The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T. While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly disclosed NSA documents show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive
A Harvard University student who created a tool that allowed Facebook users to track a person's location using the company's messaging app data got his summer internship offer at the social media giant rescinded after exposing the privacy flaws, a case study published in the Harvard Journal of Technology Science revealed. The study also noted that Khanna was scheduled to start a summer internship at Facebook in software development on June 1, but he received a call days after the app was posted saying he violated the company's user agreement when he used the site's data.
A U.S. appeals court has denied Samsung Electronics' request for a rehearing in a smartphone patent infringement case that awarded rival Apple $548 million. After Samsung had whittled the original damages in the case down from $930 million, the South Korean company had asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit for a rehearing to reduce the award by another $399 million.
Beginning more than a decade ago, one of the largest security companies in the world, Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, tried to damage rivals in the marketplace by tricking their antivirus software programs into classifying benign files as malicious, according to two former employees. They said the secret campaign targeted Microsoft Corp., AVG Technologies NV, Avast Software and other rivals, fooling some of them into deleting or disabling important files on their customers' PCs.
Limelight Networks Inc. is responsible for infringing rival Akamai Technologies Inc.'s patent for managing Web images and video, a U.S. appeals court ruled, reviving a $45 million verdict against the company. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in the District of Columbia said Limelight's control over its customers' use of its services to deliver media content over the Internet meant the company was liable for the infringement.
Google vigilantly defends its trademark, both in and out of court. It’s in no imminent danger of losing its trademark protection. But given the popularity of Google’s brand, and how it has entered mainstream English usage as a verb (to google) and participle (googling), it may only be a matter of time.
Over the past year and a half, federal agencies operating out of Pittsburgh have unveiled a string of landmark cybercrime cases, including the July takedown of Darkode, described by U.S. officials as one of the most sophisticated computer-hacking forums online. A big factor in the city’s success is an unusual level of private-public collaboration in fighting cybercrime.
Google Inc. has been given an extra two weeks to respond to European Union charges of abusing its market power in a dozen EU countries and stave off a possible billion-euro fine. The European Commission has extended the deadline for replying to the charges until Aug. 31, a Google spokesman said.
The government's war against online drug sales isn't working, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. Despite law enforcement crackdowns, online drug black markets have matured into a resilient criminal industry that enables more than $100 million worth of worldwide sales a year, a new paper from researcher Kyle Soska and computer science professor Nicolas Cristin reports.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation says San Francisco’s Bay Area has suffered more than a dozen attacks on its fiber optic infrastructure over the past year. The attacks slow Internet service and disrupt financial transactions and emergency phone calls.
A federal appeals court appeared skeptical of claims by a government trade panel that it can block Internet communications it finds infringe U.S. patents. The U.S. International Trade Commission last year took the unprecedented step of ordering ClearCorrect LLC of Round Rock, Texas, to cease receiving digital models and data from Pakistan to manufacture dental aligners, plastic orthodontic devices used to straighten teeth.
American business groups are lobbying U.S. President Barack Obama to press Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on technology protectionism concerns during Xi's upcoming U.S. visit, according to a letter addressed to Obama seen by Reuters. In the letter dated Aug. 11, 19 U.S. business lobbies including the American Chamber of Commerce in China and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and sector-focused groups including the National Association of Manufacturers and Information Technology Industry Council, prodded Obama to raise the issues faced by the information and communications technology sector.
BMW said it was looking into whether Google infringed any trademark rights after the Silicon Valley-based group set up a new company called Alphabet, which is also the name of a BMW subsidiary. "We are examining whether there are any implications over trademarks," a BMW spokeswoman said, adding there were currently no plans to take legal steps against Google.
Car hacking has been the story of the moment, with a lack of cybersecurity understanding evident among large automakers. Tesla, however, is a different case.
U.S. prosecutors have charged nine people over their alleged roles in a hacking scheme to obtain corporate press releases before they were made public, which they said generated more than $30 million of illegal trading profit. Prosecutors in Brooklyn, New York made public an insider trading indictment charging four traders: Vitaly Korchevsky, a former hedge fund manager from Glen Mills, Pennsylvania; Vladislav Khalupsky, of Brooklyn and Odessa, Ukraine and Leonid Momotok, of and Alexander Garkusha of Georgia.
China has long been notorious for rampant music piracy, but Beijing is now taking bigger steps to crack down on illegal online distribution. The National Copyright Administration of China said 2.2 million songs have been removed from online music platforms in China, after the government copyright watchdog ordered service providers to remove unlicensed music from their platforms by the end of July.
Ten videos were removed from Vimeo, after a Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint claimed that the videos contained copyrighted content from "Pixels," the 2015 feature film that's plaguing vintage video game lovers all across the land. The supposed copyright violation, it seemed, was that the videos all contained the word "pixels" in their titles. Vimeo ended up restoring the videos on Monday, after it became clear that many of the removed videos had nothing to do with the film -- and, in fact, predated it by several years.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Yahoo will be among the first technology companies to use the Internet Watch Foundation’s “hash list” to identify and remove child abuse images uploaded to their services, the British anti-abuse organization announced. Sharing the list of digital fingerprints with Internet companies will allow victims’ images to be identified and removed more quickly, preventing them from being repeatedly shared.
The Federal Trade Commission, the de facto federal watchdog for consumers' privacy and data security, knows it needs help. FTC Commissioner Terrell McSweeny and the agency's chief technologist Ashkan Soltani are in Las Vegas to talk with hackers and security researchers attending the Black Hat and DEF CON conferences.
Carphone Warehouse said that hackers had gained access to the personal information of 2.4 million of its online customers, in the latest high-profile breach of online privacy. In a press release, the U.K. cellular retailer said its websites and mobile Internet services had been penetrated by hackers and that an investigation indicated that “personal data which may include name, address, date of birth and bank details of up to 2.4 million customers may have been accessed.”
About : Legal Services | Doug Isenberg | Cases & Clients | Firm News
Resources : YouTube Channel | Daily News | Blog | Masterclass | Domain Dispute Digest
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.