A Brazilian congressional commission recommended a bill that forbids authorities from blocking popular messaging applications, just two days after a judicial order left 100 million Brazilians without Facebook Inc's WhatsApp. A Brazilian judge overturned a 72-hour suspension of the application used by roughly half the population of the South American country, triggering popular outcry over its second judicial suspension in only five months.
Hundreds of millions of hacked usernames and passwords for email accounts and other websites are being traded in Russia's criminal underworld, a security expert told Reuters. The discovery of 272.3 million stolen accounts included a majority of users of Mail.ru, Russia's most popular email service, and smaller fractions of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft email users, said Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer of Hold Security.
Apple has lost a trademark fight in China, allowing a local company to continue using the term ‘iPhone’ for leather goods that it sells. In a decision handed down by the Beijing Municipal High People’s Court, Xintong Tiandi Technology was told it can continue selling its products using the term.
Two proprietors of a piracy-based Android app store called Applanet have pleaded guilty to copyright-infringement charges, the U.S. justice department has announced. According to the DoJ, Applanet distributed four million copies of apps that would have been worth over $17 million if sold legally.
Facebook's WhatsApp messaging service resumed in Brazil after an appeals court overturned a suspension and many of the application's 100 million users in the country voiced outrage. WhatsApp was cut off in Brazil at 2 p.m. on Monday after a judge in the remote northeastern state of Sergipe ordered Brazil's five main wireless operators to block access to the app for 72 hours.
India has rejected Apple Inc.’s request to import and sell refurbished iPhones to the world’s second largest mobile population, a telecommunications ministry official said. Apple has been seeking permission to import and sell used phones to court price-conscious consumers with a similar proposal rejected in 2015 by the environment ministry.
European counterterrorism officials say American laws and corporate policies are hampering their efforts to prevent the next attack, because legal procedures for getting international evidence from U.S.-based social-media firms are dangerously outdated. European police officials who face a lengthy process to get communications data from companies such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and WhatsApp want to make American technology firms more responsive to overseas requests.
What unites a curious cast of characters and enabled one of the most brazen digital bank heists ever is a ubiquitous and highly trusted international bank messaging system called Swift. Swift — the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication — is billed as a supersecure system that banks use to authorize payments from one account to another.
A U.S. judge partly dismissed a lawsuit filed by Twitter in which the social media company argued it should be allowed to publicly disclose more details about requests for information it receives from the U.S. government.
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.
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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.