The Federal Communications Commission proposed a $25,000 fine on Google Inc., accusing the search giant of deliberately obstructing an investigation into whether the company violated federal rules when its street-mapping service collected and stored data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks in 2010. The agency proposed the fine as it faced a deadline for taking action on the "Wi-Spy" case.
Facebook Inc., which runs the world's largest social networking website, won a court ruling rejecting a bid by thousands of advertisers to sue the company as a group for overcharging them. U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton in Oakland, California, denied the advertisers' request for class-action status, saying they failed to show they had enough in common to sue for breach of contract and violating California's unfair competition law.
A U.S. judge deferred a decision on whether millions of gigabytes of data belonging to users of Megaupload.com should be preserved or the data-storage company that owns the servers where it’s housed can delete it. U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady, at a hearing in Alexandria, Virginia, told federal prosecutors they have two weeks to work out an agreement with parties claiming an interest in the massive cache of data that became inaccessible when law enforcement agents shut down Megaupload in January.
A German regional court backed a ban on push emails in Apple Inc.'s iCloud and MobileMe services in Germany, granting Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. a victory in a global patent war among several technology companies. The Mannheim regional court backed an earlier court decision that banned Apple from offering the service for synchronizing emails on devices in a patent proceeding brought by Motorola Mobility.
A computer hacker-turned-FBI informant is on track to get out of trouble after being accused of telling a police officer he was a federal agent. A Manhattan state judge agreed to dismiss the misdemeanor impersonation charge against Hector Xavier Monsegur if he avoids rearrest for six months.
Apple Inc. broke is silence about the U.S. Department of Justice's allegations that it colluded with publishers over e-book pricing by calling the allegations "simply not true." Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said, "The launch of the iBookstore in 2010 fostered innovation and competition, breaking Amazon's monopolistic grip on the publishing industry."
A glitch with the application system for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) has prompted the Internet's governing body to push the deadline for submissions to April 20. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said that it received "a report of unusual behavior" related to its TLD Application System (TAS).
Facebook, seeking to address concerns about the personal information it collects on its users, said that it would provide any user with more about the data it tracks and stores. In a posting on its privacy blog, Facebook said the expanded archive feature would be introduced gradually to its 845 million monthly active users.
Record labels, music publishers and digital music services said they had reached an agreement on proposed royalty rates for a range of online services, potentially making it easier to offer music in new ways via the Internet. The proposal would create guidelines for five new types of services, including online "locker" services such as Apple Inc.'s iTunes Match and Amazon.com Inc.'s Cloud Drive.
Microsoft Corp. said it won a ruling in a Seattle court effectively preventing phone company Motorola Mobility from immediately obtaining an injunction in Germany that could stop Microsoft from selling its Xbox and other software products there, due to a patent disagreement. Last week Microsoft announced plans to move its European distribution center to the Netherlands from Germany ahead of a German court decision expected on April 17, concerned that the court might side with Motorola and grant an injunction barring sales of its products in the country on the grounds that they infringe on a video technology patent owned by Motorola.
The Motion Picture Association of America is squaring off against a coalition of Internet giants and public interest groups over the key question of whether it's possible to directly infringe copyright by embedding an image or video hosted by a third party. A federal judge took that position last July, prompting a chorus of criticism.
Talk about the Chinese government's probes into Bo Xilai and his wife, Gu Kailai, reverberated around China's Internet despite strict censorship efforts, demonstrating a difficult task ahead for Communist Party officials seeking to restore an image of order and unity. Mr. Bo became the target of a corruption probe and his wife was named by authorities as a suspect in the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood.
A federal appeals court set back government efforts to prosecute corporate espionage with an opinion that explained its recent decision to throw out the conviction of a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc computer programmer. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said the taking of source code by Sergey Aleynikov was not a crime under a 1996 law that makes it illegal to steal trade secrets. The court said the code did not qualify as stolen goods under another federal law.
The Justice Department filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against Apple and major book publishers, charging that the companies colluded to raise the price of e-books in 2010. The lawsuit alleges that Apple and the publishers conspired to limit e-book price competition, causing “e-book consumers to pay tens of millions of dollars more for e-books than they otherwise would have paid.”
Eastern European hackers have stolen personal records for 780,000 people in the breach of a computer server in Utah. The list of victims include recipients of Medicaid and a health care program for low-income children in Utah, officials at Utah’s Department of Health said in a statement.
A U.S. appeals court rejected the government's broad reading of a computer fraud law to prosecute workers who steal from company computers, saying it could expose millions of Americans to prosecution for harmless activities at work. The 9-2 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco diverges from broader readings of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by three other federal appeals courts.
The Anonymous hacker collective, which in recent days has made headlines for attacking hundreds of Chinese government and commercial Websites, reportedly is turning its attention to U.S. trade organizations that have come out in support of stronger proposed cyber-security legislation. The group in recent days has launched denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on the Websites of TechAmerica and USTelecom, two trade groups that represent such tech heavyweights as IBM, Apple, AT&T and Verizon Communications, and have spoken out in support of the proposed Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a bipartisan bill designed to better enable U.S. government agencies and businesses to voluntarily share information about cyber-attacks.
Rumors that Iran plans to "shut down the Internet" and replace it with an entirely more controllable national intranet have been denied. The Agence France Presse reported earlier this week that millions of internet users in Iran will be permanently denied access, according to Reza Taghipour, the Iranian Information and Communications Technology Minister.
In the wake of a continuing series of reports of cyber attacks by the Anonymous hacking group against China, the Chinese government admitted that it had indeed recently fallen prey to those attacks. Anonymous supporters also claimed to attack Ugandan government websites over the weekend, and said that they planned to begin attacks on United Kingdom government servers.
Facebook's planned acquisition of Instagram is already raising privacy concerns, despite chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's pledge this morning that he wouldn't simply "integrate everything" into the larger social-networking site. "Part of the concern is that it's Facebook," says Chris Conley, an attorney at the ACLU of Northern California. "And their history of privacy and respecting user choices is mixed."
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