared to complement a continuing crackdown on political dissidents and other social critics. But the vaguely worded announcement left unclear whether the new agency, the State Internet Information Office, would in fact supersede a welter of ministries and government offices that already claim jurisdiction over parts of cyberspace.
Unsolicited e-mails purporting to show photos or videos of Osama bin Laden's killing may contain computer-damaging and identity-stealing viruses, the FBI said. The malicious software, or "malware," can embed itself in computers and spread to users' contact lists and then -- disguised as the user -- infect the systems of associates, friends and family members, the FBI said.
A Massachusetts judge has ruled that Skyhook Wireless Inc. can move ahead with a discovery phase of its legal case against Google Inc., intended to bolster its claim that the Internet search giant interfered with Skyhook's business partnerships. Boston-based Skyhook sued Google last year, and alleges that Google interfered with Skyhook's ability to have its location-sensing technology placed on mobile devices made by Motorola and Samsung.
The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the security breach at Sony Corp., in which two separate attacks over the last month shut down Sony's PlayStation Network and an online-gaming unit. Federal prosecutors in San Diego are working with FBI agents to look into the alleged hacking crimes, Reuters said.
A U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee is demanding answers from Sony after private information from some 102 million personal accounts was taken by hackers. The questions come as lawyers in Canada have announced they're seeking a $1 billion class action lawsuit against the company which has recently revealed not one, but two massive hacking breaches that left personal information from 102 million gaming accounts available to hackers.
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