Apple Inc. warned employees to stop leaking internal information on future plans and raised the specter of potential legal action and criminal charges, one of the most-aggressive moves by the world’s largest technology company to control information about its activities. The Cupertino, California-based company said in a lengthy memo posted to its internal blog that it "caught 29 leakers," last year and noted that 12 of those were arrested.
European Union Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova said she had a “constructive and open discussion” with Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The call lasted around half an hour and Jourova said the EU would closely monitor Facebook’s implementation of a strict new EU data protection law which enters into force on May 25.
Spotify, the world’s largest music streaming service, said it is to buy Loudr.fm, a San Francisco-based provider of licensing technology to help it to locate songwriters and pay them royalties they are due. The acquisition helps address a major weakness Spotify has warned exists in its business model, namely locating and ensuring the right artists get paid for their copyrighted work, an issue which, left unaddressed, leaves it open to lawsuits.
The chief executive officer of sex-solicitation website Backpage.com pleaded guilty to money laundering and conspiracy charges in California three days after the site, which was also used by human traffickers, was permanently closed. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced that Carl Ferrer offered his guilty plea in state court in Sacramento and has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors against a pair of co-conspirators and controlling shareholders. Ferrer faces a prison sentence of up to five years.
President Trump signed a sex trafficking bill that reduces legal protections for websites that enable sex trafficking. The legislation, called the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), but also referred to as SESTA after the original Senate bill, cuts into the broad protections websites have from legal liability for content posted by their users.
Read the article: The Hill
After two days and more than 10 hours of questioning of Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, there was widespread consensus among lawmakers that social media technology — and its potential for abuse — had far outpaced Washington and that Congress should step in to close the gap.Mr. Zuckerberg, composed but noncommittal about making any sweeping privacy changes, conceded that it was “inevitable that there will need to be some regulation.”
The Dubai-based cryptocurrency firm Alibabacoin Foundation said Alibaba Group Holding Ltd cannot monopolize the “magical” Alibaba name, and asked a U.S. judge to dismiss the Chinese e-commerce retailer’s trademark lawsuit. In a filing with the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Alibabacoin rejected the claim that consumers would be confused into thinking Alibaba supported its alleged effort to raise money in the cryptocurrency market.
VirnetX Holding Corp. won $502.6 million against Apple Inc. after a federal jury in Texas said the maker of iPhones was infringing patents for secure communications, the latest twist in a dispute now in its eighth year. VirnetX claimed that Apple’s FaceTime, VPN on Demand and iMessage features infringe four patents related to secure communications, claims that Apple denied.
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg endured an hours-long grilling by dozens of U.S. senators during which he repeatedly apologized and promised privacy reforms but also pointedly defended his company against the threat of new legislation. Zuckerberg invoked Facebook’s unlikely journey — from a tiny start-up he co-founded in his Harvard dorm room 14 years ago to a social media behemoth — in explaining Facebook’s frequent privacy missteps and its failure to spot and defeat Russia’s aggressive campaign to manipulate American voters in 2016 and beyond.
Online search giant Google has filed an appeal at the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) against a judgment from India’s competition watchdog that found it guilty of “search bias”, two sources aware of the matter told Reuters. In February, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) imposed a 1.36 billion rupees ($20.95 million) fine on Google, saying it was abusing its dominance in online web search and online search advertising markets.
In a series of tweets from its public policy account, Twitter announced its decision to back the Honest Ads Act, a piece of legislation introduced last year as a response to mounting evidence that Russia leveraged domestic social media platforms in an attempt to influence U.S. politics during the 2016 presidential election. After initially avoiding a commitment to the bill, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg endorsed the proposal last week.
Seven top officials of the website Backpage.com, long accused of facilitating child sex trafficking, have been arrested after a grand jury in Phoenix issued a 93-count indictment alleging conspiracy and money laundering, and the government seized all of Backpage’s websites around the world. The indictment accuses Backpage of facilitating prostitution committed by those posting ads on the site, specifically citing 17 victims trafficked on Backpage, some as young as 14.
A coalition of 20 child advocacy, privacy and consumer groups filed a complaint asking the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to investigate the Google-owned video site for alleged violations of children's online privacy laws. The groups -- which include Common Sense Media, the Center for Digital Democracy and Parents Across America -- allege that YouTube violates COPPA, a federal law that regulates user data collection from sites with users who are under 13 years old.
Congress has released Mark Zuckerberg's prepared testimony ahead of a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "It's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well," according to Zuckerberg's prepared remarks.
Hackers have attacked networks in a number of countries including data centers in Iran where they left the image of a U.S. flag on screens along with a warning: “Don’t mess with our elections”, the Iranian IT ministry said. The statement said the attack, which hit internet service providers and cut off web access for subscribers, was made possible by a vulnerability in routers from Cisco which had earlier issued a warning and provided a patch that some firms had failed to install over the Iranian new year holiday.
Facebook’s disclosure that its search tools were used to collect data on most of its 2.2 billion users could potentially trigger record fines and create new legal vulnerability for not having prevented risks to user data, three former federal officials said. The three former officials, all of whom were at the Federal Trade Commission during the privacy investigation that led to a 2011 consent decree with Facebook, said the company’s latest mishap may violate the decree’s provisions requiring the implementation of a privacy program.
Michigan governor Rick Snyder has signed legislation that criminalizes the possession of ransomware, malicious software that locks you out of your data and demands money to get access to that data back. The law makes the possession of ransomware a felony, punishable by up to three years in prison, according to a statement on the governor’s website.
Backpage.com, the popular classified ads website, appeared to be offline, posting a message that it had been seized and disabled by the federal government. Visitors to backpage.com and backpage.ca — known for personal adult ads — were met with a message that stated, "backpage.com and affiliated websites have been seized as part of an enforcement action by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division."
Russia’s state communications watchdog said it had filed a lawsuit to limit access to the Telegram messaging app after the company refused to give Russian state security services access to its users’ secret messages. Ranked as the world’s ninth most popular mobile messaging app, Telegram is widely used in countries across the former Soviet Union and Middle East.
Three years after Chinese hackers stole security clearance files and other sensitive personal information of some 22 million U.S. federal employees, cyber-defenses at the Department of Interior, which hosted White House Office of Personnel Management (OPM) servers targeted in the theft, were still unable to detect “some of the most basic threats” inside Interior’s computer networks — including malware actively trying to make contact with Russia.
Read the article: Fox News
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