The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials. By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from among hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans.
Twitter was sued for $124 million by two companies claiming the social media darling fraudulently had them organize a private sale of its shares to stoke investor interest for an initial public offering then canceled it. In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Precedo Capital Group Inc and Continental Advisors SA accused Twitter of using the aborted sale as a way to give the money-losing company a $10 billion market valuation and higher IPO price.
Microsoft’s venerable Windows XP operating system is six times more likely to be successfully hacked than newer Windows 7 and Windows 8 personal computers. Microsoft disclosed that metric at the RSA Conference in Amsterdam as it hopes to compel XP users to upgrade before it ends all XP support, including issuing security patches.
The end could be near for cookies, the tiny pieces of code that marketers deploy on Web browsers to track people's online movements, serve targeted advertising and amass valuable user profiles. Some privacy advocates warn the kinds of hyper-targeting capabilities in tech giants' cookie industry replacements will spawn even more invasive advertising in people's lives.
Adobe Systems said that the scope of a cyber-security breach disclosed nearly a month ago was far bigger than initially reported, with attackers obtaining data on more than 38 million customer accounts. The software maker also said that hackers had stolen part of the source code to Photoshop editing software that is widely used by professional photographers.
Brazil, seeking to shield its citizens from alleged U.S. spying, is pushing ahead with its plan to force global Internet companies to store data obtained from Brazilian users inside the country, according to a draft of the law seen by Reuters. Despite opposition from multinational software, hardware and telecommunications companies, President Dilma Rousseff is pressing lawmakers to vote as early as this week on the law, sparked by disclosures of widespread U.S. spying on Brazilian telecommunications data.
Hewlett-Packard Co., the world’s biggest maker of personal computers, sued optical disk drive companies claiming they conspired to fix prices on billions of dollars in products it bought from 2004 to 2010. Hewlett-Packard, in two complaints filed in federal court in Houston, said Toshiba Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. and LG Electronics Inc. were among the companies that shared confidential information and rigged bids to “fix, raise, stabilize and maintain prices” for the disk drives.
President Obama’s campaign organization site was compromised by a group of hackers, according to a number of Facebook and Twitter posts sent from the President’s accounts. A number of tweets sent from the @BarackObama handle linked to YouTube videos hosted by the Syrian Electronic Army, the hacking outfit claiming responsibility, as well as some links sent through the President’s Facebook fan page.
U.S. authorities have charged a hacker in England with breaching thousands of computer systems, including U.S. military networks, to steal massive amounts of confidential data. Lauri Love, 28, was charged with one count of accessing a U.S. department or agency computer without permission, and one count of conspiracy, U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman in New Jersey said.
EU regulators will seek feedback from Google's rivals and other third parties before deciding whether to accept the Internet search giant's offer to settle a three-year antitrust investigation and stave off a possible fine. In July, competitors shot down Google's first proposal intended to allay concerns that it was blocking rivals including Microsoft in web search results in Europe, saying it would only reinforce the company's dominance.
Legislation that would allow states to collect online sales taxes has emerged as a point of tension in high-profile Senate primary races around the nation, creating new uncertainty on an issue that business has long looked to Congress to resolve. Antitax candidates in Republican races in Wyoming, South Carolina and Tennessee have sharply criticized the legislation and the incumbent senators who voted for it last spring.
Next month the Federal Trade Commission will meet to discuss how it plans to regulate the internet of things, and how connected devices share consumer data. There are two issues at play here, one being the privacy of consumer data and the other being the security of the networks delivering that data.
Reports that U.S. intelligence agencies may have monitored the personal cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel may have roiled Berlin, but security experts in Washington are barely batting an eye. Experts contacted by the Journal agreed that the vulnerability of mobile devices makes them ripe targets for hackers and foreign spies, who wouldn’t need the cooperation of a user’s wireless provider to eavesdrop on their calls.
Apple Inc., Google Inc. and two other Silicon Valley companies must face a group lawsuit representing more than 64,000 technical employees claiming their incomes were held down by the companies’ agreements not to recruit one another’s workers. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, yesterday granted class-action certification.
Getty Images and Pinterest have announced a licensing arrangement that helps Pinterest address some of its copyright infringement issues. It's no small secret that Pinterest users aren't all that keen on verifying whether the content they're posting is something that they can legally post to the service or not.
The FBI has issued wanted posters for a man they say is behind an eBay car scam that has netted $3 million. Authorities in the U.S. also want to track down six other fugitives in relation to the charges.
As a diplomatic row rages between the United States and Europe over spying accusations, state-backed Deutsche Telekom wants German communications companies to cooperate to shield local Internet traffic from foreign intelligence services. Yet the nascent effort, which took on new urgency after Germany said that it had evidence that Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone had been monitored, faces an uphill battle if it is to be more than a marketing gimmick.
Apple Inc. won a patent-infringement trial in which Wi-Lan Inc. was seeking $248 million from the iPhone maker over an invention for wireless technology used in mobile devices. Apple didn’t infringe a patent for technology used in wireless networking, a federal jury in Marshall, Texas, said.
Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission fined the local unit of South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. for undermining the reputation of Taiwanese mobile phone maker HTC Corp. In a notice on its website, the consumer protection body said that Samsung had organized an Internet campaign in violation of fair trade rules to praise Samsung smartphones while slamming those of HTC.
New patent reform legislation introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives aims to make it more difficult for so-called patent trolls to file infringement lawsuits. The Innovation Act, sponsored by Representative Bob Goodlatte, incorporates provisions in several other bills, introduced in recent months, targeting patent-licensing businesses that use infringement lawsuits as a major source of potential revenue.
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