A Brazilian judge ordered wireless phone carriers to block access to Facebook's WhatsApp for 72 hours throughout Latin America's largest country, the second such incident against the popular messaging application in five months. The decision by the judge in the northeastern state of Sergipe applies to the five main wireless operators in Brazil.
Nvidia Corp. ducked a possible ban on imports of some of its graphics chips after settling a patent dispute with Samsung Electronics Co. The companies agreed to a license a “small number of patents by each company to the other, but no broad cross-licensing of patents or other compensation,” they said in a joint statement.
A House Democrat and Republican are teaming up on a bill that would give the government more powers to fight brokers who use software to buy large amounts of tickets that they can resell, often at a higher price. But the bill no longer includes the criminal penalties that were included in a different version of the legislation.
Uber and advocates for the blind have reached a lawsuit settlement in which the ride-hailing company agrees to require that existing and new drivers confirm they understand their legal obligations to transport riders with guide dogs or other service animals, an advocacy group announced. The National Federation of the Blind said that Uber will also remove a driver from the platform after a single complaint if it determines the driver knowingly denied a person with a disability a ride because the person was traveling with a service animal.
Fitbit Inc. won a ruling that invalidated the last of the Jawbone Inc. patents that were the subject of a dispute at the U.S. International Trade Commission. The ruling lessens the chance that Fitbit would face an import ban on bringing its fitness trackers, which are made overseas, into the U.S.
As the world watched the FBI spar with Apple this winter in an attempt to hack into a San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, federal officials were quietly waging a different encryption battle in a Los Angeles courtroom. There, authorities obtained a search warrant compelling the girlfriend of an alleged Armenian gang member to press her finger against an iPhone that had been seized from a Glendale home.
Venmo, the hugely popular peer-to-peer payments service owned by PayPal, is under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. Its parent company acknowledged the situation in an SEC filing. "On March 28th, 2016, we received a Civil Investigative Demand (CID) from the Federal Trade Commission as part of its investigation to determine whether we, through our Venmo service, have been or are engaged in deceptive or unfair practices in violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act," the filing reads.
U.S. Steel Corp. is alleging that Chinese government hackers stole proprietary methods for making lightweight steel on behalf of Chinese steel producers seeking to supply a bigger share of the U.S. auto-making market. Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel, in a complaint filed with the International Trade Commission, said a computer belonging to a Pittsburgh researcher was hacked in 2011, and that plans for developing new steel technology were stolen.
A Georgia couple is suing Snapchat, claiming that the social media app's "speed filter" tempted a woman to drive too fast and to cause a crash that injured the husband. Media outlets report Wentworth and Karen Maynard filed a lawsuit in Spalding County State Court against Snapchat and the 18-year-old driver, Christal McGee.
Facebook’s latest transparency report is out covering the second half of 2015 and the social networking company says it continues to see an uptick in government requests for user data worldwide. In fact, authorities have requested information about account data 46,763 times, a 13 percent increase from the first half of last year.
The Supreme Court approved a rule change that would let U.S. judges issue search warrants for access to computers located in any jurisdiction despite opposition from civil liberties groups who say it will greatly expand the FBI's hacking authority. U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts transmitted the rules to Congress, which will have until Dec. 1 to reject or modify the changes to the federal rules of criminal procedure.
Federal Trade Commission staffers have met with companies in recent months to examine industry concerns that Alphabet Inc.’s Google abuses the dominance of its Android smartphone software, extending a probe that began last year, according to people familiar with the matter. The FTC is examining issues similar to European regulators, who last week charged Google with improperly using Android’s status as the world’s most popular smartphone operating system to force device makers and wireless carriers to favor Google’s search engine and other services.
The House unanimously passed an email privacy bill that the technology industry and advocates pushed for years. The Email Privacy Act had the most public backers of any bill in Congress and it passed 419-0. Attention now turns to the Senate.
The FBI informed Apple of a vulnerability in its iPhone and Mac software on April 14, the first time it had told the company about a flaw in Apple products under a controversial White House process for sharing such information, the company told Reuters. The FBI told the company that the disclosure resulted from the so-called Vulnerability Equities Process for deciding what to do with information about security holes, Apple said.
A federal court found Amazon liable for charging parents for unauthorized in-app purchases made by kids, siding with the Federal Trade Commission in a case that stretched back to 2014. The key question in the legal battle was whether Amazon's app store made it too easy for children to buy virtual goods with real money inside games labeled as "free" without parental permission.
For budding novelists looking to stand out, the website PaidBookReviews.org offers a package of 100 book reviews on Amazon for the low price of $2,200. The website was one of five sites Amazon sued in Washington state court, part of the online retailer's year-long campaign to snuff out networks of fake reviews on its site.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation plans to tell the White House it knows so little about the hacking tool that was used to open a terrorist’s iPhone that it doesn’t make sense to launch an internal government review about whether to share the hacking method with Apple Inc. The decision, and the technical and bureaucratic justification behind it, would likely keep Apple in the dark about whatever security gap exists on certain models of the company’s phones, according to people familiar with the discussions.
SWIFT, the global financial network that banks use to transfer billions of dollars every day, warned its customers that it was aware of "a number of recent cyber incidents" where attackers had sent fraudulent messages over its system. The disclosure came as law enforcement authorities in Bangladesh and elsewhere investigated the February cyber theft of $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank account at the New York Federal Reserve Bank.
Some terrorist financiers blacklisted by the U.S. government continue to raise money and attract followers on U.S.-based social media, a new report says. That is because some financiers open new social media accounts, even as companies shut them down.
U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts described as bizarre the legal process used by companies to challenge competitors' patents as the Supreme Court heard a case involving a vehicle speedometer that alerts drivers if they are driving too quickly. Companies that are frequent targets of patent suits, including Apple Inc and Google Inc, have turned to the patent office procedure, known as "inter partes review,", to try to fight off patent challenges.
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