Groupon was slapped with a lawsuit accusing it of illegally using peer-to-peer advertising company by little-known Blue Calypso. Blue Calypso said in a statement that Groupon is infringing on two patents related to its digital word-of-mouth marketing business.
Seeking to further tighten rules on online collection or disclosure of children’s personal information, the Federal Trade Commission proposed restrictive requirements on on companies and Web sites that target youths or that have young audiences. The proposal expands restrictions that the commission originally proposed last fall after it found that regulations governing the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act had not kept up with advances in Internet technology.
Online poker giant Pokerstars agreed to pay $731 million to settle civil lawsuits by the Justice Department and to acquire the assets and pay off debts of Full Tilt Poker, a onetime rival. In parallel agreements, PokerStars and Full Tilt will both settle cases brought by the Justice Department in April 2011, but won't admit wrongdoing.
The French data protection authorities asked Google to examine private information that cars taking pictures for its Street View service collected, after Google acknowledged that it had retained some of the information despite promising to delete it. The request by the French privacy protection agency, known as the C.N.I.L., followed a similar one from the Information Commissioner’s Office of Britain.
U.S. regulators will require Google Inc to pay a civil penalty of $22.5 million to settle charges that it bypassed the privacy settings of customers using Apple Inc's Safari browser, two people familiar with the matter said. Members of the Federal Trade Commission voted to approve a consent decree that will allow Google to settle the agency's investigation but admit no liability, said one of the sources, who was not authorized to speak on the record.
British journalist Guy Adams -- the reporter for The Independent who became suddenly famous when Twitter banned his account at the request of NBC -- is back in action. Adams explained -- via Twitter, of course -- that he received an e-mail from Twitter saying, "We have just received an update from the complainant retracting their original request..." and that because of that his account has been "unsuspended."
A Kent State University student accused of posting a message on Twitter saying he would be "shooting up" the northeastern Ohio campus was instructed to stay away from the school and its president. William Koberna, a 19-year-old sophomore, was set to be released after posting part of a $50,000 bond set at Portage County Municipal Court in Ravenna, about 20 miles east of Akron.
Swiss player Michel Morganella was expelled from the Olympics for tweeting a message that the Swiss team said "gravely insulted and violated" the dignity of South Korea after his team's 2-1 defeat a day earlier. "As a member of the Swiss Olympic mission he gravely discriminated, insulted and violated the dignity of the South Korean football team and the South Korean people," Swiss team chief Gian Gilli told reporters.
A 1984 U.S. anti-hacking law passed when computer crime was in its infancy is under fire for potentially going too far in criminalizing the actions of employees who violate workplace policies. Judges across the country are divided on how the 28-year-old law, the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, can be applied.
A Taiwan university has filed a patent infringement suit against Apple Inc in a U.S. court over the iPhone maker's Siri speech recognition system, which lets users place calls or perform other tasks with voice commands, and is seeking undisclosed damages. Apple is also wrestling with Samsung Electronics Co Ltd in one of the biggest-ever technology patent trials as a lengthening list of foes big and small charges into legal battle with Apple over patents and trademarks for its popular mobile devices.
There's a brouhaha emerging that involves a reporter for the U.K. newspaper, The Independent, NBC's Olympic coverage and Twitter. The reporter, Guy Adams, who has been critical of NBC's Olympics coverage, was allegedly booted from Twitter for including NBC exec Gary Zenkel's email address in a tweet.
Apple Inc. and Google Inc. are taking their battle over smartphones to a new venue: Kodak's bankruptcy proceedings. Eastman Kodak Co. has put 1,100 patents on the block, and the Silicon Valley giants are lining up on opposite sides ahead of a deadline for initial bids, people familiar with the matter said.
Skype has come under fire for allegedly letting the U.S. government use its service to spy on its users. The online call service company is now saying that's simply not true.
The top American military official responsible for defending the United States against cyberattacks said that there had been a 17-fold increase in computer attacks on American infrastructure between 2009 and 2011, initiated by criminal gangs, hackers and other nations. The assessment by Gen. Keith B. Alexander, who heads the National Security Agency and also the newly created United States Cyber Command, appears to be the government’s first official acknowledgment of the pace at which America’s electricity grids, water supplies, computer and cellphone networks and other infrastructure are coming under attack.
Google Inc said it had not kept its promise to delete all the personal data, such as emails, its Street View cars collected in Britain and other countries in 2010. The failure to comply with a promise to delete all the data was notified to Britain's Information Commissioner's Office, which said the fact that the data still existed appeared to breach an undertaking signed by Google in November 2010.
Google Inc retook the offensive against thousands of authors claiming it copied their works without permission, and urged the end of a class-action lawsuit arising from its ambitious plan to build the world's largest digital book library. The request by the world's largest search engine company followed a federal judge's March 2011 rejection of a sweeping $125 million settlement of the now seven-year-old case.
Apple Inc. won’t immediately have to publish a notice on its U.K. website that Samsung Electronics Co. didn’t copy its iPad tablet, a London court ruled.
Apple was denied an injunction against Samsung's Galaxy Nexus and the adjusted Galaxy Tab 10.1N by the higher court of Munich, a court spokesman said. The patent in dispute is related to a "list scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display."
A federal court in Manhattan has sentenced Ira Rubin to three years in prison, in part of a U.S. crackdown on Internet gambling. Mr. Rubin was accused of processing tens of millions of dollars in illegal online gambling transactions for PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker, the U.S. Justice Department said.
Apple Inc lost on a bid to transfer its patent dispute with Eastman Kodak Co out of bankruptcy court, a move that could have complicated the photography company's plan to sell the technology. U.S. District Judge George Daniels in Manhattan quashed Apple's bid to have him take up the patent dispute instead of the bankruptcy judge to whom the lawsuit was assigned.
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