Google Inc. has agreed to settle litigation with patent consortium Rockstar, though terms of the deal were not disclosed in a court filing. Rockstar, which counts Apple Inc. as an investor, outbid Google and paid $4.5 billion in 2011 for thousands of former Nortel Network Corp. patents as the networking products supplier went bankrupt.
In one town this week, Chinese censors have removed a stone from their “Great Firewall” of technological controls that typically make it impossible for the world’s largest Internet user base to see major social networks taken for granted elsewhere. The occasion for the rare -- if limited -- concession is a high-powered forum called the World Internet Conference, which Chinese Internet regulators and executives are using as a platform to assert ascendancy of Internet service that is carefully filtered, highly advanced and hugely profitable.
A federal court ordered the temporary closure of two telemarketing operations accused of conning more than $120 million out of consumers for fake tech support services, a federal regulator said. The Federal Trade Commission in civil complaints accused the companies, operating under such names as PC Cleaner Inc., Boost Software Inc. and Netcom3 Global Inc., of marketing bogus free software that finds errors on computers.
Toronto is asking a court to order the mobile car-booking service Uber Technologies Inc. to shut down in North America’s fourth-largest city. Uber has been operating in Toronto since 2012 without a proper license, the city of Toronto said in a statement on its website.
According to BuzzFeed, Uber is investigating Josh Mohrer, general manager of the company's service in New York, for tracking one of their reporters' rides without permission. The report also details a tool called "God View" that can track customers through vehicle locations.
The U.S. State Department said its unclassified email system was up again after being shut down this weekend to improve security following a cyber attack several weeks ago. The department said a day earlier that its unclassified email systems were the victim of a cyber attack at around the same time White House systems were breached, but no classified data was compromised.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said that it would be “the height of lunacy” for Congress to greenlight an online sales tax measure before the end of the year. Cruz, joined by other opponents of the Marketplace Fairness Act, derided the online sales tax proposal as essentially a giveaway to large retailers and their K Street lobbyists, and is “singularly directed against the little guys.”
A U.S. judge has rejected Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.’s bid to put Microsoft Corp.'s lawsuit over smartphone patent royalties on hold while the South Korean company pursues an arbitration proceeding in Hong Kong. In a brief order, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in New York said the lawsuit would proceed despite the arbitration.
Apple Inc. was told to pay a Texas company $23.6 million after a jury found its iPhone and other devices used SkyTel pager technology from the 1990s without permission. Patents developed for the SkyTel network and owned by Mobile Telecommunications Technologies LLC are valid and were infringed by Apple, a federal jury in Marshall, Texas, said.
A San Francisco court ruled that Google has the right to arrange its search results as it pleases, which confirms the company’s long-held position, while underscoring the stark difference in how U.S. and European authorities seek to regulate the search giant. The new ruling, which is the first since 2007 to address Google’s rights under the First Amendment, came after a website called CoastNews argued that Google had unfairly pushed it far down in its search results -- even though, CoastNews claimed, its site appeared at the top of results created by Bing and Yahoo.
A law firm in Calgary is working on the first known personal injury case that will use activity data from a Fitbit to help show the effects of an accident on their client. The lawyers aren’t using Fitbit’s data directly, but pumping it through analytics platform Vivametrica, which uses public research to compare a person’s activity data with that of the general population.
Chinese authorities have shut down the web sites responsible for the Wirelurker malware and arrested suspects in the case, according to a statement by the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Public Security on Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service. Wirelurker appeared earlier this month breaking new ground as malware that could attack non-jailbroken iOS devices.
TRUSTe, a company that is supposed to help consumers figure out which sites to trust online, deceived consumers, the Federal Trade Commission alleged in a complaint disclosed. Since 1997, TRUSTe says it has certified the privacy chops of thousands of Web sites -- giving them a digital "privacy seal" to display on their sites as a sign that they could be trusted.
The Russian government agency looking to enforce new restrictions on the Internet has asked Twitter and Facebook to send representatives to Russia to discuss the laws. The new laws require bloggers to register with the government and Internet data regarding Russians to be stored in Russia.
U.S. communications regulators are expected to vote Dec. 11 on whether to boost funding for the largest U.S. educational technology subsidy program, E-Rate, by 62 percent to help connect more schools and libraries to high-speed Internet. Education labor unions and groups have long urged the Federal Communications Commission to lift the years-old cap on the program's budget.
Companies from Microsoft Corp. to China’s Huawei Technologies Co. scouring Europe for fiscally attractive shores are turning to an unlikely country: France. As a base for research and development teams, that is.
Many teachers say the ClassDojo behavior-tracking app helps them automate the task of recording classroom conduct, as well as allowing them to communicate directly with parents. But some parents, teachers and privacy law scholars say ClassDojo, along with other unproven technologies that record sensitive information about students, is being adopted without sufficiently considering the ramifications for data privacy and fairness, like where and how the data might eventually be used.
New research by two Italian cyber-security experts found that about a quarter of the fashion and luxury ads they examined on Facebook are for knockoffs. The ads, touting things such as $180 Ray-Ban Aviator eyewear for less than $30, linked to bogus e-commerce sites registered by Chinese front companies, according to Andrea Stroppa and Agostino Specchiarello.
The U.S. State Department recently detected "activity of concern" in portions of its e-mail system, a senior official said. U.S. officials aren't saying whether it could be a hacking attempt by a foreign government, but the State Department is now stepping up security of its unclassified network during a system shutdown, the senior State Department official said.
A corporate alliance with subtle interests in the net neutrality fight has been quietly pushing the Federal Communications Commission for strict broadband rules. In a series of meetings this year attended by representatives from Ford Motor, Visa, United Parcel Service, and Bank of America, participants urged FCC commissioners to reclassify broadband service under Title II, according to documents filed with the FCC.
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