U.S. Regulators would be violating the First Amendment if they were to force Google and other search engines to delist certain irrelevant search results at a user’s request, a major advertising trade group said. The Association of National Advertisers sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission urging it to “forcefully reject” a complaint from Consumer Watchdog, which requested that Google be required to allow Americans to have the “right to be forgotten.”
Streaming video services by Apple, Amazon and Google have thrived off the idea that they are alternatives to cable TV. Now, the Federal Communications Commission is considering if it should begin to regulate online video services, like they do cable companies. And that's causing anxiety in Silicon Valley.
The Obama administration has determined that it must retaliate against China for the theft of the personal information of more than 20 million Americans from the databases of the Office of Personnel Management, but it is still struggling to decide what it can do without prompting an escalating cyberconflict. The decision came after the administration concluded that the hacking attack was so vast in scope and ambition that the usual practices for dealing with traditional espionage cases did not apply.
Japanese police arrested Mark Karpelès, the head of collapsed bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, alleging that he manipulated the company’s computer system to increase the balance in an account. Tokyo-based Mt. Gox was once the world’s largest exchange platform for the virtual currency by trading volume. In February 2014, it filed for bankruptcy, saying it had lost 750,000 of its customers’ bitcoins as well as 100,000 of its own, worth some $500 million at the time.
In just the first month that net-neutrality regulations have been in effect, consumers have filed about 2,000 complaints to the Federal Communications Commission against Comcast, AT&T, and other Internet service providers, according to records obtained by National Journal. Many consumers complained about data caps—limits that providers place on customers' monthly Internet usage.
In a setback for Google, a U.S. appeals court ruled that the low licensing rate Microsoft pays to use some of Google’s Motorola Mobility patents had been properly set. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said a lower court judge properly determined the patents’ value even though the royalty rate was only a fraction of what Motorola had asked for.
Oracle Corp.'s long-running legal battle with Google Inc. over Google's Android operating system for smartphones and other devices probably will not proceed to another trial until the middle of 2016, a U.S. judge said. The closely watched case involves how much copyright protection should extend to the Java programming language, which Google used to design the operating system.
Google is to defy France's ruling that the "right to be forgotten" should be applied globally and not just in Europe. Last month, the French privacy watchdog, CNIL, ordered the firm to extend people's right to have posts removed from its websites worldwide, including Google.com.
The U.S. Department of Commerce said it will revise regulations intended to restrict the export of software that can used to break into computers and smart phones. An initial draft of the regulations, published in May, attracted hundreds of comments, many of them complaints that the rules were so broad as to bar the easy sale of standard tools used to test electronic security.
Cybercriminals are exploiting publicly available information and weaknesses in corporate email systems to trick small businesses into transferring large sums of money into fraudulent bank accounts, in schemes known as “corporate account takeover” or “business email fraud.” Companies across the globe lost more than $1 billion from October 2013 through June 2015 as a result of such schemes, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., which faced a trial on patent infringement in a lawsuit brought by patent holder Smartflash LLC, can halt the proceedings while the Smartflash patents are scrutinized for their validity by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a U.S. appeals court ruled.
The hackers who stole data on tens of millions of U.S. insurance holders and government employees in recent months breached another big target at around the same time -- United Airlines. United, the world’s second-largest airline, detected an incursion into its computer systems in May or early June, said several people familiar with the probe.
TrackingPoint self-aiming rifles work by using a computer connected to wi-fi, which helps the shooter to more accurately aim and hit its target. However, two security researchers found that the $13,000 rifle can be compromised, allowing a hacker to recalibrate the scope’s calculation so the shots land away from the intended target.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for blocking Islamic State militants from using social media to spread their message, injecting herself into a controversial issue that has divided current government officials. Clinton, who is running for the White House in 2016, said “we have got to shut down their Internet presence, which is posing the principal threat to us” in response to a question while campaigning.
Russian government-backed hackers who penetrated high-profile U.S. government and defense industry computers this year used a method combining Twitter with data hidden in seemingly benign photographs, according to experts studying the campaign. In a public report, researchers at security company FireEye Inc. said the group used the unusual tandem as a means of communicating with previously infected computers.
When investigators in the fraud watch department of Washington-based AARP received a call from a senior citizen late last year who had lost $300,000 to a con man she met on an Internet dating website, the organization looked into the problem. It found that in just the last six months of 2014, an estimated $82 million had been lost to online romance scams.
Europe’s privacy watchdog is backing severe penalties for companies that violate new rules governing how companies handle customer data. Some in the E.U., including member states, believe that the maximum penalty for violating the law should be two percent of global revenue or 1 million Euros. The European Parliament has proposed a more severe penalty of five percent of global revenue or 100 million Euros.
China is pushing to rewrite the rules of the global Internet, aiming to draw the world’s largest group of Internet users away from an interconnected global commons and to increasingly run parts of the Internet on China’s terms. It envisions a future in which governments patrol online discourse like border-control agents, rather than let the U.S., long the world’s digital leader, dictate the rules.
Facebook may not prevent its users from using fake names, a German privacy watchdog said, in the latest privacy setback for the U.S. company in Europe. The Hamburg data protection authority, which is responsible for policing Facebook in Germany, said the social network firm could not unilaterally change users' chosen usernames to their real names, nor could it ask them for official ID.
Hackers who say they oppose Planned Parenthood claim to have posted a database associated with the organization’s Web site as well as the names and e-mail addresses of employees online. Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, told The Washington Post in an e-mailed statement that the organization has notified the Justice Department and the FBI "that extremists who oppose Planned Parenthood's mission and services have launched an attack on our information systems, and have called on the world's most sophisticated hackers to assist them in breaching our systems and threatening the privacy and safety of our staff members."
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