Former Scouting Director Gets 4 Years for Baseball Hacking

A federal judge sentenced the former scouting director of the St. Louis Cardinals to nearly four years in prison for hacking the Houston Astros' player personnel database and email system in an unusual case of high-tech cheating involving two Major League Baseball clubs. Christopher Correa had pleaded guilty in January to five counts of unauthorized access of a protected computer from 2013 to at least 2014, the same year he was promoted to director of baseball development in St. Louis.

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U.S. Military's Cyberwar Against ISIS Off to Slow Start

An unprecedented Pentagon cyber-offensive against the Islamic State has gotten off to a slow start, officials said, frustrating Pentagon leaders and threatening to undermine efforts to counter the militant group’s sophisticated use of technology for recruiting, operations and propaganda. The U.S. military’s new cyberwar, which strikes across networks at its communications systems and other infrastructure, is the first major, publicly declared use by any nation’s military of digital weapons that are more commonly associated with covert actions by intelligence services.

Social Media Sites Unresponsive in Turkey Amid Coup

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 Proposes New Royalty Method for Streaming Music

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.

Bill Would Make 'Revenge Porn' a Federal Crime

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.

FDIC Updating Cyber Security Policies After Data Breach

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.

EU Announces New Antitrust Charges Against Google

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.

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