A French-born American has now sued his home country because, he claims, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has illegally seized a domain that he’s owned since 1994: France.com. In the mid-1990s, Jean-Noël Frydman bought France.com from Web.com and set up a website to serve as a "digital kiosk" for Francophiles and Francophones in the United States.
Amid rising threats, including a recent attack on several U.S. power and natural gas suppliers, energy companies are now spending less than 0.2 percent of their revenue on cybersecurity, at least a third less than financial institutions, according to Precision Analytics LLC and The CAP Group LLC, security consultants that work within the industry. “It’s scary," said Brian Walker, a former head of Marathon Oil Corp.’s global IT and now an independent consultant.
Alphabet Inc. President Sergey Brin said that technology companies must take greater responsibility for the social impact of their work, his first comments following a year of heightened global awareness about misuse of digital services. “We’re in an era of great inspiration and possibility, but with this opportunity comes the need for tremendous thoughtfulness and responsibility as technology is deeply and irrevocably interwoven into our societies,” Brin wrote after quoting from Charles Dickens’ novel “A Tale of Two Cities” about the “the best of times” and “the worst of times.”
A European Commission plan to tax the digital turnover of large companies drew scepticism from the global rule-setting body on tax matters and some EU states, which called instead for an international solution. The criticism came at the first meeting of EU ministers to discuss the plan, which was presented by the Commission last month and entails a 3 percent levy on the digital revenues of large multinational corporations such as Google, Facebook and Amazon.
EU lawmakers and member states struck a preliminary deal that will allow countries to force online streaming services including Netflix and Amazon’s video service to help fund European films and TV shows. The new law extends the European Union’s broadcasting rules to online video services and includes a quota of 30 percent for European works on video-on-demand platforms, the European Parliament said.
A top Facebook executive apologized for errors made by the firm and vowed to do more to improve transparency during a four-hour grilling from British lawmakers who insisted the company’s response to a data scandal had been inadequate. Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer said the mistakes made by the firm hurt, and that it was cooperating with investigations by British regulators.
In what is being hailed as a historic day for music creators, the Music Modernization Act passed the House, paving the way for improved royalty payments to songwriters, artists and creatives in the digital era. Speaking from the House floor today, Robert Goodlatte (R-VA) said the bill “brings early 20th century music laws for the analog era into the 21st century digital era,” adding, “music is no longer written on piano rolls, and our laws shouldn’t be based on that technology either.”
The Justice Department is investigating whether Huawei Technologies Co. violated U.S. sanctions related to Iran, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that opens a new avenue of scrutiny of the Chinese cellular-electronics giant on national security grounds. It’s unclear how far the Justice Department probe has advanced and what specific allegation federal agents are probing.
At a time when the real Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to clean up Facebook, the Silicon Valley company has failed to eliminate impostor accounts masquerading as him and his chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, to swindle Facebook users out of thousands of dollars. An examination by The New York Times found 205 accounts impersonating Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg on Facebook and its photo-sharing site Instagram, not including fan pages or satire accounts, which are permitted under the company’s rules.
A California man who built a sizable business out of recycling electronic waste is headed to federal prison for 15 months after a federal appeals court in Miami rejected his claim that the “restore disks” he made to extend the lives of computers had no financial value, instead ruling that he had infringed Microsoft’s products to the tune of $700,000. The appeals court upheld a federal district judge’s ruling that the disks made by Eric Lundgren to restore Microsoft operating systems had a value of $25 apiece, even though they could be downloaded free and could be used only on computers with a valid Microsoft license.
Democrats are demanding answers from the Trump administration on steps being taken to prevent the president from falling victim to foreign hackers, suggesting his personal cellphone use poses a national security threat. A pair of Democratic congressman sent a letter to high-level officials pressing them on reports that Trump frequently relies on his personal cellphone for conversations with those outside the White House.
Facebook said it has declined an invitation to testify at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on filtering practices by social media companies, a company spokesman said. The company said that even though it will not appear, it looks “forward to a continuing dialogue with members of the committee about Facebook’s strong commitment to being a platform for all voices and ideas.”
The company formerly known as Yahoo is paying a $35 million fine to resolve federal regulators' charges that the online pioneer deceived investors by failing to disclose one of the biggest data breaches in Internet history. The Securities and Exchange Commission announced the action against the company, which is now called Altaba after its email and other digital services were sold to Verizon Communications for $4.48 billion last year.
Ireland says it will begin collecting more than 13 billion euros ($15.9 billion) of back taxes from Apple, 19 months after the European Commission ruled that a tax deal with the tech giant amounted to illegal state aid. The Commission ordered Ireland to collect back taxes for the years 2003-2014, which it estimated at 13 billion euros, plus interest.
The city of Atlanta spent more than $2.6 million on emergency efforts to respond to a ransomware attack that destabilized municipal operations. Attackers, who infected the city's systems with the pernicious SamSam malware, asked for a ransom of roughly $50,000 worth of bitcoin.
The U.S. Supreme Court gave its stamp of approval to a government review process prized by high technology companies as an easy and cheap way to combat “patent trolls” and others that bring patent infringement lawsuits. The justices ruled 7-2 that a type of in-house patent review at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office does not violate a defendant’s right under the U.S. Constitution to have a case adjudicated by a federal court and jury.
Careem, Uber’s main ride-hailing app rival in the Middle East, was hit by a cyber attack that compromised the data of 14 million users, it said. The company learned of the breach, in which access was gained to a computer system that stored customer and driver account information, on January 14, it said in statement.
Facebook Inc. said it was able to remove a larger amount of content from the Islamic State and al-Qaeda in the first quarter of 2018 by actively looking for it. The company has trained its review systems -- both humans and computer algorithms -- to seek out posts from terrorist groups.
A hacker group, dubbed Orangeworm, is mainly targeting American healthcare organizations, though there are a number of victims worldwide, including in Asia and Europe. But rather than do anything destructive, Orangeworm is likely using leverage on those medical devices -- designed to process and view images from X-Ray and MRI machines -- to learn more about them as part of an ongoing corporate espionage operation, Symantec said.
Apple Inc.’s takeover of music-identification service Shazam faces an extended European Union probe as antitrust regulators raised concerns that the iPhone maker could use the app’s data to lure customers to its own music service. The EU set a Sept. 4 deadline to investigate whether Apple might get unfair access to commercially sensitive information about users of rival music-streaming services.
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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.