A German court has ruled that Facebook Inc.’s current find-a-friend function is illegal, labeling it an unacceptable and intrusive form of advertising. The decision by the Federal Court of Justice upholds a previous ruling by a lower court against Facebook, which has faced a number of legal disputes in Europe regarding privacy protection.
The widow of an American killed in a shooting attack at a Jordanian police training center has sued Twitter Inc, blaming the social media company for making it easier for Islamic State to spread its message. Tamara Fields, a Florida woman whose husband Lloyd died in the Nov. 9 attack, accused Twitter of having knowingly let the militant Islamist group use its network to spread propaganda, raise money and attract recruits.
International hacking movement Anonymous said it attacked hundreds of Thai government websites over death sentences handed down to two migrant workers for the murder of two British tourists. A court sentenced Myanmar migrant workers Zaw Lin and Win Zaw Htun, both 22, to death on Dec. 24 after finding them guilty of murdering tourists Hannah Witheridge, 23, and David Miller, 24, on a beach on the island of Koh Tao in 2014.
One of the hackers who boasted last fall of breaking into the private email account of the CIA director apparently has struck again — this time targeting the director of national intelligence. A prankster who goes by the nickname “Cracka” told a reporter for the online magazine Motherboard that he had broken into a series of accounts linked to National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper.
A U.S. government cyber security official warned that authorities have seen an increase in attacks that penetrate industrial control system networks over the past year, and said they are vulnerable because they are exposed to the Internet. Industrial control systems are computers that control operations of industrial processes, from energy plants and steel mills to cookie factories and breweries.
Google, facing increased scrutiny from European regulators, has hired a former senior adviser to President Obama to lead its global public policy team. Caroline Atkinson, who left her position as a White House deputy national security adviser last month, will join Google in March and be based in Washington.
Last year, IBM notched 7,355 new patents, which put it atop the leaderboard for the 23rd year in a row. Once again, Samsung and Canon were second and third on the list.
Twitter Inc. has ignited a debate over freedom of speech on the Internet by stripping the verification status of a controversial journalist for violating the social media site’s rules of conduct. Twitter removed the blue check mark on the account of Milo Yiannopoulos, who writes for Breitbart News, a conservative media outlet.
Bosses can snoop on workers’ e-mails including personal messages with loved ones during working hours, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in a case brought by a Romanian man fired after his employer spied on his private Yahoo! Inc. chats. “It is not unreasonable for an employer to want to verify that the employees are completing their professional tasks during working hours,” the court in Strasbourg, France, ruled.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it was helping Ukraine investigate an apparent attack last month on the country's power grid that caused a blackout for 80,000 customers. Experts have widely described the Dec. 23 incident at western Ukraine's Prykarpattyaoblenergo utility as the first known power outage caused by a cyber attack.
Qualcomm Inc. asked a U.S. federal court to compel some of its biggest customers and competitors — including Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. — to hand over any documents they provided to South Korean antitrust authorities investigating the U.S. chip maker. The maneuver, which some legal experts called unusual, risks setting off court battles with companies that include two major purchasers of Qualcomm chips.
Nearly 200 experts, companies and civil society groups from more than 40 countries are asking governments around the world to support strong encryption — and reject proposals that would undermine the digital security it provides. “The internet belongs to the world’s people, not its governments. We refuse to let this precious resource become nationalized and broken by any nation," Brett Solomon, executive director of Access Now, the online advocacy group that organized the open letter, said in a news release.
U.S. safety regulators have determined that only Fiat-Chrysler radios have a security flaw that allowed hackers to take control of a Jeep last year. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in documents posted online Saturday that it is ending a five-month investigation into the vulnerabilities of automotive radios.
An appellate panel has ruled in favor of daily fantasy sports sites DraftKings and FanDuel, allowing both to continue operating in the state of New York while their appeal is being heard, according to Darren Rovell of ESPN. The sites are currently appealing a ruling by the New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman who said daily fantasy sports is a form of gambling.
A Latvian hacker who made $1,000 for writing code used in a virus that infected more than a million computers worldwide has already spent enough time in prison, a U.S. judge ruled. Deniss Calovskis was sentenced to the 20 1/2 months he spent in jail fighting extradition to the U.S. and in pretrial custody and will probably be returned to Latvia.
A new report from the Federal Communications Commission finds that while providers have done a decent job building out high-speed Internet, as many as 10 percent of Americans — roughly 34 million people — lack access to what the government considers broadband. As a result, the FCC has concluded that the expansion of broadband isn't happening in a "reasonable and timely" fashion, and the agency says the law calls on the FCC to "take immediate action" to speed things up.
The Obama administration announced an overhaul of its efforts to respond to online propaganda from the Islamic State after months of acknowledgments that it had largely failed in its attempts to counter extremist recruitment and exhortations to violence on social media. The administration has emphasized that it needs the assistance of some of the nation’s biggest technology companies, and a group of top White House and national security officials flew to California on Friday to plead their case with executives.
Leading U.S. technology companies, including Apple Inc., Google Inc. and Facebook Inc., roundly criticized proposed U.K. legislation that would expand the British government’s spying powers, according to responses to lawmakers. The tech companies’ strong push back underscores the challenges the British government will have to overcome to make the proposed laws work in practice, even as police and prosecutors welcome the changes.
U.S. cyber intelligence firm iSight Partners said it has determined that a Russian hacking group known as Sandworm caused last month's unprecedented power outage in Ukraine. The Dec. 23 outage at Western Ukraine's Prykarpattyaoblenergo cut power to 80,000 customers for about six hours, according to a report from a U.S. energy industry security group.
Senior Obama administration officials will hold high-level discussions with Silicon Valley CEOs to talk about whether social-media firms can do more to prevent terrorists from using their services to recruit and incite violence, according to people familiar with the planned summit. Some of the most important officials in the U.S. government, including Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper plan to take part in the meeting, though it wasn’t immediately clear how many of those people will fly out to northern California to meet the CEOs in person, or how many will join instead by teleconference, according to people familiar with the planning.
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