A U.S. appeals court on revived part of a patent lawsuit brought by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen against AOL, Apple, Google and Yahoo, saying a lower court incorrectly found that the tech companies didn't infringe one of its patents. The patent, held by Allen's Interval Licensing, relates to the ubiquitous pop-ups that computer users routinely see while surfing the Web or shopping online.
A judge has pushed back to April 2015 the start of a class-action, antitrust trial involving four big tech companies and 64,000 current and former Silicon Valley workers. Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe are accused of conspiring not to recruit each other’s workers, suppressing wages from 2005 to 2009.
Dozens of websites joined a symbolic protest against the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed rules governing net neutrality, which opponents say would result in Internet traffic being divided among fast lanes for companies that can afford them and slow lanes for everyone else. Netflix, Mozilla, Reddit and numerous other websites have displayed boxes with the familiar “loading” pinwheel icon and messages including, “If there were Internet slow lanes, you’d still be waiting.”
Approximately 4.93 million Gmail usernames and passwords were published to a Russian Bitcoin forum, as first reported by Russian website CNews. That’s the bad news. The good news is that this leak doesn’t seem as massive upon further inspection.
The stylish and sophisticated Apple Watch may be the most trackable gadget yet to be produced by the folks at Cupertino, Calif. The experts we’ve spoken with say Apple seems to have taken the right steps, though much remains unknown about how Watch’s health data will be handled.
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission warned the wireless phone industry that the commission was seriously considering subjecting mobile carriers to the same net neutrality regulations as providers of wired Internet service. Wireless carriers were largely exempted from the commission’s 2010 net neutrality regulations, which were thrown out by a federal appeals court in January.
Canada's telecommunications regulator should ease restrictions on domestic television providers because of the competitive threat they face from online services like Netflix Inc, Quebecor Inc. Chief Executive Pierre Dion told a hearing. Left unregulated, he said Netflix will become the largest distributor of video content in Canada, leaving domestic broadcasters struggling to compete.
A specialist panel appointed by search engine giant Google to help it implement a landmark court ruling on privacy rights held a meeting in Madrid, their first in a seven-stop tour to gather the views of European experts on the issue. The European Union's top court ruled in May that people have a right to request that years-old personal information that is no longer relevant be removed from Internet search results.
Home Depot confirmed that hackers had broken into its in-store payments systems, in what could be the largest known breach of a retail company’s computer network. The retailer said the exact number of customers affected was still not clear. But a person briefed on the investigation said the total number of credit card numbers stolen at Home Depot could top 60 million.
Video streaming service Netflix Inc will join Reddit, Kickstarter and thousands of other websites in an online protest that calls for strong U.S. rules to ensure equal treatment of Internet traffic. Nancy Pelosi, Democratic leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, also joined the ranks of Netflix, consumer advocates and others who are calling on the Federal Communications Commission to set stricter rules for Internet service providers by regulating them more like public utilities.
Google will have to make more concessions to settle a four-year-old probe in Europe into alleged abuse of its dominant position in the Internet search and advertising business after extremely negative feedback from rivals on its current offer, the European Commission said. The move, however, casts doubts on whether European Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia will now be able to wrap the case up in the remaining two months of his mandate.
Since it was sued by Getty Images last week for copyright infringement, Microsoft has now taken down the beta version of its Bing Image Widget, which helped publishers embed panels of image search results on their sites.
Google has announced a settlement with a coalition of photographers over use of their work in its Google Books scanning project. The photographers first filed suit against Google in 2010. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but all parties are said to be “pleased” with the agreement, which includes funding for the PLUS Coalition for better image licensing.
A federal judge ordered four leading tech companies to come up with more money to settle a class-action lawsuit that accuses them of conspiring against their own employees. But now, the companies challenged the ruling, saying the judge was “untethered to --and actually at odds with” the sober realities of the case. They are demanding that a higher court set her straight.
Regulators in India are investigating whether Amazon.com Inc may have circumvented restrictions placed on foreign investors by selling directly to domestic consumers, The Wall Street Journal said, citing unidentified sources. The Indian Finance Ministry's Enforcement Directorate is looking into whether Amazon.com's local subsidiary may have sold directly to customers, but made it look as if the sales were made by other companies, the Journal report said, quoting two people familiar with the matter.
A hacker broke into part of the HealthCare.gov insurance enrollment website in July and uploaded malicious software, according to federal officials. Investigators found no evidence that consumers' personal data was taken in the breach, federal officials said.
Getty Images, owner of one of the largest collections of digital photographs, said it sued Microsoft for copyright infringement over a tool that lets website owners embed images generated by the Bing search engine. Microsoft’s two-week-old tool, called Bing Image Widget, allows for Getty’s digital images to be embedded on commercial websites without permission, Getty said.
Americans lack real choices among providers of high-speed Internet service, with fewer than one in four homes having access to two or more providers of the broadband speeds that are quickly becoming “table stakes” in modern communications, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said. The chairman, Tom Wheeler, said in a speech that the F.C.C. planned to promote more choices and protect competition, because a lack of adequate consumer choice inhibits innovation, investment and economic benefits.
Microsoft and the German publishing industry stepped up pressure on the European Union’s antitrust chief to make radical adjustments to a proposed antitrust settlement with Google, or effectively leave resolution of the case to his successor. At a news conference in Brussels, a senior lawyer for Microsoft said the company had gathered new evidence to show that the settlement with Google proposed by Joaquín Almunia, the antitrust chief, would be ineffective at restoring competition.
Google Inc. and France’s LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA said they settled a 10-year legal dispute over trademark referencing as they decided to jointly fight advertising for counterfeit products online. Luxury-goods company LVMH had complained 10 years ago that ads sold by Google infringed its trademarks and promoted the sale of counterfeit goods on the Internet, triggering a long series of lawsuits that travelled all the way to the European Union’s highest court.
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