After the Turkish military deployed in Istanbul and Ankara, the government apparently blocked social media in response to what was being reported as an attempted coup. Turkey Blocks, a Twitter account that regularly checks if sites are being blocked in the country, reported that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were all unresponsive, though Instagram and Vimeo remained available.
Apple, in a government filing, proposed simplifying the highly complex way that songwriting royalties are paid when it comes to on-demand streaming services like Apple Music, Spotify and Tidal. According to Apple’s proposal, made with the Copyright Royalty Board, a panel of federal judges who oversee rates in the United States, streaming services should pay 9.1 cents in songwriting royalties for every 100 times a song is played.
Pokemon Go players couldn't catch much after the game kept crashing. A group called PoodleCorp claimed responsibility for the server crash in a series of tweets.
Anti-pornography groups have succeeded in their efforts to get Starbucks and McDonald's to block porn on the chains' Wi-Fi networks. Earlier this year McDonald's responded by putting filters in place at most of its U.S. restaurants, a change that was just disclosed.
Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced long-stalled legislation that would make it a federal crime to share sexually explicit material of a person online without the subject’s consent. The "Intimate Privacy Protection Act" is an effort several years in the making to combat the rise in recent years of “revenge porn,” images that are shared on the internet in order to extort or humiliate someone.
A group of prominent tech leaders said that a Donald Trump presidency would be bad for innovation in America. “We have listened to Donald Trump over the past year and we have concluded: Trump would be a disaster for innovation,” they said in posts on The Huffington Post and Medium.
Taiwan is trying to figure out how hackers managed to trick a network of bank ATMs into spitting out millions. Police said several people wearing masks attacked dozens of ATMs operated by Taiwan's First Bank.
Microsoft Corp. won’t be forced to turn over e-mails stored in Ireland to the U.S. government for a drug investigation, an appeals court said in a decision that may affect data security throughout the U.S. technology industry. The ruling overturned a 2014 decision ordering Microsoft to hand over messages of a suspected drug trafficker.
The U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is updating cyber security policies after a 2015 data breach in which a former employee kept copies of sensitive information on how banks would handle bankruptcy, the regulator's chief said. FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg also said he made personnel changes after receiving a report in 2013 informing him that he had not been fully briefed about the major compromise of the regulator's computers by a foreign government in 2010 and 2011.
Margrethe Vestager, European Union's competition chief, announced a new round of antitrust charges against Google — the third set since early 2015 — claiming that some of the company’s advertising products had restricted consumer choice. The efforts are part of her continuing push to rein in Google’s activities in the EU, where the Silicon Valley company has captured roughly 90 percent of the region’s online search market.
A Chinese businessman who pleaded guilty in March to conspiring to hack into the computer networks of Boeing and other major U.S. defense contractors was sentenced to nearly four years in prison, prosecutors said. Su Bin, 51, was charged with taking part in a years-long scheme by Chinese military officers to obtain sensitive military information.
The growing threat of hacking and a duty to protect data more stringently will accelerate demand for cyber insurance in Europe, insurer Allianz said, as it launched its first product aimed at Germany's small-to-medium-sized manufacturers. Cyber insurance has been slow to take off in Europe with fewer than one in 10 firms having taken out a policy, said Christopher Lohmann, head of the region Central and Eastern Europe at Allianz Global Corporate & Speciality.
China's spies hacked into computers at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation from 2010 until 2013 -- and American government officials tried to cover it up, according to a Congressional report. According to congressional investigators, the Chinese government hacked into 12 computers and 10 backroom servers at the FDIC, including the incredibly sensitive personal computers of the agency's top officials: the FDIC chairman, his chief of staff, and the general counsel.
A Democratic U.S. senator asked the software developer behind Nintendo Co Ltd's Pokemon GO to clarify the mobile game's data privacy protections, amid concerns the augmented reality hit was unnecessarily collecting vast swaths of sensitive user data. Senator Al Franken of Minnesota sent a letter to Niantic Chief Executive John Hanke asking what user data Pokemon GO collects, how the data is used and with what third party service providers that data may be shared.
Authorities in Stillwater, Minn., have rescued five sex-trafficking victims aged 13 through 17 in recent months by combing through classified ads for “escorts” on Backpage.com. With more than 20,000 escort ads appearing on Backpage this year for the Minneapolis-St. Paul area alone, officials figure they miss many trafficked children.
Alphabet Inc's Google has been given an extra 6 weeks to early September to respond to EU charges that it uses its dominant Android mobile operating system to squeeze out rivals, EU antitrust regulators said. The U.S. technology giant found itself under fire in April as the European Commission said its requirement that mobile phone manufacturers pre-install Google Search and the Google Chrome browser in order to get access to other Google apps may harm consumers and competition.
A $1 billion lawsuit alleges that Facebook is liable for Hamas attacks in Israel and the West Bank that were allegedly facilitated in part by the group’s use of the social network. “For years, Hamas, its leaders, spokesmen, and members have openly maintained and used official Facebook accounts with little or no interference,” the lawsuit says.
The Federal Trade Commission said Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros. Home Entertainment didn’t require users of YouTube, including the very popular channel PewDiePie, to properly highlight they were paid to promote a Warner Bros. videogame. The FTC said Warner Bros. paid an advertising agency to create a so-called “YouTube influencer campaign” for its 2014 game “Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor.”
Flamboyant German tech entrepreneur Kim Dotcom is planning to relaunch file-sharing website Megaupload in January 2017, five years after the U.S. government took down the site accusing it of piracy. Megaupload, founded in 2005, had boasted of having more than 150 million registered users and 50 million daily visitors.
A senior executive of Alphabet's Google unit said that the company was notifying customers of 4,000 state-sponsored cyber attacks per month. Speaking at a Fortune magazine tech conference in Aspen, Colorado, Google senior vice president and Alphabet board member Diane Greene mentioned the figure while touting Google's security prowess.
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