A major Internet outage in China that rerouted users to the U.S. website of a company which helps people get around Beijing's censorship may have been due to a hacking attack, the official Xinhua news service reported. The state-run China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) said in a microblog post that the outage, which lasted for several hours, was due to a malfunction in China's top-level domain name root servers.
Stores can sell marijuana in Colorado and Washington but they can’t — for now — target potential customers on popular sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google. Despite the progressive reputations of these companies, they are keeping existing pot policies in place, frustrating the marijuana industry.
Chinese Internet users are now required to register their real names to upload videos to Chinese online video sites, an official body said, as the Communist Party tightens its control of the Internet and media to suppress anti-government sentiment. The new rule has been implemented to "prevent vulgar content, base art forms, exaggerated violence and sexual content in Internet video having a negative effect on society," China's State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) said on its website.
Pandora Media Inc. and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers were expected to square off in a long-awaited federal-court trial to determine how much the Internet-radio giant should pay for the use of their compositions for the next two years. The outcome could have a broad effect on the growing digital-music business, which now pays more to record labels and performers than to those who write and publish songs.
A list of 16 million email addresses and passwords has fallen into the hands of botnet operators, the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) said. It remained unclear though to what these login credentials provide access.
As President Obama made clear in his NSA speech last week, surveillance reforms aren't going to happen overnight, and a blog post by Microsoft's chief legal officer gave a glimpse of the international back-and-forth that may need to take place for civil liberties, national security -- and cross-border business -- to be protected as the digital era moves ahead. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith called for "an international legal framework -- an international convention -- to create surveillance and data-access rules across borders," saying current legal structures are out of date and have prompted "some governments, as we've learned over the past year...to take unilateral actions outside [the] system" -- not the best way forward, Smith said.
Target says it has identified and stopped at least 12 scams preying on consumers via email, Facebook and other outlets, following the store's mega security breach. Although Target sent, a blast to customers to offer one year of free credit monitoring, scammers are also on the prowl and are sending out similar emails.
A federal appeals court gave Apple Inc a temporary reprieve from being subjected to an external monitor appointed to ensure it complied with antitrust laws, after the company was found liable last year for conspiring with five publishers to fix the prices of e-books. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York granted Apple an "administrative stay" of the court order appointing the monitor, Michael Bromwich, while the company seeks permission for a longer stay during its appeal.
Privacy buffs sounded the alarm when Google bought smart-thermostat maker Nest for $3.2 billion last week. The app-connected appliance tracks schedules to regulate home temperature, but Nest’s CEO swears his company won’t simply hand over users’ data to its new overlords.
Bitcoin doesn’t meet the definition of a currency or even an electronic payment form in Finland, where the central bank has instead decided to categorize the software as a commodity. Finland is the latest country to try to come to grips with the advent of virtual currencies that aren’t controlled by any central bank or government.
Intellectual Ventures is set to square off this week against Google Inc's Motorola Mobility unit in the first trial that the multibillion-dollar patent-buying firm has undertaken since it was founded. Privately-held Intellectual Ventures sued Motorola in 2011, claiming the mobile phone maker infringed patents covering a variety of smartphone-related technologies, including Google Play.
Google removed two Chrome browser extensions from its web store after it was discovered the software included code that served people ads in a way that violated the company’s terms of service. Internet message boards were abuzz over the two extensions — “Add to Feedly” and “Tweet This Page” — each of which had fewer than 100,000 users.
An examination by The New York Times into the enormous data theft, including interviews with people knowledgeable about the investigation, cybersecurity and credit experts and consumers shows that Target’s system was particularly vulnerable to attack. It was remarkably open, experts say, which enabled hackers to wander from system to system, scooping up batches of information.
The cyber security firm IntelCrawler said it has uncovered at least six ongoing attacks at merchants across the United States whose credit card processing systems are infected with the same type of malicious software used to steal data from some 40 million credit cards at Target Inc. Andrew Komarov, the firm's chief executive, told Reuters that his firm has alerted law enforcement, Visa Inc and intelligence teams at several large banks about the findings.
A San Diego traffic court threw out a citation against a woman believed to be the first motorist in the country ticketed for driving while wearing a Google Glass computer-in-eyeglass device. Commissioner John Blair ruled that Cecilia Abadie was not guilty because she had been cited under a code that requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the device was in operation, which the officer did not provide.
Nearly 30,000 bitcoins were ordered forfeited by the Silk Road website in the largest such action ever involving the e-currency, federal prosecutors said in New York.
A federal judge has denied a request by Apple Inc. to remove a lawyer she appointed to monitor the company’s e-book pricing reform, saying it “failed to show” that’s in the “public interest” to do so. U.S. District Judge Denise Cote in Manhattan also denied the company’s request to delay oversight of its antitrust compliance, saying there was no threat of “irreparable harm” to the company.
The U.S. government sent a confidential, 16-page technical bulletin to retailers and other merchants that describes the malicious software and techniques used to attack Target Corp late last year.
Google has lost its high court bid to block a breach of privacy legal action launched against it in the UK by a group of British Internet users. The case will now go ahead in the UK, where a group of more than 100 people are suing Google, alleging that it misused private information, breached confidence and breached the 1998 Data Protection Act.
A group of cyber security professionals is warning that the U.S. government has failed to implement fixes to protect the HealthCare.gov website from hackers, some three months after experts first pointed out the problem. David Kennedy, head of computer security consulting firm TrustedSec LLC, told Reuters that the government has yet to plug more than 20 vulnerabilities that he and other security experts reported to the government shortly after HealthCare.gov went live on October 1.
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