BlackBerry Ltd. has settled its lawsuit against Kik Interactive, a company started by one of its former co-op students which developed a rival instant messaging application to its BlackBerry Messenger that eventually surpassed it in popularity. BlackBerry had sued Kik for patent infringement, claiming it made “false and/or misleading statements” and caused “confusion” in the market between Kik and BBM.
According to the 2013 Cost of Cyber-Crime Study, conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, the annual cost of cyber-crime in the U.S. now stands at $11.56 million per organization. The 2013 figure is an increase of 26 percent from the $8.9 million Ponemon reported in 2012.
The Web site of WhatsApp, a widely used messaging app, appeared to have been hacked. The site showed a pro-Palestinian message and was given the title "You Got Pwned."
Four months after opening its review of Apple’s finances, the Securities and Exchange Commission has closed it, having found nothing untoward about the company’s handling of its overseas cash and related tax policies. In a September letter to Apple, released late last week, the SEC said it had completed its review of the company’s fiscal 2012 annual report, and would take no action against it at this time.
The sticky situation between Airbnb and New York City has now gotten even stickier, as the New York Daily News reports that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has subpoenaed the collaborative apartment-sharing service for the user data for 225,000 New Yorkers on the site. Airbnb Head of Global Policy David Hantman has responded to the subpoena demand in a post on the company blog, which calls the request “unreasonably broad” and insists that the company will continue to target so-called “bad actors” on the platform without giving away the data of all New York users.
The European Union wants to regulate the cloud even if that makes its use more complicated. One proposed amendment would require “all transfers of data” from a cloud in the European Union to a cloud maintained in the United States or elsewhere to “be accompanied with a notification to the data subject of such transfer and its legal effects.”
Pinterest filed a suit against Pintrips, a personal travel planning startup, accusing it of trademark infringement, false designation of origin, unfair competition and trademark dilution. “This action arises from Pintrips’ decision to adopt a social media brand that is confusingly similar to Pinterest’s, and its refusal to recognize, discuss or remediate the confusion it causes among consumers,” lawyers for Pinterest write in the complaint.
More than two million people in China are employed by the government to monitor web activity, state media say, providing a rare glimpse into how the state tries to control the Internet. The Beijing News says the monitors, described as Internet opinion analysts, are on state and commercial payrolls.
A lawsuit filed by a father claims a phone he bought for his underage son contained pornographic images of sales representatives from the same Sprint store where he made the purchase. Arsen Garibyan filed the lawsuit against Sprint Corp. and Nextel of California Inc. on behalf of his son in Los Angeles Superior Court.
Mug shots are merely artifacts of an arrest, not proof of a conviction, and many people whose images are now on display -- on websites that charge a fee to remove them -- were never found guilty, or the charges against them were dropped. But these pictures can cause serious reputational damage.
Hackers infiltrated the computer system of the software company Adobe, gaining access to credit card information and other personal data from 2.9 million of its customers, the company acknowledged. The security breach, which Adobe called a part of a “sophisticated attack,” also allowed hackers to obtain encrypted passwords and other personal information from customers.
A federal grand jury indicted 13 members of the Internet hacking group Anonymous for allegedly carrying out cyber-attacks worldwide, including targets that refused to process payments for WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy website founded by Julian Assange. The U.S.-based members of Anonymous are accused of zeroing in on the computers of governments, trade associations, law firms, financial institutions and other institutions that oppose the philosophy of Anonymous to make all information free for everyone, regardless of copyright laws or national security considerations.
Class action lawyers have seized upon a ruling against Google to file a new lawsuit against Yahoo on behalf of 100 million people who do not use Yahoo Mail but have communicated with someone who does. The suit, which seeks at least $5 million, claims that Yahoo violates the Wiretap Act and related California laws that forbid intercepting private communications.
France has approved a bill to support independent bookstores against competition from online retailers. The new laws will restrict companies like Amazon from combining offers of five percent discounts with free deliveries.
Pakistani authorities have banned instant messaging and internet telephony services including Skype, WhatsApp and Viber in the province of Sindh for three months for security reasons, a government spokesman said. Karachi, a city of 18 million people and both the capital of Sindh on Pakistan's southern Indian Ocean coast and the country's financial hub, is plagued by Islamist militant and sectarian violence as well as kidnappings and contract killings.
An appeals court partially reversed a ruling by the U.S. International Trade Commission, asking it to reconsider a decision that Google Inc subsidiary Motorola Mobility did not infringe on a Microsoft Corp patent. Acting on an appeal by Microsoft, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found that the ITC was correct in finding that Motorola Mobility, which has since been bought by Google, did not infringe three patents.
Mojtaba Ahmadi, who served as commander of the Cyber War Headquarters, was found dead in a wooded area near the town of Karaj, north-west of the capital, Tehran. Five Iranian nuclear scientists and the head of the country’s ballistic missile programme have been killed since 2007.
The U.S. government in July obtained a search warrant demanding that Edward Snowden’s e-mail provider, Lavabit, turn over the private SSL keys that protected all web traffic to the site, according to to newly unsealed documents. The July 16 order came after Texas-based Lavabit refused to circumvent its own security systems to comply with earlier orders intended to monitor a particular Lavabit user’s metadata, defined as “information about each communication sent or received by the account, including the date and time of the communication, the method of communication, and the source and destination of the communication.”
California Governor Jerry Brown signed a first-of-its-kind state law criminalizing what has become known as revenge porn, the distribution of private, explicit photos of other people on the Internet, usually by ex-lovers or spouses, to humiliate them. The measure, which passed both houses of the Democratic-led state legislature almost unanimously last month, makes it a misdemeanor for individuals to take and then circulate without consent such images online with the intent to harass or annoy.
Google must defend itself against accusations that it is illegally wiretapping in the course of its everyday business — gathering data about Internet users and showing them related ads. The accusations, made over several years in various lawsuits that have been merged into two separate cases, ask whether Google went too far in collecting user data in Gmail and Street View, its mapping project.
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