A judge in Milan has shut the door on Uber’s ride-sharing business in Italy, dealing a major blow to the company’s ambitions in Europe. The ruling that Uber’s Pop service creates “unfair competition” effectively holds the private company to the same standard as a public taxi service.
When President Obama sent his inaugural Twitter post from the Oval Office, the White House heralded the event with fanfare, posting a photograph of him perched on his desk tapping out his message on an iPhone. But it took only a few minutes for Mr. Obama’s account to attract racist, hate-filled posts and replies.
A Canadian teen has pleaded guilty to 12 charges related to online harassment and "swatting" families across the U.S. and Canada in 2013 and 2014. He had previously pleaded guilty to 11 other charges, bringing the total to 23 counts of extortion, public mischief, and criminal harassment. According to a report in Canada's Tri City News, the 17-year-old (whose name has not been released) harassed mostly "young, female gamers and their parents" in Canada and the U.S. for ignoring his advances online.
The founder of virtual reality glasses maker Oculus VR Inc, acquired by Facebook Inc for $2 billion, has been accused of taking confidential information he learned while working with another company and passing it off as his own, according to a lawsuit. The plaintiff, Hawaii-based company Total Recall Technologies, said it hired Oculus founder Palmer Luckey in 2011 to build a prototype head mounted display.
The Federal Communications Commission voted to extend a program that offers deaf-blind people specialized equipment to help them use smartphones, laptops and related devices. The commission extended, for a year, the National Deaf-Blind Equipment Distribution program, known as iCanConnect, which hands out telecommunications equipment to low-income people who are both deaf and blind.
In three Americans with Disabilities Act-related cases over the past eight months, in California, Texas, and Arizona, Uber has been slammed with lawsuits that allege the company discriminates against blind and wheelchair-using passengers. The suits demand Uber abide by the ADA, but Uber claims that because it’s a technology company, not a transportation service, it doesn’t fall under the ADA’s jurisdiction.
Hackers have struck one of the world's largest Internet dating websites, leaking the highly sensitive sexual information of almost four million users onto the web. The stolen data reveals the sexual preferences of users, whether they're gay or straight, and even indicates which ones might be seeking extramarital affairs. In addition, the hackers have revealed email addresses, usernames, dates of birth, postal codes and unique internet addresses of users' computers.
In one of his final moves as New York’s top financial regulator, Benjamin M. Lawsky will soon unveil a set of new licensing rules that could have long-lasting effects on businesses using bitcoin and other virtual currencies. In doing so, bitcoin advocates fear Mr. Lawsky will cement his reputation for taking tough stands against the financial industry.
Uber has just poached Sabrina Ross, Apple counsel specializing in privacy law. She’s joining Katherine Tassi, the former head of data protection at Facebook, who joined Uber as its managing counsel for privacy last August.
The chief executive who sought greater autonomy for the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers — the agency that manages the technical operations of the Internet — has announced he is leaving early next year. Officials of Icann announced that Fadi Chehadé, who has helped lead discussions of Icann’s proposed break with the U.S. government, has informed the nonprofit’s board he is leaving in March 2016 to pursue work in the private sector.
The U.S. Commerce Department proposed new export controls that would treat unknown software flaws as potential weapons, a move aimed at reducing the security industry’s aid to rival nations. The department said it was following through on an international commitment to address the evolution of warfare to include more technology.
Canada and its spying partners exploited weaknesses in one of the world's most popular mobile browsers and planned to hack into smartphones via links to Google and Samsung app stores, a top secret document obtained by CBC News shows. Electronic intelligence agencies began targeting UC Browser -- a massively popular app in China and India with growing use in North America -- in late 2011 after discovering it leaked revealing details about its half-billion users.
Enom, a domain registrar and subsidiary of publicly-traded Rightside Group, recently suffered a “very sophisticated attack” by hackers. In an email to customers, Enom CEO Taryn Naidu wrote that hackers hijacked the DNS traffic of four domains owned by “large Internet infrastructure companies.”
Several lawsuits have alleged that companies are expecting employees to work unpaid and off-hours via iPhones, BlackBerrys or other digital devices. The number of suits, not to mention legal opinions, is relatively small so far, but attorneys say a newly sympathetic attitude among judges, along with coming changes to federal labor regulations, could open the door to many more claims.
CareFirst, a Blue Cross plan, became the third major health insurer in the United States to disclose this year that hackers had breached its systems and potentially compromised some customer information. The company, which is based in Maryland and serves the Washington, D.C., area, called the attack that occurred last June a “sophisticated” one that could have affected as many as 1.1 million of its customers.
The U.S. Navy is working hard to improve the cyber security of its computer networks and weapon and communications systems, while bracing for potential attacks on power grids and fuel supplies, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said. Mabus said cyber warfare was a clear threat given Russia's use of cyber attacks before its physical invasions of Crimea and Georgia.
FBI Director James Comey twice used the word “depressing” in describing his reaction to tech companies’ recent plea to President Obama for the White House to support universal strong encryption. “I read this letter and I think either these folks don’t see what I see, or they are not fair-minded,” Comey said during a Q&A at Georgetown Law school. “Either one of those things is depressing to me.”
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’ widely used data and research website was hacked, but the regional central bank’s internal systems were not compromised, the St. Louis Fed said. The regional central bank said in a statement, “On April 24, 2015, computer hackers manipulated routing settings at a domain name service vendor used by the St. Louis Fed so that they could automatically redirect some of the Bank’s web traffic that day to rogue webpages they created to simulate the look of the St. Louis Fed’s research.stlouisfed.org website.”
Firms such as Google and Microsoft will face stiffer fines if they violate Europe's "right to be forgotten" online rules, according to a draft text agreed by European Union ambassadors, diplomatic sources said. EU member states are negotiating an overhaul of the bloc's outdated privacy laws in a bid to make them more harmonized and relevant for the rise of the Internet.
Millions of routers and other embedded devices are affected by a serious vulnerability that could allow hackers to compromise them. The vulnerability is located in a service called NetUSB, which lets devices connected over USB to a computer be shared with other machines on a local network or the Internet via IP (Internet Protocol).
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The GigaLaw Firm helps companies of all sizes protect their brands online, using domain name dispute policies – such as the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) – and other legal tools available to copyright and trademark owners on the Internet.