Internet overseer ICANN will push ahead with a new ".africa" top-level domain, despite having twice been ordered not to because of serious questions over how it handled the case. A Los Angeles court refused [PDF] a preliminary injunction against ICANN that would prevent it from adding .africa to the internet and allowing South Africa-based ZA Central Registry (ZACR) from running it.
Facebook must do much more to stamp out hate speech on its site, the president of Italy's lower house of parliament said, warning that rising abuse on various social media was being fueled by fake news. Laura Boldrini, herself often the focus of sexist insults and online threats, complained to Facebook managers in November about hate speech on the social network and put forward several proposals on ways to deal with the problem.
Companies concerned about cybersecurity have a fleet of new Microsoft tools coming their way. The company announced a host of new security capabilities as part of the run-up to the massive RSA security conference in San Francisco.
Vocal proponents of Mexico’s 2014 soda tax, the first national soda tax of its kind, received links laced with an invasive form of spyware developed by NSO Group, an Israeli cyberarms dealer that sells its digital spy tools exclusively to governments and that has contracts with multiple agencies inside Mexico, according to company emails leaked to The New York Times last year. NSO Group and the dozens of other commercial spyware outfits that have cropped up around the globe over the past decade operate in a largely unregulated market.
Microsoft’s lawsuit against the Department of Justice will continue, according to a ruling from Western Washington District Court. The ruling is a crucial early hurdle for Microsoft’s case, which argues that the government’s gag-ordered searches of Microsoft accounts violates the constitutional right to free speech.
Comcast's claims that it offers the “fastest Internet in America” and the “fastest in-home WiFi” risks misleading consumers and should be stopped, according to an advertising watchdog administered by the Council of Better Business Bureaus. The ruling from the National Advertising Review Board found that Comcast's reliance on Ookla's Speedtest.net data masks important details that undermine the cable giant's marketing.
Fileless malware attacks, which were recently discovered in the networks of at least 140 banks, telecoms and governments, account for about 15% of known attacks today and have been around for years in different forms. "Fileless malware attacks are becoming much more common and circumvent most of the endpoint protection and detection tools deployed today," Gartner security analyst Avivah Litan said.
Donald Trump’s White House has discussed encryption policy with the FBI, a bureau official indicated. James Baker, the FBI’s general counsel, said he is unaware of any planned changes on encryption policy under the new administration.
Facebook said that it's making three changes to stop housing, employment and credit-related ads on its network that discriminate based on personal attributes. The company came under fire last fall, following a ProPublica article that showed it was possible to make housing ads on Facebook that explicitly excluded certain racial groups, in violation of the Fair Housing Act.
Microsoft has thought up another way to attract potential customers to its cloud computing service: deterrent against patent trolls. Companies new to the cloud are vulnerable to non-practicing entities, which do not make any products themselves but use their arsenal of broad technology patents to sue other firms in order to extract royalties or a cash settlement.
Nine internet service providers (ISPs) have been sued by six film and television studios in Ireland over access to streaming websites. 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros, Disney and Sony are among the studios that brought the claim.
European Union institutions moved a step closer to letting consumers access their online subscriptions for services like Netflix or Sky when they travel across the bloc. The agreement between the European Parliament and Malta, which acts on behalf of all 28 EU states as the bloc's current presidency, is another step in an EU drive to knock down barriers in the single market of 500 million people.
A network of websites used by hackers and others to anonymously share information has itself been hit by a cyberattack. The attack disabled a large chunk of the so-called Dark Web, knocking thousands of websites offline, cybersecurity and privacy specialists said.
Twitter said in a blog post that it's cracking down even more on repeat abusers who make new accounts to continue trolling people who have blocked them. This "whack-a-mole" problem is a big one for Twitter, which many of its critics have brought up as a consistent weakness in the network's anti-harassment policies.
Ireland's privacy watchdog has launched a bid to refer Facebook's data transfer mechanism to the European Union's top court in a landmark case that could put the shifting of data across the Atlantic under renewed legal threat. The move is the latest challenge to the various methods by which large tech firms such as Google and Apple move personal data of EU citizens back to the United States.
The U.S. House of Representatives voted to require law enforcement authorities to obtain a search warrant before seeking old emails from technology companies, a win for privacy advocates fearful the Trump administration may work to expand government surveillance powers. But the legislation was expected to encounter resistance in the Senate, where it failed to advance last year amid opposition by a handful of Republican lawmakers after the House passed it unanimously.
BT has backed Google in its competition battle with Brussels over the tech giant’s smartphone operating system, Android, in an intervention that signals the nervousness of mobile operators over the power of Apple. It is understood that BT, Britain’s biggest mobile operator following its takeover of EE, has written to the European Commission rejecting antitrust charges it has levied against Google.
Anas Modamani, a Syrian refugee whose 2015 selfie with Chancellor Angela Merkel came to symbolize her decision to allow hundreds of thousands of unscreened migrants into Germany, is seeking to prevent Facebook from allowing users to repost the image after it repeatedly showed up in fake news reports. The case is one of several high-profile cases against Facebook in Germany.
A group of nearly 100 technology companies including Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google are banding together to fight the Trump administration’s controversial travel ban. In a joint amicus brief filed in the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the firms challenged President Donald Trump’s executive order which temporarily restricts citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S.
Italian authorities have seized 50 domains which made a catalogue of newspapers and magazines available illegally. The Special Unit for Broadcasting and Publishing performed the seizure as part of an investigation by the Public Prosecutor of Rome.
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