Sen. Chuck Grassley’s Twitter account was hacked by a person claiming to be in Osage and affiliated with the Internet hacker group Anonymous. The thrust of the hacking, besides having a little fun at the senator’s public expense, seems to be urging Iowans not to support several bills, notably the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP ACT, two controversial proposals on Internet regulation.
Polish officials vowed to stick to plans to sign an international copyright treaty that has outraged Internet activists and prompted an attack on government websites. A government minister, Michal Boni, defended the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, and said that signing the international treaty would not hamper Internet usage and that Poland will sign it as planned.
Businesses collectively spend billions of dollars each year beefing up security on their computer systems and employee laptops, but rarely do they give much thought to the ease with which anyone can penetrate a videoconference room where their most guarded trade secrets are openly discussed.
The founder of file-sharing website Megaupload was ordered to be held in custody by a New Zealand court, as he denied charges of Internet piracy and money laundering and said authorities were trying to portray the blackest picture of him. Prosecutor Anne Toohey argued at a bail hearing that Kim Dotcom, a German national also known as Kim Schmitz, was a flight risk "at the extreme end of the scale" because it was believed he had access to funds, had multiple identities and had a history of fleeing criminal charges.
A consumer group penned a letter to European regulators asking them to block the pending merger of Google and Motorola Mobility on anticompetitive grounds. "The Internet is too important to allow an unregulated monopolist to dominate it," John M. Simpson, director of Consumer Watchdog's Privacy Project, wrote to the EU's competition commissioner, Joaquin Almunia.
In the summer of 2007, Apple's Steve Jobs received a note from then-Palm chief executive Ed Colligan, according to correspondence revealed in a lawsuit over employee poaching. "Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other's employees, regardless of the individual's desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal," Colligan wrote to the now-deceased Apple chief.
If Megaupload is guilty, then who among its brethren is innocent? Many companies have crowded into the online storage market recently, most of them aimed at consumers and businesses that want convenient ways to get big data files out of their teeming in-boxes, off their devices and into the cloud -- perhaps so that friends or co-workers can download them.
Social gaming giant Zynga Inc. may be getting ready to place a bet on Internet gambling. Zynga's exploration of online gambling comes amid growing belief that individual states will allow some forms of Internet betting.
A German court ruled against Samsung Electronics Co in a patent suit versus Apple, another leg in a long legal battle as the two technology giants jostle for top spot in the booming smartphone and tablet markets. Samsung, which passed Apple in the third quarter as the world's top maker of smartphones, is locked in a bruising patent tussle with the U.S. firm in some 10 countries from the United States to Australia, France and Japan.
Federal authorities said they were investigating disruptions to the Justice Department website and threats to the site maintained by the FBI believed to be prompted by the arrests of four suspects as part of a far-reaching Internet piracy investigation. Federal authorities said they were investigating disruptions to the Justice Department website and threats to the site maintained by the FBI believed to be prompted by the arrests of four suspects as part of a far-reaching Internet piracy investigation.
Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, called off a scheduled vote on the online antipiracy bill that had rallied the World Wide Web and rocked Capitol Hill, and House leaders took steps to slow legislation as well. In the House, Representative Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, called off plans to formally draft his version of the antipiracy bill next month.
Delhi High Court has postponed until early February hearings on petitions by Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. to quash criminal proceedings against them in a widely-watched Web censorship case. If the petitions fail, those Internet companies and several others will have to face trial in a New Delhi court in March.
Apple Inc. filed another suit in Germany, seeking to ban sales of Samsung Electronics Co.’s smartphones, including the Galaxy S Plus and the S II, extending the global legal dispute between the two companies. The action targeting 10 smartphone models was filed in the Dusseldorf Regional Court and is based on Apple’s design rights, court spokesman Peter Schuetz said.
Federal prosecutors in Virginia have shut down one of the world's largest file-sharing sites, Megaupload.com, and charged its founder and others with violating piracy laws -- a day after a 24-hour blackout of popular websites such as Wikipedia drew national attention to the issue. The indictment is among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States, according to the FBI.
China will expand nationwide a trial program that requires users of the country’s wildly popular microblog services to disclose their identities to the government in order to post comments online, the government’s top Internet regulator said. The official, Wang Chen, said at a news conference that registration trials in five major eastern Chinese cities would continue until wrinkles were worked out.
China's Commerce Ministry expressed opposition to the U.S. Trade Representative's recent inclusion of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s Taobao e-commerce operation on a list of "notorious markets" for piracy. The ministry also called for the U.S. to be more objective in judging China's record on intellectual-property rights.
Online protests quickly cut into Congressional support for online antipiracy measures as lawmakers abandoned and rethought their backing for legislation that pitted new media interests against some of the most powerful old-line commercial interests in Washington. Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah and one of the Senate bill’s original co-sponsors, called it “simply not ready for prime time” and withdrew his support.
Suspicion is growing that operatives in China, rather than India, were behind the hacking of emails of an official U.S. commission that monitors relations between the United States and China, U.S. officials said. News of the hacking of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission surfaced earlier this month when an amateur "hacktivist" group purporting to operate in India published what it said was a memo from an Indian Military Intelligence unit to which extracts from commission e-mails were attached.
Prosecutors charged a computer programmer with stealing software code valued at nearly $10 million from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They charged Bo Zhang, who worked as a programmer at the bank, with illegally copying software to an external hard drive, according to a criminal complaint filed in District court.
New international laws are not needed to protect human rights online, even as they are increasingly under attack, a top State Department official said. Kicking off the annual State of the Net Conference, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Michael Posner said governments should not feel entitled to repress human rights.
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