To the list of woes buffeting Motorola Mobility’s little-loved Xoom tablet, add this: the company sold a batch of used ones without first wiping out all the prior owners’ personal data. Motorola Mobility said 100 of about 6,200 it sold through Woot.com from October to December still may have contained email and social media account passwords as well as other personal ephemera.
Internet giants Google and Facebook removed content from some Indian domain websites following a court directive warning them of a crackdown "like China" if they did not take steps to protect religious sensibilities. The two are among 21 companies ordered to develop a mechanism to block material considered religiously offensive after private petitioners took them to court over images deemed offensive to Hindus, Muslims and Christians.
A group linked to the hacker network Anonymous said that it had attacked the Swedish government's website, bringing it down for periods of time by overloading it with traffic. CyberForce used Twitter to claim responsibility, saying, "We have succeeded in the attack against the government."
Samsung Electronics Co., in its first acknowledgment of the European Commission's antitrust investigation of its patent licensing practices, said it believed the commission would ultimately conclude the company complies with the rules. The investigation arose out of Samsung's dispute with Apple Inc. over trademarks and patents that cover smartphones and tablet computers.
European governments, supported by the top justice official in the European Union, are pressing Google to halt coming changes to its privacy policies while they investigate the implications for personal data protection. The move is a shot across the bow for a range of companies, including Facebook, that rely on the European market of 500 million people for a hefty chunk of their business.
With worries growing over computer hacking, data theft and the risk of digital attacks destroying essential systems, western states and their allies are co-operating closer than ever on cyber security. But as they do so, the gulf between them and China and Russia -- blamed for many recent hacks and with a very different and much more authoritarian view over the future of the Internet -- grows ever wider.
Internet activist group Anonymous published a recording of a confidential call between FBI agents and London detectives in which the law-enforcement agents discuss action they are taking against hacking. British police said they were investigating reports of the illegally recorded call, and the FBI said a criminal investigation was under way into the incident.
A virus has attacked the computer network of a job-development agency in the Commerce Department, forcing it to block employees from the Internet for nine days. The attack, discovered two weeks ago, targeted computers at the Economic Development Administration, which is responsible for making business-development grants to distressed communities to help them create jobs.
South Korean prosecutors indicted a social media and freedom-of-speech activist for reposting messages from the North Korean government’s Twitter account. Park Jung-geun, 23, a photographer who specialized in taking pictures of babies, was detained last month on charges of violating South Korea’s controversial National Security Law, which bans “acts that benefit the enemy” -- North Korea -- but does not clearly define what constitutes such acts.
A Paris court ordered Google France and its parent company Google to pay plaintiff Bottin Cartographes 500,000 euros (about $660,000) for providing its free mapping services to businesses across the country. The court also required Google to pay a 15,000 euro fine for its practice.
VeriSign Inc, the company in charge of delivering people safely to more than half the world's websites, has been hacked repeatedly by outsiders who stole undisclosed information from the leading Internet infrastructure company. The previously unreported breaches occurred in 2010 at the Reston, Virginia-based company, which is ultimately responsible for the integrity of Web addresses ending in .com, .net and .gov.
Three days before Super Bowl XLVI, federal prosecutors said they have seized 16 websites that illegally streamed live sports and pay-per-view events over the Internet, and charged a Michigan man with running nine of those websites. According to the government, the 16 websites provided links to give viewers easy access to other sites that hosted pirated telecasts from the National Football League, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League, World Wrestling Entertainment Inc ("WWE") and TNA Impact Wrestling.
Lawyers for Facebook are looking for $84,000 in legal fees from a New York man after a judge ruled he caused delays in his lawsuit seeking part ownership in the social networking site. They also want a judge to freeze Paul Ceglia's legal case until the fees are paid.
Apple Inc. failed to get a preliminary ban on sales of Samsung Electronics Co.’s Galaxy 10.1N and Galaxy Nexus mobile phone from a German court. The Munich Regional Court rejected the motion, in a case where Apple invoked a patent granted last year protecting technology related to touch screens for tablets and smartphones.
Romanian authorities are investigating a 20-year-old who is suspected of hacking into several Pentagon and NASA servers and posting confidential data he retrieved from those servers on his blog, officials said. The suspect was identified as Razvan Manole Cernaianu, reportedly an information technology student known online as TinKode.
The websites of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich and the former Soviet republic's interior ministry were put out of action as disgruntled Internet users hit back at the government after it shut down a popular file sharing site. Ukrainian police closed down Ex.ua, a website used by millions of Ukrainians to obtain movies, music and software for free.
Sweden’s Supreme Court announced it won’t agree to hear an appeal by The Pirate Bay’s founders, meaning the jail sentences and fines imposed by the Swedish Court of Appeals will stand. In other words, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström, who started file-sharing site The Pirate Bay in September 2003, face jail time and have to collectively pony up a fine of 46 million Swedish kronor (US$6.7 million).
Barnes & Noble Inc.’s claim that Microsoft Corp. is misusing patents to undermine competition from Google Inc.’s Android operating system was thrown out by a U.S. trade judge. U.S. International Trade Commission Judge Theodore Essex rejected Barnes & Noble’s arguments the patents should be held unenforceable, Microsoft Deputy General Counsel David Howard said in a statement.
A group of Internet hackers said it took down the website of Brazil's second largest private sector bank, one day after it did the same with the country's largest private bank. Banco Bradesco SA said in a statement that its site suffered "momentary interruptions," due to high traffic, but that it was never forced offline.
It should be no surprise that not long after Facebook rolled out its brand new Timeline function, an assortment of fraudulent pages started to pop up promising the ability to revert to the old profile. Many of the pages offer the same promise: a plug-in for your browser that will "disable" the new Timeline functionality.
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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.