Australia’s competition regulator said it would investigate whether U.S. online giants Facebook and Alphabet Inc.’s Google have disrupted the news media market to the detriment of publishers and consumers. Like their rivals globally, Australia’s traditional media companies have been squeezed by online rivals, as advertising dollars have followed eyeballs to digital distributors such as Google, Facebook and Netflix Inc.
Twitter Inc. said it allowed anti-Muslim videos that were retweeted by President Donald Trump because they didn’t break rules on forbidden content, backtracking from an earlier rationale that newsworthiness justified the posts. A Twitter spokesperson said "there may be the rare occasion when we allow controversial content or behavior which may otherwise violate our rules to remain on our service because we believe there is a legitimate public interest in its availability."
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia overturned the Department of Homeland Security's delay of President Obama's International Entrepreneur Rule (IER). The Obama-era rule would allow foreign-born entrepreneurs two-and-a-half years in the U.S. to grow their companies, and possibly an additional two-and-a-half year extension.
Chinese President Xi Jinping said the country will not close its door to the global Internet, but that cyber sovereignty is key in its vision of Internet development. Xi’s comments were read by Huang Kunming, head of the Chinese Communist Party’s publicity department at the country’s largest public cyber policy forum in the town of Wuzhen in eastern China.
Walt Disney Co. sued Redbox in an attempt to stop the DVD rental company from selling digital copies of its movies. Privately held Redbox last month began offering consumers codes they can use to download a digital copy of a Disney movie.
Britain's National Cyber Security Center has advised all UK government departments to avoid using Russia-based anti-virus software, warning that it could be exploited by the Russian government. NCSC chief executive Ciaran Martin cautioned in the letter that in cases where access to the information by Russia "would be a risk to national security, a Russia-based (anti-virus) company should not be chosen."
An arbitration court ordered smartphone pioneer BlackBerry Ltd to pay $137 million to Nokia to settle a payment dispute and the Canadian company said it would pursue a separate patent infringement case against the Finnish firm. The International Court of Arbitration ruled that BlackBerry had failed to make certain payments to Nokia under a patent licence contract, BlackBerry said.
Qualcomm Inc. said it filed three new patent infringement complaints against Apple Inc., saying there were 16 more of its patents that Apple was using in its iPhones. The new complaints represent the latest development in a long-standing dispute and follows Apple’s countersuit a day earlier against Qualcomm, which alleged that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon mobile phone chips infringed on Apple patents.
Facebook Inc. faced a skeptical judge over its second request to get out of a lawsuit alleging its photo scanning technology flouts users’ privacy rights. “The right to say no is a valuable commodity,” U.S. District Judge James Donato said during a hearing in San Francisco. The case concerns the “most personal aspects of your life: your face, your fingers, who you are to the world.”
More than 5 million people in the UK could be entitled to compensation from Google if a class action against the Internet giant for allegedly harvesting personal data is successful. A group led by the former executive director of consumer body Which?, Richard Lloyd, and advised by City law firm Mischon de Reya claims Google unlawfully collected personal information by bypassing the default privacy settings on the iPhone between June 2011 and February 2012.
A majority of Supreme Court justices seemed to agree that the abundance of private information available about Americans in the digital age might require new restraints on government’s ability to access it. In the specific case before the court, these new limits could require law enforcement officials to prove more to a judge about suspected criminal wrongdoing before they are able to collect cell-tower records, which can provide a detailed record of a person’s whereabouts.
Apple Inc. filed a countersuit against Qualcomm Inc, alleging that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon mobile phone chips that power a wide variety of Android-based devices infringe on Apple’s patents, the latest development in a long-running dispute. Qualcomm in July accused Apple of infringing several patents related to helping mobile phones get better battery life.
Three employees in the inspector general’s office for the Department of Homeland Security stole a computer system that contained sensitive personal information of about 246,000 agency employees, according to three United States officials and a report sent to Congress last week. They planned to modify the office’s proprietary software for managing investigative and disciplinary cases so that they could market and sell it to other inspector general offices across the federal government.
A Canadian accused by the United States of helping Russian intelligence agents break into email accounts as part of a massive 2014 breach of Yahoo accounts pleaded guilty, the U.S. Justice Department said. Karim Baratov pleaded guilty to charges returned by a grand jury in the Northern District of California in February for hacking email accounts and selling the passwords to an agent of Russia’s intelligence agency, the department said in a statement.
Facebook says it's able to remove 99% of Islamic State and Al Qaeda terrorist content before it's flagged by users thanks to advances in artificial intelligence that are helping stop the spread of terrorist content. Once Facebook is aware of the terrorist content, it removes 83% of it within an hour of it being uploaded, the company said.
In the week since the Federal Communications Commission released a plan to scrap existing rules for Internet delivery, more than 200,000 phone calls, organized through online campaigns, have been placed to Congress in protest. An additional 500,000 comments have been left on the agency’s website.
The contents of a highly sensitive hard drive belonging to a division of the National Security Agency have been left online. The virtual disk image contains over 100 gigabytes of data from an Army intelligence project, codenamed "Red Disk."
YouTube, scrambling to respond to its latest brand-safety crisis involving videos with children that drew sexually inappropriate comments, says it has taken focused action to address the problem. In the past week, YouTube said, it has removed more than 150,000 videos featuring children that had been targeted by pedophiles in the comments section, and also disabled comments for over 625,000 videos.
The European Union is seeking to play peacemaker in the patent-licensing wars that have embroiled technology giants such as Qualcomm Inc. and Apple Inc., according people familiar with the matter. The European Commission will publish guidelines to help navigate disputes between the makers and users of key technology as more gadgets get connected to the Internet.
The illegal drug trade on the dark web is growing rapidly, despite authorities shutting down major market sites like AlphaBay, as crime gangs diversify and seek new clients online, a report by two European Union agencies warned. The report, which is the first of its kind to analyze the drug trade in Europe on the dark web, showed that online markets are becoming increasingly sophisticated and offering growing numbers of illegal products to buyers.
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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.