For the first time, Facebook released a trove of emails that were sent between its CEO Mark Zuckerberg and wood-pellet salesman Paul Ceglia. Facebook’s motive in releasing the emails: to quash Ceglia’s claims that he is owed 50% of Zuckerberg’s stake in the company.
Over the last year, the American Civil Liberties Union has asked officials from hundreds of school districts around the country to make changes in their Internet screening systems to eliminate bias, said Anthony Rothert, a civil liberties lawyer based in St. Louis. All have agreed to, he said, except Camdenton High School in central Missouri, which the ACLU sued last summer.
The Federal Trade Commission called for greater regulation of the data collection companies that compile a wide range of personal and financial information about millions of consumers, and asked for a provision that would allow people access to the information collected on them. The recommendation was part of a sweeping set of guidelines put forth in the commission’s final report on online consumer privacy.
The Justice Department's top antitrust official says she won't stand by quietly if companies make agreements with rivals on price, signaling a stern stance as the department conducts a high-profile probe into electronic-book publishing. Without mentioning Apple Inc. or the five publishers that are the target of the investigation, Sharis Pozen says she won't hesitate to act against "collusive behavior at the highest levels of companies."
The Tokyo District Court approved a petition demanding that Google Inc. suspend its autocomplete search feature for Internet browsers after a man alleged that it breached his privacy and got him fired, his lawyer said. Google is refusing to suspend the feature, saying that its headquarters in the United States will not be regulated by Japanese law and that the case does not warrant deleting the autocomplete suggestions related to the petition under its in-house privacy policy, lawyer Hiroyuki Tomita said.
Microsoft employees, accompanied by United States marshals, raided two nondescript office buildings in Pennsylvania and Illinois, aiming to disrupt one of the most pernicious forms of online crime today — botnets, or groups of computers that help harvest bank account passwords and other personal information from millions of other computers. With a warrant in hand from a federal judge authorizing the sweep, the Microsoft lawyers and technical personnel gathered evidence and deactivated Web servers ostensibly used by criminals in a scheme to infect computers and steal personal data.
Demand for Apple products, coupled with severe constraints on local supply, has created a thriving black market. But it's getting tougher and costlier to smuggle the devices into China as the Chinese customs authority has told some U.S.-based shipping agents not to accept orders of iPads, and warned travelers to declare their gadgets at the border and pay a 10 percent import duty on electronics.
The terrorist attacks by an Al Qaeda-influenced gunman may signal a new wave of Internet surveillance in France. New laws have been proposed by French president Nicolas Sarkozy in his effort to create a "civilized Internet." Sarkozy used a televised address to propose a new set of laws that criminalize the use of websites affiliated with terrorist sympathizers and hate groups.
Facebook has weighed in on a practice by some businesses asking employees or job applicants for their passwords to the popular social-media site. "This practice undermines the privacy expectations and the security of both the user and the user's friends," Erin Egan, the site's chief privacy officer, wrote on the site's Facebook and Privacy Page.
Lawmakers sent letters requesting information from more than 30 popular iPhone applications developers as part of an inquiry into how software companies collect private consumer data. Recipients of the letter, including Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Path, were asked to provide information about the user data that is collected when consumers download their apps -- and how that data is used.
Privacy advocates in the U.S. and the European Union are on edge over changes Facebook is enacting in its language governing its terms of service. Their upset comes as Facebook is proposing modifications to its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities that, at least on the surface, seem fairly minor and don't indicate any radical shift in thinking or practice in terms of privacy.
Facebook Inc. acquired 750 patents from International Business Machines Corp., adding intellectual property that may help it counter allegations of patent infringement, a person with knowledge of the transaction said. The patents cover various technologies such as software and networking, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the deal hasn’t been made public.
Facebook removed a page that paid homage to the young Frenchman who died in a shootout with police after killing seven people, officials said. French interior ministry officials said the ministry had asked the social networking site to remove the page that went up shortly after Mohamed Merah was killed in Toulouse.
Despite rising concern that cyberattacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, hackers used relatively simple methods in more than 90% of data breaches in 2011, according to a report compiled by Verizon. The annual Verizon report on data breaches also found that in a vast majority of attacks (80%), hackers hit victims of opportunity rather than companies they sought out.
TiVo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. agreed to dismiss their patent litigation against each other, after TiVo's settlement with Microsoft's partner AT&T Inc. eliminated the motivation for the suits. Microsoft first sued TiVo in a San Francisco federal court in 2010 as part of a broader attempt to provide legal cover for partner AT&T, a customer of its Internet video platform.
Hollywood studios want a federal judge to preserve data on all the 66.6 million users of Megaupload, the file-sharing service that was shuttered in January due to federal indictments targeting its operators. The Motion Picture Association of America is requesting Carpathia, Megaupload’s Virginia-based server host, to retain the 25 petabytes of Megaupload data on its servers, which includes account information for Megaupload’s millions of users.
Three online dating giants agreed to screen for sex offenders and take other safety steps after a woman was assaulted on a date, the California attorney general's office announced. Match.com, eHarmony and Spark Networks signed a joint statement of business principles intended to provide an example for the industry and help guard against sexual predators, identity theft and financial scams.
President Bill Clinton's 1997 electronic embargo against Iran, which curbed its citizens' access to U.S.-based software and Web sites, continues to create legal hassles for American Web companies. In August 1997, Clinton signed an executive order saying U.S. companies and individuals could not provide "goods, technology, or services to Iran" -- a decree that led to unintended consequences such as Utah-based Bluehost giving the boot to Iranian bloggers and open-source software site SourceForge.net denying access to Iranians.
The Chinese government has helped Microsoft Corp.'s business in China by improving intellectual-property protection, the company's top China executive said, but continues to hurt it with regulations preventing the official launch of the Xbox 360 game console. Simon Leung, chief executive of the Greater China Region for Microsoft, said that a group of government agencies in 2004 issued a regulation to limit the influence of videogames and arcades on children, and it has had the effect of preventing Microsoft from officially selling its popular console in China.
A new bill has been submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives that will require most video games to include a warning label that states: "WARNING: Exposure to violent video games has been linked to aggressive behavior." Introduced by Rep. Joe Baca and Rep. Frank Wolf, H.R. 4204 would require any game rated "E" (Everyone), "Everyone 10+" (Everyone 10 and older), ''T'' (Teen), ''M'' (Mature) or ''A'' (Adult) by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB).
Introduced by Rep. Joe Baca and Rep. Frank Wolf, H.R. 4204 would require any game rated "E" (Everyone), "Everyone 10+" (Everyone 10 and older), ''T'' (Teen), ''M'' (Mature) or ''A'' (Adult) by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB).
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