The UK government has said it wants to hand out life sentences to anyone found guilty of a cyberattack that has a catastrophic effect, under plans announced in the Queen's speech. Any hackers that manage to carry out "cyberattacks which result in loss of life, serious illness or injury or serious damage to national security, or a significant risk thereof" would face the full life sentence, according to the serious crime bill proposed in Queen's speech.
Security researchers have uncovered new bugs in the Web encryption software that caused the pernicious “Heartbleed” Internet threat that surfaced in April. Experts said the newly discovered vulnerabilities in OpenSSL, which could allow hackers to spy on communications, do not appear to be as serious a threat as "Heartbleed."
New York's high court was to consider one of the first legal challenges to state and local laws that make it a crime for people to bully others online, especially children. The 2010 Albany County law, one of more than a dozen around the country that criminalize cyberbullying, pits free-speech advocates against a community that has given prosecutors a larger role in affairs that typically had been handled by schools.
Requests are still rolling into Google Inc. in Europe for individual results to be deleted from Internet searches. Google Inc. said that it had received 41,000 requests from people hoping to delete individual results that turn up for their name in the first four days after it posted a Web page to take the requests late last week.
Chinese state media lashed out at Google Inc., Apple Inc. and other U.S. technology companies, calling on Beijing "to punish severely the pawns" of the U.S. government for monitoring China and stealing secrets. U.S. companies such as Yahoo Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Facebook Inc. threaten the cyber-security of China and its Internet users, said the People's Daily on its microblog, in comments echoed on the front page of the English-language China Daily.
Microsoft's top lawyer verbally gobsmacked the United States government, proposing a laundry list of surveillance reforms he says ought to get instituted immediately. "It's now apparent that the government intercepted data in transit across the Internet and hacked links between company data centers," Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, wrote in a blog post.
Comedian John Oliver’s hilarious net neutrality video and call for people to flood the Federal Communications Commission with protests worked: The agency’s comment system crashed. The FCC’s creaky Electronic Comment Filing System couldn’t keep up with the hordes of people trying to weigh in on the agency’s net neutrality proposal.
Turkish authorities say they have restored access to YouTube five days after the country's highest court ruled that the two-month ban on the video-sharing website violates freedom of expression. The restrictions on YouTube were imposed in late March after the leak of an audio recording of a government security meeting.
Egypt's police force is seeking to build a surveillance system to monitor social media for expressions of dissent -- including profanity, immorality, insults and calls for strikes and protests. According to a leaked document in which technology companies are invited to offer their services, Egypt's interior ministry says it wants the ability to scan Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Viber in real-time for usage that might "harm public security or incite terrorism."
The recent effort to disrupt the Gameover Zeus botnet includes plans for Internet service providers to notify victims, but some security researchers think ISPs should play an even bigger role in the future by actively quarantining infected computers identified on their networks. Law enforcement agencies from several countries including the FBI and Europol announced that they worked with security vendors to disrupt the Gameover Zeus botnet, which is estimated to have affected between 500,000 and 1 million computers.
A U.S.-led international operation disrupted a crime ring that had infected hundreds of thousands of PCs around the globe with malicious software used for stealing banking credentials and cyber extortion, the Justice Department said. Authorities used technical and legal tactics to interrupt the so-called botnet's operations, shutting down the servers the cyber criminals used to control infected machines and causing those machines to "phone home" to servers controlled by law enforcement.
The Supreme Court says a company is not liable for inducing patent infringement if someone other than the company carries out some of the steps leading to infringement. The justices unanimously ruled that Internet content delivery company Limelight Networks Inc. did not infringe on the patented system for managing images and video owned by rival Akamai Technologies Inc.
Google services are being disrupted in China ahead of this week's 25th anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators around Beijing's Tiananmen Square, a censorship watchdog said. GreatFire.org said in a blog post that the government appeared to have begun targeting Google Inc's main search engine and Gmail, among many other services, since at least last week, making them inaccessible to many users in China.
Hackers stole nearly $2 million from the online bank accounts of Japanese businesses in April, a surge in theft that has prompted some banks to curtail online services and rethink compensation policies, executives and regulators say. In April there were 50 cases of theft from online accounts held by Japanese businesses with nearly 200 million yen stolen, according to a person with knowledge of the industry-wide tally, which has not been made public.
Google and other Internet companies find themselves in a quandary over how to strike a balance between privacy and freedom of information as the top world search engine took a first step towards upholding an EU privacy ruling. The companies are in the position of having to interpret broad criteria from Europe's top court for information that is "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant" as well as developing criteria for distinguishing public figures from private individuals.
Chinese officials are ramping up political and economic pressure on the United States government and large technology companies following the Justice Department’s announcement on May 19 of indictments against five members of the Chinese Army on charges of economic cyberespionage. Prominent Chinese officials, agencies and commentators have announced or called for measures that are widely seen as retribution for Washington’s latest charges as well as earlier related accusations, raising the specter of a trade war and stoking anxiety among American companies that do business in China.
Hollywood studios say they don't oppose a delay in a copyright infringement lawsuit against Megaupload and its founder, Kim Dotcom, provided that they can continue efforts to serve Megupload, reserve the right to amend their complaint and continue to take actions to preserve Megaupload's riches. The assets of a company accused to have enriched itself by over $175 million appear to be the central worry of the copyright holders.
One of the founders of file-sharing website Pirate Bay has been arrested in southern Sweden to serve an outstanding sentence for copyright violations after being on the run for nearly two years, Swedish police have said. Peter Sunde had been wanted by Interpol since 2012 after being sentenced in Sweden to prison and fined for breaching copyright laws.
Google is starting to accept requests from Europeans who want to erase unflattering information from the results produced by the world's dominant search engine. The demands can be submitted on a Web page that Google opened in response to a landmark ruling issued two weeks ago by Europe's highest court.
The U.S. government's unwillingness to stop Amazon.com from using hardball tactics in fights with book publishers has angered book lovers but antitrust experts say regulators are unlikely to intervene in what appear to be business disputes. Amazon has delayed the delivery of some Hachette Book Group titles and even removed an option to pre-order "The Silkworm," by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith.
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