A Twitter post from an undergraduate student at Santa Clara University has prompted the school to acknowledge that it asked the FBI to investigate how a few dozen grades were electronically altered. Mark Loiseau, 25, a senior electrical engineering student, received an unpleasant surprise this morning: three FBI agents showed up at his off-campus apartment wanting to have a friendly chat with him.
An organization of state securities regulators, whose goal is to protect investors from fraud, says it has been the victim of an attempted Internet scam. The North American Securities Administrators Association, or NASAA, told the operator of a Web site which represented the "State Securities Commission" to cease operations and to shut the site down.
Google Inc. withdrew its bid to intervene in the government’s lawsuit challenging AT&T Inc.’s proposed purchase of T-Mobile USA Inc., citing a new order on how confidential data will be handled in the case to protect business secrets. Google, in a filing in federal court in Washington, referred to an order signed by U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle that said a so-called non-party must be given notice when confidential material is submitted in the case.
Steam, the online gaming network run by game company Valve, confirmed that its forums had been hacked and warned users to keep a close eye on their credit card statements. The service’s forums had been defaced earlier in the week, resulting in some gamers receiving e-mails from a hacking Web site, Kotaku reported.
Facebook is facing legal action in Germany over its controversial facial-recognition feature. The state data protection authority in Hamburg is preparing to sue the social-networking giant over the feature, which automatically recognizes and tags photos in Facebook users' networks, according to a report in Deutsche Welle.
The U.S. Justice Department will be allowed access to WikiLeaks-related Twitter accounts, including information about what Internet and e-mail addresses are associated with them, a federal district judge ruled. The 60-page ruling from U.S. District Judge Liam O'Grady in Virginia represents a second victory for the Department of Justice, which sought the court order as part of a grand jury probe that appears to be investigating whether WikiLeaks principals including editor Julian Assange violated American criminal laws.
Eighty-seven companies and business association announced that they have formed a coalition to fight a plan that would allow for new domain addresses. The new group lobbying against the change, the Coalition for Responsible Internet Domain Oversight, includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Restaurant Association, the Intellectual Property Owners Association, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the World Federation of Advertisers.
New U.S. Internet traffic rules cleared a hurdle, surviving an attempt by the Senate to block them from taking effect later in the month. President Barack Obama's fellow Democrats in the Senate blocked a Republican-backed resolution to disapprove of the Federal Communications Commission's rules on "net neutrality."
A first-grade teacher in New Jersey who described her students as "future criminals" on Facebook could be fired under a judge's decision after parents complained her remarks were offensive. Administrative Law Judge Ellen Bass ruled that the Paterson teacher, Jennifer O'Brien, "demonstrated a complete lack of sensitivity to the world in which her students live" and recommended that she lose her tenured position.
Canadian patent licensing firm WiLAN Inc said the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office validated most of the claims in one of its key patents, bringing a re-examination process that began in January closer to completion. Broadcom and Intel requested a re-examination of the patent after a Markman ruling last year in cases related to the patent was given in WiLAN's favor.
The European Commission is planning a legal change next year that may prompt U.S. Web giants like Google and Facebook to rethink how they store and process consumer data, raising the prospect of a trans-Atlantic dispute over Internet privacy. The European justice commissioner, Viviane Reding, said she planned to insert wording into a revision of the Continent’s main data privacy law that would require non-E.U. companies to abide by Europe’s stricter rules on data collection or face fines and prosecution.
Facebook Inc. is finalizing a proposed settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over charges that it engaged in deceptive behavior when changing its privacy settings, according to people familiar with the situation. The proposed settlement – which is awaiting final approval from the agency commissioners – would require Facebook to obtain "express affirmative consent" if Facebook makes "material retroactive changes," some of the people said.
A crew of Internet bandits devised an international scheme to hijack more than 4 million computers worldwide so websurfers visiting Netflix, IRS.gov and other popular websites would be rerouted to sites that generated at least $14 million in fraudulent profits, an indictment unsealed in New York alleged. The indictment says 500,000 computers in the United States were infected, including some used by educational institutions, nonprofits and government agencies like NASA.
Google will continue to offer support to firms using its Android system that are involved in legal disputes, its executive chairman Eric Schmidt said, as the Internet giant looks to cement alliances in the face of toughening competition. Schmidt, wrapping up a three-city Asian tour in Taipei, also threw an olive branch to China, with whom Google fell out over hacking and censorship disputes, saying the company "wanted to serve China's citizens within the limits the government allowed."
To sign up some of the estimated 100 million Americans who are not online, the Federal Communications Commission and private providers are trying to make broadband Internet access both less expensive and more valuable. The FCC planned to announce commitments from most of the big cable companies in the United States to supply access for $9.99 a month to a subset of low-income households.
The Federal Trade Commission announced that Skid-e-Kids had agreed to settle its charges that it had allowed children under the age of 13 to register on the site without their parents’ consent, which is against the law. According to the FTC, the site collected the first and last names of its 5,600 underage users, their dates of birth — even the cities in which they lived.
The White House threatened to veto a proposal to overturn the federal government's controversial Net neutrality regulations. Opponents of the rules, which the Federal Communications Commission adopted by a 3-2 party line vote last December, have scheduled a Senate vote that would lift the regulations before they take effect on November 20.
Barnes & Noble is asking the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Microsoft's patent-licensing tactics, accusing the software giant of trying to thwart competition with flimsy infringement claims. "Microsoft is attempting to raise its rivals' costs in order to drive out competition and deter innovation in mobile devices," Barnes & Noble lawyer Peter T. Barbur wrote in an October 17 letter to Gene I. Kimmelman, the chief counsel for competition policy in the Justice Department's antitrust division.
Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., are expected to introduce legislation that would close a loophole that now allows some Internet retailers to avoid collecting sales taxes from out-of-state customers. The bipartisan Senate bill is similar, though not identical, to a measure introduced last month in the House by Reps. Steve Womack, R-Ark., and Jackie Speier, D-Calif., that would let states make online retailers collect sales taxes from out-of-state customers.
In a case that raises questions about the use of “supercookies” to track users online, the Federal Trade Commission said that it reached a settlement with an online advertiser the commission had charged with deceiving customers by using a type of tracker called a Flash cookie. According to the FTC complaint, ScanScout, an advertising network that places video ads on websites, instructed its consumers via its privacy policy page that they could opt out of receiving targeted ads by “changing your browser settings to prevent the receipt of cookies.”
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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.