The House Judiciary Committee’s Encryption Working Group released its year-end report -- and the result is good news for technology companies. While the report doesn’t explicitly rule out encryption legislation, it lands firmly on the side of encryption policy critics, arguing that law enforcement backdoors pose a threat to security.
Because it’s free, has a relatively good record on privacy and security, and is popular in so many parts of the world, WhatsApp has cultivated an unusual audience: It has become the lingua franca among people who, whether by choice or by force, have left their homes for the unknown. This is happening as the world is increasingly at war over migration; 2016 was, among other things, a prolonged and pitched battle over the rights and privileges of migrant people, whether Syrians in Europe, Europeans in Britain’s fight over Brexit, or the issue of Mexican and Muslim immigration that dominated the American presidential race.
After failing to strike a new deal with Apple, Nokia is suing the iPhone maker for patent infringement in both Germany and the U.S. The two companies had a deal in 2011 that covered some Nokia patents, but Nokia says efforts to reach a broader pact have gone nowhere.
In June, a gunman killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in a horrific spate of violence at a gay nightclub in Orlando. Now, the families of some of the victims are suing Google, Twitter and Facebook, arguing that the tech companies had a role in the shooter's radicalization.
Egypt has reportedly censored encrypted chat service Signal. App developer Open Whisper Systems confirmed the transcontinental country is censoring its messaging and voice calling program.
In a twist on the peddling of fake news to real people, researchers say a Russian cyberforgery ring has created more than half a million fake internet users and 250,000 fake websites to trick advertisers into collectively paying as much as $5 million a day for video ads that are never watched. The fraud, which began in September and is still going on, represents a new level of sophistication among criminals who seek to profit by using bots -- computer programs that pretend to be people -- to cheat advertisers.
The European Commission has charged Facebook with providing misleading information during its takeover of the online messaging service WhatsApp, opening the company to a possible fine of 1 percent of its turnover. However, the statement of objections sent to Facebook will not affect the EC's approval of the $22 billion merger in 2014, the Commission said in a statement.
People buying computers in South Carolina would be limited in their access to porn online under newly proposed legislation. A bill pre-filed this month by state Rep. Bill Chumley would require sellers to install digital blocking capabilities on computers and other devices that access the internet to prevent the viewing of obscene content.
A Nigerian national has been charged, and others are being sought, in connection with a hack of Los Angeles County emails that might have exposed personal data from hundreds of thousands of people who had business with county departments, officials said. Kelvin Onaghinor, 37, of Nigeria faces nine counts related to the breach, including unauthorized computer access and identity theft, according to the Los Angeles County Chief Executive Office.
In a move that may shake-up U.S. patent law, the Supreme Court decided to hear a case about where patent owners can file lawsuits -- a case that will likely put an end to a special Texas cottage industry that has been a thorn in the side of big business. The case will affect a judicial region known as the Eastern District of Texas, which for years has been a hothouse of patent lawsuits thanks to plaintiff-friendly laws and juries that have a reputation for handing out outsize damages awards.
Apple has launched a legal challenge to a record $14 billion EU tax demand, arguing that EU regulators ignored tax experts and corporate law and deliberately picked a method to maximize the penalty, senior executives said. Apple's combative stand underlines its anger with the European Commission, which said on Aug. 30 the company's Irish tax deal was illegal state aid and ordered it to repay up to 13 billion euros ($13.8 billion) to Ireland, where Apple has its European headquarters.
German judges and state prosecutors need to crack down straight away on fake news disseminated through social media platforms such as Facebook, Germany's Justice Minister Heiko Maas said in an interview. Maas, a Social Democrat in conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition, has repeatedly warned the U.S. technology company to respect laws against defamation in Germany that are more rigid than in the United States.
A Minnesota lawyer who has drawn scorn for his tactics in filing porn copyright lawsuits and disability litigation has been indicted alongside a longtime partner in a multimillion-fraud and extortion conspiracy that counted as its victims hundreds of people nationwide and the court system itself. Paul Hansmeier and John L. Steele collected about $6 million from legal settlements in copyright-infringement lawsuits they had filed against people who allegedly downloaded pornographic movies online -- films to which the men’s companies had ostensibly purchased or filed copyrights, the indictment says.
Online learning company Lynda.com, a subsidiary of LinkedIn, which is now officially a subsidiary of Microsoft, sent out an email to some users alerting them to a breach of a database that includes contact information and courses some users viewed. Altogether, it’s emailing about 9.5 million users whose passwords weren’t included in the affected database, a LinkedIn spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.
The U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which is responsible for testing and certifying voting systems, among other things, was hacked around the time of the election, security outfit Recorded Future reports. The EAC confirmed a “potential intrusion” in a statement issued to TechCrunch.
Federal Communications Commission chair Tom Wheeler, who passed important rules on net neutrality during his three-year tenure, will step down from the agency next month. In a tweet in 2014, Trump called the FCC's adoption of Net neutrality rules a "power grab" by President Obama.
Twitter announced that it has cut off all geospatial intelligence data being sold to police intelligence centers, also known as fusion centers. The geospatial intelligence tool was being provided by Dataminr, an analytics firm partially owned by Twitter, which has exclusive access to the company’s live data feed or “firehose.”
Cyberinsurance is the fastest-growing insurance product in America, fueled by a slate of recent corporate and government hackings. PricewaterhouseCoopers forecasts that the now roughly $3 billion corporate cyberinsurance market will grow to $7.5 billion in premiums by 2020, driven partly by rising prices.
China has shut down or "dealt with" thousands of websites for sharing "harmful" erotic or obscene content since April, the state's office for combating pornography and illegal publications announced. The office said 2,500 websites were prosecuted or shut down and more than 3 million "harmful" posts were deleted in eight months up to December during a drive to "purify" the Internet in China and protect youth, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
Yahoo has disclosed that in addition to its September hacking incident, another “unauthorized third-party” obtained data from more than 1 billion user accounts. The company claims that the information stolen may include names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords, and “in some cases” encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers.
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