Facebook Inc. will be probed by European Union data-protection regulators over a feature that uses face-recognition software to suggest people’s names to tag in pictures without their permission. A group of privacy watchdogs drawn from the EU’s 27 nations will study the measure for possible rule violations, said Gerard Lommel, a Luxembourg member of the so-called Article 29 Data Protection Working Party.
Services developed by Apple and Google for people to store photos, music and data online may do more to combat online piracy than regulation can, a U.S. official said. Victoria Espinel, the coordinator of U.S. intellectual property enforcement, said corporate innovation was often more effective than law enforcement or other rules, which are sometimes applied inappropriately.
A former student at a suburban Philadelphia high school has sued his school district for allegedly spying on him and his family using a school-issued Mac laptop, according to court documents. The Lower Merion School District of Ardmore, Pa. was first sued in February 2010 by another student using similar charges.
The FBI plans to step up its focus on fighting computer crime as it grapples with cyber intrusions at companies such as Google and Sony. “We will increasingly put emphasis on addressing cyber threats in all of their variations,” Robert Mueller, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on extending his term.
A blogger sued for defamation over comments posted on an Internet message board is not entitled to the same protections as a journalist, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled. The court said that blogger Shellee Hale's criticism of a software company on a porn industry bulletin board was not covered by the New Jersey press shield law, which protects members of the news media from revealing their confidential sources.
According to the Guardian, 25 percent of all the hackers in the U.S. are actually informants for the federal government. The reason for that, the U.K. publication reports, citing Eric Corley, the publisher of hacker quarterly 2600, is that hackers have become quite easy to break when they're faced with threats of long prison sentences for their alleged crimes.
Nearly three months after RSA Security was breached by hackers, the company has announced it will replace the security tokens for nearly all of its SecurID customers. The move, announced in a letter to customers, comes after news that defense contractor Lockheed Martin was reportedly breached by hackers using duplicates of the SecurID keys that RSA had issued the contractor.
A Russian hacker has reverse-engineered part of Skype's code and posted the results on the internet. His aim: to make Skype open source.
A week after claiming a hacker had posted a lewd photo to his Twitter account, U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner apologized for lying about the ordeal and admitted carrying on inappropriate relationships with several women he'd met online.
Adobe confirmed that the Flash Player bug it patched is being used to steal login credentials of Google's Gmail users. The vulnerability was patched in an "out-of-band," or emergency update.
New York state lawmakers are advancing a bill that would create an "educational reform program" for teenagers who get in trouble for creating and sharing pornographic images of minors. The program, proposed by Assembly Democrats, is intended to give prosecutors and judges a more lenient option for dealing with teenagers accused of "sexting," using their cellphones, email or social-networking sites to distribute naked and sexually explicit pictures of themselves or classmates.
China’s official Communist Party newspaper issued a caustic response to Google’s charge that Chinese hackers had taken aim at influential users of its Gmail service, calling the accusations “political gaming” aimed at fomenting new discord between the Beijing and Washington governments. The newspaper, People’s Daily, published a front-page editorial in its international editions that also suggested that Google’s actions could cost it credibility in the business world.
The hacker group LulzSec said that it hacked Nintendo's U.S. website as a warm-up to its claimed attack on servers used by an FBI-affiliated site. Nintendo has confirmed that servers hosting its American website were indeed hacked, in reports from both the Associated Press and Wall Street Journal, but the company also noted that no company or customer information was stolen in the attacks.
The United States is seriously concerned about cyber-attacks and is prepared to use force against those it considers acts of war, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said at a security meeting in Asia. "We take the cyber threat very seriously and we see it from a variety of sources, not just one or another country," Gates said at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue, an apparent reference to reports that several of the attacks may have originated in China.
The Justice Department is scrutinizing likely bidders for a trove of patents being sold by the bankrupt Canadian telecom-equipment maker Nortel Networks Corp. amid concerns the patents could be used to unfairly hobble competition, according to people familiar with the matter. The antitrust review has enveloped some of the U.S.'s largest technology companies, including Apple Inc. and Google Inc.
A new Apple patent intended for mobile devices could help the music and film industries stop people from illegally recording a concert or a movie playing in a theater. The patent describes an invisible infrared sensor integrated into mobile iOS devices with a built-in camera -- which includes iPhones, the iPod Touch and iPad 2.
A Malaysian social activist is apologizing 100 times on Twitter in an unusual settlement with a magazine publisher in a defamation case, his lawyer said. The penalty has sparked debate among Internet users about the pitfalls of social media in Malaysia, where authorities have repeatedly warned people to be more cautious about they write on blogs, Facebook and Twitter.
About two-thirds of Syria’s Internet networks became unreachable as protests against President Bashar al-Assad intensified. The routes to 40 of 59 networks were withdrawn from the global routing table, security firm Renesys said on its website.
LulzSec, the hacking group that has been identified as being behind the latest attack on Sony, has struck again -- this time targeting a private-sector FBI affiliate called InfraGard. InfraGard is a non-profit organization that connects the business community with law enforcement.
LulzSec, a hacking group that recently made news for hacking into PBS, claimed that it has broken into several Sony Pictures websites and accessed unencrypted personal information on over 1 million people. In a statement, the group claimed that it had also managed to compromise all "admin details," including administrator passwords, as well as 75,000 "music codes" and 3.5 million "music coupons" from Sony networks and websites.
About : Legal Services | Doug Isenberg | Cases & Clients | Firm News
Resources : YouTube Channel | Daily News | Blog | Masterclass | Domain Dispute Digest
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.