Four academic researchers who specialize in uncovering algorithmic discrimination say that a decades-old federal anti-hacking statute is preventing them from doing work to detect discrimination. They say a provision of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act could be used to criminally prosecute them for research that involves scraping publicly available data from these sites or creating anonymous user accounts on them, if the sites’s terms of service prohibit this activity.
One day after Amazon announced that it would introduce Amazon Inspire, a free instructional resources site where teachers could share lesson plans, the company said it had removed three items from the site after educators complained that the products were copyrighted materials. In a related blunder, Amazon had included two of the items it has since taken down in a screen shot of the site that was sent to journalists and published in news outlets, including The New York Times.
Hillary Clinton’s technology policy initiative is a list maker’s dream, a parade of specific proposals covering a spectrum of issues. But its overriding theme is that technology should be an engine of equality rather than elitism.
Islamic State’s online efforts to recruit and inspire terrorists are being met with increasingly effective resistance, according to the U.S. envoy to the coalition fighting the group in Iraq and Syria. “This network of voices on the internet right now is really starting to turn the tide against their message," Brett McGurk told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
South Korea's Fair Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating "some matters" relating to tech giant Apple Inc., the head of the anticompetition body said during a parliamentary hearing, without disclosing further details.
A travel agent in California recently took Microsoft to court over the company’s Windows 10 upgrade tactics, and she won. After an unauthorized Windows 10 upgrade borked her small business PC, Teri Goldstein from Sausalito, California sued Microsoft over the issue, as first reported by The Seattle Times.
Google and Viacom defeated an appeal in a nationwide class action lawsuit by parents who claimed the companies illegally tracked the online activity of children under the age of 13 who watched videos and played video games on Nickelodeon's website. By a 3-0 vote, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia said Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc, and Viacom Inc were not liable under several federal and state laws for planting "cookies" on boys' and girls' computers, to gather data that advertisers could use to send targeted ads.
Chinese authorities will require Baidu Inc. and other search engines to report banned content and verify advertisers’ qualifications in its latest attempt at Internet regulation. Under rules to take effect Aug. 1, search engines operating in the country will be prohibited from providing banned information in various formats including links, summaries, cached pages, associative words, related searches and relevant recommendations, the Cyberspace Administration of China said in a statement.
The European Union’s competition watchdog has signaled it is preparing to issue a fresh set of formal antitrust charges, possibly before August, against Alphabet Inc.’s Google over abusing its dominance in advertising, according to people familiar with the matter. The European Commission has asked rival companies to permit disclosure to Google of confidential information they submitted that support allegations that it abuses its dominance in advertising.
German publishers have appealed a Berlin court's rejection of a case in which they accused Google of abusing its market power by refusing to pay them for displaying newspaper articles online, a lawyer for the publishers said. Germany's biggest newspaper publisher, Axel Springer and 40 other publishers had accused Alphabet Inc's Google of unfair treatment.
The Obama administration is ramping up its efforts to fight terrorism online as extremist Islamic groups seek to motivate homegrown attackers. Driving the effort is the recently set up Global Engagement Center, housed at the State Department but led by retired Navy SEAL Cmdr. Michael Lumpkin, a former top Pentagon official.
A sardonic Facebook page that defended Brock Turner as the "real victim" in the controversy over the ex-Stanford student's sexual assault of an unconscious woman has been taken down for violating the social media company's community standards. Beginning June 9, the Brock Turner Family Support page published a series of increasingly offensive posts lamenting Turner's 6-month stint in county jail and trivializing the plight of his victim, whom Turner was convicted in March of assaulting outside a campus party in 2015.
Some of the web’s biggest destinations for watching videos have quietly started using automation to remove extremist content from their sites, according to two people familiar with the process. The move is a major step forward for internet companies that are eager to eradicate violent propaganda from their sites and are under pressure to do so from governments around the world as attacks by extremists proliferate, from Syria to Belgium and the United States.
Networking products company Arista Networks Inc., which has been in a patent dispute with Cisco Systems Inc., said the International Trade Commission issued a limited exclusion order and cease-and-desist order against it concerning two features. The ITC ruled in Arista’s favor on two other features, finding that they don’t infringe Cisco’s patents.
Some of the nation’s largest banks, acknowledging that traditional passwords are either too cumbersome or no longer secure, are increasingly using fingerprints, facial scans and other types of biometrics to safeguard accounts. Millions of customers at Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo routinely use fingerprints to log into their bank accounts through their mobile phones.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission issued a complaint charging the Indian origin company InMobi of tracking user location against their consent. As a fine, InMobi will pay a sum of $950,000.
Tech firms have clashed with the EU on regulatory issues ranging from privacy to taxes to antitrust law. But ahead of a referendum on the U.K.’s continued membership in the EU, several technology executives and lobbyists said that the U.K.’s leaving the bloc could deepen those battles -- while creating new obstacles for them to do business in the U.K., too.
A Russian ringleader of a group that fraudulently bought some of the hottest tickets in music, sports and theater by sneaking into StubHub users' accounts pleaded guilty in a scheme involving over $1 million worth of tickets. Vadim Polyakov is expected to get a 4-to-12-year prison term after his plea to money laundering and possessing stolen property.
The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation was among the organizations breached by suspected Russian hackers in a dragnet of the U.S. political apparatus ahead of the November election, according to three people familiar with the matter. The attacks on the foundation’s network, as well as those of the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, compound concerns about her digital security even as the FBI continues to investigate her use of a personal e-mail server while she was secretary of state.
The Senate rejected a Republican-led effort to allow the FBI to access a person’s Internet browsing history, email account data and other electronic communications without a court order in terrorism and spy cases. The measure from Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) would have also extended the government’s authority to conduct surveillance over potential “lone wolf” attackers.
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