A U.S. judge ruled that Apple Inc cannot pursue an injunction against Google's Motorola Mobility unit, effectively ending a key case for the iPhone maker in the smartphone patent wars. The ruling came from Judge Richard Posner in Chicago federal court. He dismissed the litigation between Apple and Motorola Mobility with prejudice, meaning it can't be refiled.
The Texas attorney general is accusing Google of improperly withholding evidence to stymie an investigation into whether the company has been abusing its dominance of Internet search. The allegations surfaced in a court filing earlier this week as part of Texas' 2-year-old probe into Google's business practices.
Two service outages within the course of several hours rocked microblogging platform Twitter, as users worldwide reported significant down-time and slow service across both Twitter's website and mobile applications. Amid speculation that Twitter had been crippled by a hacker attack, the San Francisco-based company blamed the outage -- one of its most severe episodes in recent months -- on a "cascading bug" in one of its infrastructure components.
An executive at Google Inc.'s Motorola Mobility unit said it is trying to propose new patent licensing terms for Microsoft Corp., as the cellphone maker remains locked in legal battles with both the software giant and Silicon Valley gadget maker Apple Inc. While more than 50 companies have worked out licensing agreements with the firm over its intellectual property, Motorola Vice President of Intellectual Property Kirk Dailey said Microsoft and Apple "are outliers, in that they don't want to pay" for licenses.
Complicating its efforts to accelerate advertising revenue, Facebook has agreed to make it clear to users that when they click to like a product on Facebook, their names and photos can be used to plug the product. They will also be given a chance to decline the opportunity to be unpaid endorsers.
A new Louisiana law requires sex offenders and child predators to state their criminal status on their Facebook or other social networking page, with the law's author saying the bill is the first of its kind in the nation. State Rep. Jeff Thompson, a Republican from Bossier City, Louisiana, says his new law, effective August 1, will stand up to constitutional challenge because it expands sex offender registration requirements, common in many states, to include a disclosure on the convicted criminal's social networking sites as well.
As expected, the House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously approved a resolution aimed at preventing any efforts to hand the United Nations more power to oversee the Internet. Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., championed the resolution, which was sparked by concerns that some countries may try to use international telecommunications negotiations in December to increase the role that the U.N. plays in global Internet governance.
Yahoo! Inc., owner of the largest U.S. Web portal, is in talks to resolve a patent-infringement dispute with Facebook Inc., according to a court filing. Lawyers for Yahoo asked U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White in San Francisco for a two-week extension on deadlines to file replies in the lawsuit while the companies hold discussions.
A candid blog post at NPR’s All Songs Considered blog has touched off a small firestorm in the music industry over the behavior of young, “digital native” music fans and the right of musicians and record companies to be paid for their work. Fourteen years since the arrival of the game-changing Napster file-sharing service, these topics still touch a nerve.
A judge strongly questioned Apple Inc's request for an injunction against Google Inc's Motorola Mobility unit at a crucial hearing in the smartphone patent wars between the two technology companies. Federal Judge Richard Posner in Chicago said an injunction barring the sale of Motorola phones would have "catastrophic effects" on Motorola.
A Dutch court ordered Apple Inc to pay damages to Samsung Electronics Co Ltd over a patent violation in the Netherlands, the latest twist in the global legal battle waged by the two rival phone and computer makers. Apple and Samsung have been suing each other in about a dozen countries for the last few years as they compete globally for consumers in the fast-growing markets for smart phones and tablet computers.
Google denied that Street View data presented to a British regulator was "pre-prepared" and said it was "surprised" that the agency had reopened its investigation into the Web giant's data collection practices. The denial was in response to an Information Commissioner's Office letter sent that included additional questions to its 2010 investigation, saying it was motivated to reopen its probe after information provided in an earlier U.K. investigation appeared to have been contradicted by the Federal Communications Commission.
Google is cracking down on a website that strips music from YouTube videos and converts it to playable MP3s, which violates the video-sharing site's terms of service. The website, YouTube-MP3.org, received a cease-and-desist letter from Google, YouTube's parent company, and was given seven days to comply, according to TorrentFreak, which saw the letter.
The United States and Israel jointly developed a sophisticated computer virus nicknamed Flame that collected intelligence in preparation for cyber-sabotage aimed at slowing Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon, according to Western officials with knowledge of the effort. The massive piece of malware secretly mapped and monitored Iran’s computer networks, sending back a steady stream of intelligence to prepare for a cyberwarfare campaign, according to the officials.
Photography pioneer Eastman Kodak Co sued Apple Inc to stop it from interfering with plans to sell a large patent portfolio, a significant part of its bankruptcy restructuring. In a lawsuit filed in U.S. bankruptcy court in Manhattan, Kodak said Apple, the largest U.S. company by market value, wrongly claims to own 10 patents arising from work that the companies did together in the early 1990s.
InterDigital Inc said it had agreed to sell to Intel Corp about 1,700 wireless technology patents for $375 million, sending InterDigital shares up 27 percent. While Intel is pushing to expand its chip business beyond computers and into mobile devices, InterDigital for about a year has been seeking to capitalize on a surge in interest in wireless patents.
A hacker claiming to have broken into networks of dozens of banks and stolen customer data, has released as proof a file that contains names, addresses, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers in plain text, but no credit card numbers.
An alliance of consumer rights groups pressed Facebook not to aim advertisements at preteen children or track their activities online if it formally opens its site to them. Facebook has millions of underage users who claim to be over the required age of 13, and the company has had discussions with some advocacy groups over how to keep children safe on the site if they insist on signing up.
Google Inc. received more than 1,000 requests from governments around the world in the second half of last year to take down items such as YouTube videos and search listings, and it complied with them more than half the time, according to information provided by the company. Google plans to publish the data Monday in its Global Transparency Report, a biannual study the search giant started in 2010.
Despite attempts by privacy advocates, academics, law enforcement officials, technologists and advertisers to determine a person’s age on the Internet, the reality is that, online, it is extremely difficult to tell whether someone is an 11-year-old girl or a 45-year-old man. The question arose after Skout, a mobile social networking app, discovered that, within two weeks, three adults had masqueraded as teenagers in its forum for 13- to 17-year-olds.
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