Amateur cybersleuths have been hunting malware, raising firewalls and fending off mock hack attacks in a series of simulations supported in part by Britain's eavesdropping agency. The games are intended to pull badly-needed talent into the country's burgeoning cybersecurity sector, according to former security minister Pauline Neville-Jones, who spoke at a closing ceremony at the Science Museum in the English port city of Bristol.
In a move aimed at helping newspapers generate new revenue from struggling online operations, the German government intends to require search engines and other Internet companies to pay publishers whose content they highlight. The German governing coalition, led by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, said that it planned to introduce legislation to create a new kind of copyright for online publishers. Under the proposal, Internet aggregators and search engines would have to pay the publishers if they wanted to display all or parts of their articles — even small snippets like those that are shown in search links.
Emboldened by their victory in quashing online piracy legislation, U.S. Internet companies are gearing up for a battle over whether consumers should be able to restrict efforts to gather personal data. Google Inc, Facebook, Apple Inc and other tech companies have lobbied against congressional and federal agency proposals that would let Internet users press "do not track" buttons on their browsers to block targeted advertising.
Fresh off its success in helping to derail anti-online piracy legislation, the Consumer Electronics Association has set its sights on persuading lawmakers to pass legislation that would require online retailers to collect sales taxes from out-of-state customers. The association voted in December to take on the issue that has been simmering before Congress for two decades.
A judge said Apple Inc. couldn't pursue patent infringement litigation against Eastman Kodak Co. over a patent the computer giant fears might be sold during Kodak's bankruptcy before an ownership dispute is resolved. Judge Allan L. Gropper of U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan's rulings covered both a pending suit Apple has against Kodak over the patent, as well as another complaint it wants to bring that covers damages the company thinks it is owed since Kodak filed for Chapter 11.
One late-night visit by the FBI was all it took for the notorious hacker known as "Sabu" to switch sides and become a valued snitch. Hector Xavier Monsegur cooperated immediately in June, helping investigators close a net around five other leaders of the international hacking group Anonymous, according to court documents.
Samsung Electronics Co. says it has filed a second patent lawsuit against Apple Inc. in South Korea, alleging infringement of tablet and smartphone technology. Samsung said that the lawsuit filed in Seoul alleges that Apple's iPhone 4S and iPad 2 infringe three of Samsung's patents.
Anonymous hackers claimed to have taken down several Vatican websites run by the Catholic Church to protest the "corrupt Roman Apostolic Church." The hacking attacks on www.vatican.va and other sites came the day after several alleged members of the Anonymous-associated hacking group LulzSec were charged by U.S. authorities and it was revealed that LulzSec's leader had been an FBI informant.
The Justice Department has warned Apple Inc. and five of the biggest U.S. publishers that it plans to sue them for allegedly colluding to raise the price of electronic books, according to people familiar with the matter. Several of the parties have held talks to settle the antitrust case and head off a potentially damaging court battle, these people said.
A day after the authorities arrested several hackers from the Anonymous movement, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, warned members of Congress that terrorist groups might use hackers to attack the United States. Mr. Mueller said that the federal government must act swiftly to prevent such attacks and economic espionage from other countries because they pose a “potentially devastating” threat to the country’s businesses and infrastructure.
PayPal, the online payments arm of eBay Inc, has sparked a furor in the publishing world by asking some e-book distributors to ban books that contain "obscene" themes including rape, bestiality or incest. PayPal sent an email on Feb 18 to Mark Coker, founder of e-book publisher and distributor Smashwords, saying it would "limit" the company's PayPal account unless Smashwords removed from its website e-books "containing themes of rape, incest, beastiality and underage subjects."
Facebook Inc. lost a ruling in Germany over using the e-mail addresses of people who aren’t members of its social network. A Berlin court found Facebook doesn’t adequately inform members that all e-mail addresses imported by its “Friend Finder” function will be used to contact others, even if they aren’t members of its network, German consumer group Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband, which won the ruling, said on its website.
Apple has put forth proposals to Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. to settle some pending litigation in exchange for royalty payments to license its patents, among other terms, these people said. Some people familiar with the situation see more reason for Apple to consider legal settlements, following a mix of legal victories and setbacks against smartphone makers that use Google Inc.'s Android mobile operating system.
One of the world's most-wanted cyber hackers secretly became an FBI informant last year and helped bring in five other suspected leaders of the loose-knit international Anonymous group who were charged with computer crimes. In a major blow to Anonymous, which has hacked the websites of government agencies and companies around the world, U.S. authorities said the hacker, Hector Xavier Monsegur, was arrested at his small apartment in a Manhattan housing complex last June.
A cybersecurity bill introduced by Republican Senator John McCain could dramatically expand the domestic reach of U.S. intelligence agencies and potentially give them massive troves of emails, civil liberties advocates said. "This is a privacy nightmare that will eventually result in the military substantially monitoring the domestic, civilian Internet," said Michelle Richardson of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Two men have been charged in Britain with hacking into Sony Music's computers and stealing music, the company and British police said. A person familiar with the situation said the hackers had obtained unreleased Michael Jackson tracks.
Anonymous supporters who willingly enlisted their personal computers to launch denial-of-service attacks against the groups' enemies may have unwillingly donated their personal banking information in the process. After the Jan. 20 raid on Megaupload, a law enforcement sting that drew the immediate anger of Anonymous hackers, an unnamed attacker took a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack tool called Slowloris, popular with Anonymous supporters, and rigged it to include the Zeus Trojan, a devious piece of malware used to siphon victims' online banking credentials.
U.S. prosecutors have filed papers in New Zealand seeking the extradition of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and three of his colleagues, whom they accuse of making a fortune by helping Internet users share files illegally. U.S. prosecutors accuse the four men of breaching copyright by facilitating millions of illegal downloads through their website, enriching themselves at the expense of movie makers and songwriters.
Within three months of the launch of the Internet "pornography" domain ".xxx," 10 cases have been launched against Web pirates registering sites on it using the names of reputable companies and people, insiders said. Sources at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) reported that among complainants to its dispute resolution system over .xxx -- usually called dot-triple x -- were banks, a jewelry business and an online shopping operation.
The Tajikistan government ordered Internet providers to block Facebook, along with several independent media sites, a spokeswoman for the country's web-provider association told AFP. "Internet providers received a spoken order from government agents to block the sites," said Parvina Ibodova, president of the association.
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