The White House and some congressional Democrats have raised privacy concerns about a cybersecurity bill drafted by top Senate Intelligence Committee lawmakers, stalling -- at least temporarily -- one of Congress’s top priorities. A draft of the bill was circulated by the panel’s chairman, Sen. Richard Burr (R., N.C.) and the ranking Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California.
The U.S. trade office said it is keeping an eye on Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's consumer shopping website for sales of counterfeit and pirated goods, but refrained from putting the site back on a piracy blacklist. Alibaba has fought hard to tackle counterfeit products to keep its reputation from being tarnished in the run-up to, and after, its initial public offering last year.
A government policy that forbade the export of products with strong encryption in the 1990s has years later left users of devices like Android and Apple phones vulnerable to hackers when they visit one-third of all websites, including whitehouse.gov and nsa.gov. Researchers last month discovered millions of devices and websites were using an outdated encryption key to secure their communications.
France and Luxembourg lost their battle to apply reduced VAT rates to ebooks when a top European court agreed with EU regulators that only paper books qualified for lower taxes. EU rules allow member states to set lower rates of value-added tax on printed books but the European Commission decided two years ago that the 5.5 percent and 3 percent rates imposed by France and Luxembourg respectively, were illegal.
Apple Inc. told a U.S. appeals court on that rival Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. should be barred from selling products that infringe on its smartphone patents, but the judges were skeptical. Judge Kimberly Moore was skeptical that Apple was being harmed since it already licenses some technology to other companies.
China's proposed anti-terrorism law will not affect the legitimate interests of technology firms, a top Chinese spokeswoman said after U.S. President Barack Obama warned of its impact and demanded amendments. China's proposals, which would require tech firms to provide encryption keys and install backdoors granting law enforcement access for counterterrorism investigations, drew criticism from Obama, who told Reuters in an interview China would have to change the draft law if it were "to do business with the United States."
Media company Viacom has filed a trademark and copyright infringement claim against a website that allows people to stream TV shows featured on children’s entertainment channel Nickelodeon. In court documents filed at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, Viacom has alleged that the website nickreboot.com infringes Nickelodeon trademarks and copyright, which are owned by Viacom.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler defended the commission's recent vote in support of net neutrality, saying it isn't regulation as some critics contend it is, but instead sets up the Federal Communication Commission as a kind of referee. Wheeler spoke during an onstage appearance at Mobile World Congress and was interviewed by Anne Bouverot, director general of the MWC's governing organization, GSMA.
European policy makers are set to debate new proposals laying out the concept of net neutrality, which in their present form, could allow telecommunications companies serving Europe more leeway in striking deals over Internet service than their U.S. counterparts. The latest proposals by Latvia, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the council of the European Union, outline net neutrality in Europe should ensure similar traffic across networks is treated equally by telecoms operators.
The European Union's antitrust chief has met Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt as she seeks to resolve a four-year investigation into complaints that the Internet search giant abuses its dominance. European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager met Schmidt on Monday, her spokesman Ricardo Cardoso said in an email.
Aside from a few "nits," a federal judge appeared poised to sign off on a $415 million settlement that would end a five-year legal battle over alleged illegal hiring practices in Silicon Valley. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh has set a July 9 hearing for final approval of the pact, which would resolve antitrust claims against Apple, Adobe, Google and Intel over allegations that they entered into secret agreements not to raid each others' workforces.
The Mississippi attorney general's attempt to investigate Google is on hold for at least four more months. U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate granted Google's request for a preliminary injunction, preventing Attorney General Jim Hood from going through with a subpoena meant to examine whether Google is facilitating others' illegal activities on its sites.
The Obama administration is waiting for China to respond to concerns raised about planned new rules pushing Chinese banks to purchase high-tech products from domestic vendors, a senior State Department official said. U.S. business groups have complained about the regulations, and senior officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry, have written to their Chinese counterparts about them.
Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen's office said on it has launched an investigation into Lenovo Group Ltd's sales of laptops preloaded with Superfish software, which the U.S. government last month warned made users vulnerable to cyberattacks.
Self-identified ISIS supporters have made online threats against Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and other Twitter employees for shutting down accounts that promote ISIS. In a post on anonymous forum justpaste.it, the group drew an illustration of Dorsey in crosshairs.
Google paid $25 million to control the “.app” top-level domain, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a non-profit group which maintains much of the technical plumbing of the Internet. The price is more than three times as much as the previous record for a new top-level domain, the $6.8 million paid by Dot Tech LLC in September for the “.tech” top-level domain.
Thousands of Uber driver names and driver's license numbers may be in the hands of an unauthorized third party due to a data breach that occurred last year, the ride-hailing company said. In a statement, Uber’s managing counsel of data privacy, Katherine Tassi, said the company discovered on Sept. 17, 2014, that one of its many databases could have potentially been accessed because one of the encryption keys required to unlock it had been compromised.
China is weighing a far-reaching counterterrorism law that would require technology firms to hand over encryption keys and install security "backdoors", a potential escalation of what some firms view as the increasingly onerous terms of doing business in the world's second largest economy. A parliamentary body read a second draft of the country's first anti-terrorism law this week and is expected to adopt the legislation in the coming weeks or months.
The White House released a discussion draft of proposed legislation to protect consumer privacy online. The proposal, known as the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights Act, would require companies to provide clear notice of how they use data, ensure data isn’t reused in other contexts and give consumers a method to have their data deleted. Read the article: The Hill
Some of China's largest Internet companies deleted more than 60,000 online accounts because their names did not conform to regulations, the top Internet regulator said. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, Tencent Holdings Ltd, Baidu Inc, Sina Corp affiliate Weibo Corp and other companies deleted the accounts in a cull aimed at "rectifying" online names, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said.
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