Privacy and civil liberties groups begrudgingly announced they were OK with changes to an email privacy bill heading for a House Judiciary Committee vote. Ahead of a vote, the widely supported bill went through a series of small changes, which the American Civil Liberties Union called an unnecessary sacrifice to advance the bill, which has been stalled for years.
Uber Technologies released its first-ever transparency report detailing the information requested by not only U.S. law enforcement agencies, but also by regulators. The ride-sharing company said that between July and December 2015, it had provided information on more than 12 million riders and drivers to various U.S. regulators and on 469 users to state and federal law agencies.
Cyber-criminals have professionalized ransomware schemes, borrowing tactics from customer service or marketing, law enforcement officials and security firms say. Some players in the booming underworld employ graphic artists, call centers and technical support to streamline payment and data recovery, according to security firms that advise businesses on hacking threats.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said it was important for the agency to move quickly in its consideration of reforms to the market for high-capacity Internet connections used by certain businesses. “To have such a fresh start, we need broad principles, we need to work to find common ground, and we need to seriously look at the best ways for the Commission to act,” he said at a conference held by trade group INCOMPAS, according to his prepared remarks.
The threat of hacking seems to lurk around every corner, but American universities may not be doing enough to prepare the next generation of cyberdefenders. None of America's top 10 computer science programs -- as ranked by U.S. News & World Report in 2015 -- requires graduates to take even one cybersecurity course, according to a new analysis from security firm CloudPassage.
Microsoft became the first major U.S. tech company to say it would transfer users' information to the United States using a new transatlantic commercial data pact and would resolve any disputes with European privacy watchdogs. Data transfers to the United States have been conducted in a legal limbo since October last year when the European Union's top court struck down the Safe Harbour framework that allowed firms to easily move personal data across the Atlantic in compliance with strict EU data transferral rules.
Legislation to prevent the Federal Communications Commission from using its net neutrality rules to regulate the rates that companies charge customers for Internet service appears heading toward a House vote. The bill passed out of the Energy and Commerce Committee last month on a party-line vote over objections from Democrats, who said it would end up cutting off broad portions of the FCC's regulatory authority.
DNS overlord ICANN has responded to an angry letter from three U.S. Congressmen accusing it of failing to answer questions -- by sending a letter that fails to answer their questions. The three senators, including Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz, complained to ICANN chairman Steve Crocker that the organization had not responded to questions it had sent in two previous letters.
The U.S. Justice Department is continuing its legal fight with Apple, indicating that it plans to press forward with an effort to force the company to help the FBI by unlocking a seized iPhone in a New York drug case. In a letter, federal prosecutors informed a federal judge in Brooklyn that they still need Apple to unlock an iPhone 5S to aid in a drug trafficking case, keeping alive the government's broader legal showdown with Apple pitting law enforcement and national security needs against privacy protections.
Adobe Systems Inc. issued an emergency update to its widely used Flash software for Internet browsers after researchers discovered a security flaw that was being exploited to deliver ransomware to Windows PCs. The software maker urged the more than 1 billion users of Flash on Windows, Mac, Chrome and Linux computers to update the product as quickly as possible after security researchers said the bug was being exploited in "drive-by" attacks that infect computers with ransomware when tainted websites are visited.
U.S. newspapers including the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal are raising the alarm over new ad-blocking software that promises to replace publishers’ advertisements with its own and pay readers in bitcoin to view them. The ad-replacing plan comes from Brave, a web browser launched this year by Brendan Eich, the co-founder and former chief executive of Mozilla, the corporate arm of the open-source software community.
For Amazon, no country is more important to its global growth ambitions than India, the second-most-populous nation in the world behind China, where online shopping is in its infancy and growing explosively. But Amazon’s India plans just ran into a hitch. Late last month, the Indian government issued additional rules governing foreign ownership of e-commerce companies operating in the country.
#KOT, or Kenyans on Twitter, are being blamed for a run on deposits that resulted in Chase Bank Kenya Ltd. being placed under creditor protection by the East African country’s regulators. Central Bank of Kenya Governor Patrick Njoroge said “malicious comments” on social networks including WhatsApp Inc. were part of the reason the lender was placed under receivership.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation's secret method for unlocking the iPhone 5c used by one of the San Bernardino shooters will not work on newer models, FBI Director James Comey said. "We have a tool that works on a narrow slice of phones," Comey said at a conference on encryption and surveillance at Kenyon University in Ohio.
Online bazaars selling military weapons coveted by terrorists and militants, which violate Facebook’s recent ban on the private sales of weapons, have been appearing in regions where the Islamic State has its strongest presence. This week, after The New York Times provided Facebook with seven examples of suspicious groups, the company shut down six of them.
Reddit -- long the Internet’s playground for pseudonymous, no-rules forum discussion -- said it would give people a blocking feature to shield themselves against harassment on the site, in a move to prohibit abusive users from sending messages to others. The new tool is the latest attempt by Reddit to minimize the sometimes toxic atmosphere of the site.
Average Chinese who usually avoid confrontation with the government are taking advantage of a public comment period of a draft Internet regulation to express their frustration with intensified blocking of foreign websites. A government website posted the draft regulation, which would tighten oversight of Internet domain names, on March 25.
The White House is declining to offer public support for long-awaited legislation that would give federal judges clearer authority to order technology companies like Apple to help law enforcement crack encrypted data, according to sources familiar with the discussions. The Obama administration's refusal to either endorse or oppose legislation from Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein, the Republican chair and top Democrat respectively of the Senate Intelligence Committee, stems in part from ongoing divisions among various federal agencies over encryption, the sources said.
Turkey is investigating how hackers have posted online the identity data of some 50 million Turks, including what they said were details about the president and prime minister, after what is believed to be the biggest data breach seen in the country. While no group has taken credit for uploading the data to a website called the Turkish Citizenship Database, the comments posted suggest Turkey may be a target of political hackers.
Less than a year after it was hacked, its emails leaked all over the Web, Milan-based government spyware creator Hacking Team is facing fresh trouble. Not from another hacktivist, however, but an official authority, which has revoked the company’s license to sell outside of Europe.
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