A dual American and Russian citizen received a sentence of 10 years and had $500,000 in illicit proceeds confiscated for illegally shipping technology to Russia. Alexander Fishenko plead guilty to 19 charges stemming from the scheme at a federal court in New York.
Artem Vaulin is accused of being the mastermind behind the most popular illegal file-sharing site in the world, KickassTorrents, which U.S. authorities say helped distribute more than a billion dollars' worth of pirated movies and music. Yet despite allegedly making a living from helping people steal copyrighted material, the 30-year-old Ukrainian seems to have bought movies and music legally on iTunes — and some of those purchases ultimately helped investigators track him down, according to a criminal complaint lodged against him in federal court.
Google removed a handful of malicious, fake Pokémon apps during the past weekend. It is another example of developers creating bootleg apps to take advantage of people caught up in the latest craze -- and a reminder that you should play it safe when downloading apps.
The alleged founder of one of the world's most notorious illegal file-sharing sites was arrested in Poland, the Justice Department said. Thirty-year-old Ukrainian Artem Vaulin faces conspiracy, copyright infringement and money laundering charges in the United States, where authorities have accused him of operating KickassTorrents.
WikiLeaks was blocked in Turkey, the site said, after it published thousands of emails from the country's ruling party following a failed military coup. The move comes hours after WikiLeaks, known for publishing classified government and military info, made public nearly 300,000 emails and 500,000 documents from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) dating back to 2010.
The French data protection authority issued a formal notice to Microsoft Corporation to stop collecting excessive data from users without their consent, it said.
Milo Yiannopoulos, the tech editor at conservative news site Breitbart and a pretty notorious internet troll, has been suspended from Twitter for the final time. He’s now banned for good for repeatedly abusing other users, the company confirmed.
Some of the U.S. Library of Congress’s websites are inaccessible as the result of a denial-of-service attack, the Library of Congress announced. The attack has also caused other websites hosted by the LOC, including the U.S. Copyright Office, to go down, and some Library of Congress employees were reportedly unable to access their work email accounts or visit internal websites.
Twitter’s CEO reached out to comedian Leslie Jones after she highlighted the harassment she had been receiving on the social media platform. “Hi Leslie, following, please [direct message] me when you have a moment,” Jack Dorsey tweeted to Jones, who had documented the racist and sexist tweets being directed at her account.
Cybersecurity is the biggest concern for companies evaluating risk in the nascent self-driving vehicle industry, according to a survey conducted by Munich Re. The world’s second-biggest reinsurer found that 55 percent of corporate risk managers surveyed named cybersecurity as their top concern about self-driving cars.
A Brazilian judge ordered wireless phone carriers to block access to Facebook Inc's WhatsApp indefinitely, the third such incident against the popular phone messaging app in eight months. The decision by Judge Daniela Barbosa Assunção de Souza in the southeastern state of Rio de Janeiro applies to Brazil's five wireless carriers.
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.
Google said that global government requests for its user data had risen in the second half of 2015 to an all-time high. Authorities made 40,677 requests in the second half of last year, according to an update made to the company’s transparency report, up from 35,365 in the first half of the year.
Spanish police issued guidelines on how to safely use augmented-reality video games after the release of the application Pokemon Go. The police advice included reminders that users are in "the real world" and must be aware of obstacles such as traffic lights and cars.
Twitter moved swiftly to remove posts from Islamic extremists glorifying a truck attack in Nice, France, watchdog groups said, in a rare round of praise for a platform that has often struggled to contain violent propaganda. A spate of violence over the past several months has posed numerous challenges to social media companies.
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.
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.
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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.