Authorities in a southern Chinese city raided an office of Uber Technologies Inc. and seized cellphones and other equipment, a state-run newspaper reported, in the latest setback for the U.S. car-hailing app company’s operations in China. Officials with the Guangzhou city government’s transportation, police and business-licensing departments conducted the operation at Uber’s office, and an investigation was continuing, the Guangzhou Daily.
A Chicago judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by United Airlines against a 22-year-old. United Airlines and Orbitz had filed a civil lawsuit in November against Aktarer Zaman, a young computer whiz from New York City, who launched a website called Skiplagged.com to help people buy cheap plane tickets.
The debate over whether companies should be forced to build in ways for law enforcement to access communications protected by encryption took a tense turn in a congressional hearing. "It is clear to me that creating a pathway for decryption only for good guys is technologically stupid," said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), who has a bachelor's in computer science from Stanford University.
A Senate bill is aimed at slowing so-called patent trolls, by making it more difficult and more costly to bring many patent suits. The proposed Senate legislation fine-tunes an anti-troll bill in the House, patent experts say, to be less objectionable to groups, like pharmaceutical companies and universities, that traditionally resist any moves to weaken the rights of patent holders.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced insider trading charges against two Beijing residents, alleging they purchased stock options ahead of Chinese e-commerce company 58.com’s purchase of a $1.6 billion minority stake in rival Ganji.com. The regulator said a court had granted its request to freeze assets in the U.S. brokerage accounts of Xia Xiaoyu and Hu Yanting.
In a lengthy editorial, Facebook's vice president of public policy in Europe, Richard Allan, issued a retort to European regulators who have started investigations into the company's privacy practices. Allan argues that the many countries now investigating Facebook are undermining European law and could ultimately hurt both Facebook's users and smaller Internet companies trying to become the next Facebook.
Months after President Obama proposed to strengthen digital privacy protection for students, two legislators introduced a comprehensive bill in Congress intended to accomplish that goal. Titled the Student Digital Privacy and Parental Rights Act of 2015, the bill would prohibit operators of websites, apps and other online services for kindergartners through 12th graders from knowingly selling students’ personal information to third parties; from using or disclosing students’ personal information to tailor advertising to them; and from creating personal profiles of students unless it is for a school-related purpose.
Under fierce political crossfire in Europe and hobbled by a lack of natural allies, U.S. technology firms are turning to their biggest asset to fight back: hard cash. Google Inc.,Microsoft Corp. and others have poured money into lobbying efforts in Brussels in recent years, seeking to influence new European Union legislation on issues ranging from data protection to copyright, and to fight legal battles against European Union actors -- and each other.
Apple Inc. said the European Commission's investigation into Ireland's tax treatment of multinationals could have a "material" impact if it was determined that Dublin's tax policies represented unfair state aid. Apple said that if the EU's investigations concluded against Ireland, the company could be required to pay past taxes for up to 10 years "reflective of the disallowed state aid."
Google said it would spend €150 million ($164 million) in Europe on grants for digital journalism experimentation, amid increasing tensions with EU regulators and publishers. The company also said it would work with European newspapers and journalism organizations to develop products and increase revenue, crucial for a cash-strapped newspaper industry that has struggled to stay afloat in the Internet age.
Wall Street briefly halted trading for Twitter stock afternoon after the company’s Q1 earnings were leaked early. The leak appeared to come from Selerity, a data science company which is in the business of finding and reporting company earnings early. Selerity works to automatically identify the URL of a company’s earnings statement before that URL is shared publicly — essentially pulling back the veil on earnings information before the company is ready to do so.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has received the first request to delay the implementation of new Internet regulations from a communication architect who said the rules threaten his business, a filing showed. The FCC's new so-called net neutrality rules are slated to go into effect in June.
For three days, China's Great Firewall has been intercepting the Javascript module from Facebook Login, which allows third-party sites to authorize users through Facebook infrastructure. First reported on Sunday, the attack causes sites using Facebook Login to redirect to a third-party page for many web users in China.
Microsoft Corp. lost a round in a potentially costly patent battle when a U.S. International Trade Commission judge found that the software giant used InterDigital Inc.'s technology in its mobile phones without permission. The judge, Theodore Essex, said that Microsoft infringed two wireless cellular patents owned by InterDigital, a patent licensor, and said it would not be against the public interest to ban the Microsoft devices from being imported into the United States.
Google Inc. said it would launch an experimental portal that allows interested patent holders to sell their patents to the company. Patent holders can tell Google about the patents they're willing to sell and the expected price through the portal, the company said on its blog.
President Obama’s newly installed defense secretary, Ashton B. Carter, toured Silicon Valley to announce a new military strategy for computer conflict, starting the latest Pentagon effort to invest in promising start-ups and to meet with engineers whose talent he declared the Pentagon desperately needed in fending off the nation’s adversaries. Mr. Carter immediately acknowledged, though, the need to rebuild trust with Silicon Valley, whose mainstays — like Apple, Google and Facebook (whose new headquarters he toured) have spent two years demonstrating to customers around the world that they are rolling out encryption technologies to defeat surveillance.
Call it bad timing for Comcast. But the heated public debate over Net neutrality likely played a major role in sinking the cable giant's hopes to buy Time Warner Cable. "It was subtle, but Net neutrality framed the debate," said Christopher Sprigman, a law professor at New York University.
Tesla Motors Inc.’s Twitter feed and its media-relations e-mail account were hacked, with the electric-car maker led by billionaire Elon Musk becoming the latest victim of online vandals. The hacker or hackers who compromised Tesla’s Twitter feed were able to post messages to the Palo Alto, California-based company’s more than 564,000 followers, and one of the attackers responded to an e-mail message to Tesla’s press contact, indicating that account was compromised, too.
The European Union's decision to take on Google stems from official complaints by 19 companies in Europe and the United States, including Microsoft and a number of small firms, people familiar with the matter said. The list of complainants in the European Commission's charge sheet, which includes companies not directly involved in the charges around Google's shopping service, would make it easier for the regulator to expand the case beyond its preliminary focus on price-comparison shopping sites.
Some of President Obama’s email correspondence was swept up by Russian hackers last year in a breach of the White House’s unclassified computer system that was far more intrusive and worrisome than has been publicly acknowledged, according to senior American officials briefed on the investigation. The hackers, who also got deeply into the State Department’s unclassified system, do not appear to have penetrated closely guarded servers that control the message traffic from Mr. Obama’s BlackBerry, which he or an aide carries constantly.
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