Facing a rebellion among artists and even some of its own employees, Spotify Technology SA will partially walk back a move to punish musicians for their personal misconduct. The music-streaming giant has told artists, managers and record-label executives that it will eventually restore songs by XXXTentacion to playlists, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Apple Inc. won $539 million from Samsung Electronics Co. in the final throes of the companies’ U.S. court struggle over smartphone technology, seven years after the start of a global patent battle. Apple sought about $1 billion in a retrial of a case that originally produced a verdict of that amount in 2012, while Samsung argued it should pay only $28 million this time.
The Justice Department has opened a criminal probe into whether traders are manipulating the price of Bitcoin and other digital currencies, dramatically ratcheting up U.S. scrutiny of red-hot markets that critics say are rife with misconduct, according to four people familiar with the matter. The investigation is focused on illegal practices that can influence prices -- such as spoofing, or flooding the market with fake orders to trick other traders into buying or selling, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the review is private.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers is rolling out legislation that would prohibit internet companies from creating targeted advertisements aimed at children. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) reintroduced companion versions of the Do Not Track Kids Act in the Senate and House, respectively.
Hackers have infected at least 500,000 routers and storage devices in dozens of countries, some of the world’s biggest cyber security firms warned, in a campaign that Ukraine said was preparation for a future Russian cyber attack. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it was investigating the malware, which targets devices from Linksys, MikroTik, Netgear Inc., TP-Link and QNAP, advising users to install security updates.
President Donald Trump cannot block Twitter users for the political views they have expressed, a federal judge in Manhattan ruled. Blocking users from viewing his Twitter account — a feature offered by the social media platform — is unconstitutional and a violation of the First Amendment, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald wrote in her ruling.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is demanding that Amazon stop selling facial recognition technology to the government after the rights group obtained documents showing how the technology giant is marketing the product to law enforcement. The ACLU and a coalition of rights groups on Tuesday sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos warning of the threat that such surveillance technology poses in the hands of police.
Yelp Inc. said it has renewed a European antitrust complaint against Alphabet Inc’s Google, seeking to gain traction on a longstanding accusation that the search giant unfairly promotes its own services in results. A similar complaint Yelp filed in 2014 has not led the European Union to issue a formal charge against Google, nor have letters and testimony to U.S. regulators led to charges.
European lawmakers barraged Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, with a litany of questions about his company’s global power, its role in elections and its misuse of user data. One even raised the prospect of breaking up the social media giant. But the meeting in Brussels ended with members of the European Parliament complaining that Mr. Zuckerberg had used the session’s odd format to evade specific questions and just repeat statements he had made in the past.
President Donald Trump uses a White House cellphone that isn’t equipped with sophisticated security features designed to shield his communications, according to two senior administration officials -- a departure from the practice of his predecessors that potentially exposes him to hacking or surveillance. The president, who relies on cellphones to reach his friends and millions of Twitter followers, has rebuffed staff efforts to strengthen security around his phone use, according to the administration officials.
The vast majority of emails flooding inboxes across Europe from companies asking for consent to keep recipients on their mailing list are unnecessary and some may be illegal, privacy experts have said, as new rules over data privacy come into force at the end of this week. Many companies, acting based on poor legal advice, a fear of fines of up to €20m (£17.5m) and a lack of good examples to follow, have taken what they see as the safest option for hewing to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): asking customers to renew their consent for marketing communications and data processing.
A coalition of advocacy groups wants the Federal Trade Commission to force Facebook to break up what it calls a social media monopoly. The social network, which boasts 2.2 billion users on Facebook alone, should be forced by the FTC to spin-off WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger into independent businesses, the groups say in a Freedom from Facebook petition.
Automated Twitter accounts may have slightly swayed the results of the elections for president and over whether the United Kingdom should leave the European Union enough to change their outcomes, the authors of National Bureau of Economic Research working paper published this month argue. “Overall, our results suggest that the aggressive use of Twitter bots, coupled with the fragmentation of social media and the role of sentiment, could contribute to the vote outcomes,” wrote the authors of the paper, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and the United Kingdom's Swansea University.
President Trump's real battle against the Chinese was supposed to be over intellectual property theft, which the White House says has been going on for years and costs the U.S. economy $225 billion to $600 billion a year. Trump was supposed to get the Chinese to stop stealing U.S. business secrets and technology, but a statement on the trade skirmish was brief and lackluster, saying that both sides agreed to “strengthen cooperation” (diplomatic speak for not doing much) and that China would “advance relevant amendments” to its patent law.
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin joined the growing chorus of government officials concerned about tech monopolies. When asked if Google is a monopoly, Mnuchin told CNBC's "Squawk Box" that "these are issues that the Justice Department needs to look at seriously — not for any one company — but obviously as these technology companies have a greater and greater impact on the economy, I think that you have to look at the power they have."
In the first hours after the Texas school shooting that left at least 10 dead, online hoaxers moved quickly to spread a viral lie, creating fake Facebook accounts with the suspected shooter's name and a doctored photo showing him wearing a "Hillary 2016" hat. It has become a familiar pattern in the all-too-common aftermath of U.S. school shootings: A barrage of online misinformation, seemingly designed to cloud the truth or win political points.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission said it was referring reports that a website flaw could have allowed the location of mobile phone customers to be tracked to its enforcement bureau to investigate. A security researcher said that data from LocationSmart, a California-based tech firm, could have been used to track AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc., Sprint Corp. and T-Mobile US mobile consumers within a few hundred yards of their location and without their consent.
Researchers said a team of hackers tied to North Korea recently managed to get the Google Play market to host at least three Android apps designed to surreptitiously steal personal information from defectors of the isolated nation. The three apps first appeared in the official Android marketplace in January and weren’t removed until March when Google was privately notified.
Germany, home to a tough new online hate speech law, has become a laboratory for one of the most pressing issues for governments today: how and whether to regulate Facebook, the world’s biggest social network. Inside a deletion center in Berlin, more than 1,200 content moderators clean up content — from terrorist propaganda to Nazi symbols to child abuse — that violates the law or the company’s community standards.
Two alleged owners of Mugshots.com — Sahar Sarid and Thomas Keesee — have been arrested in south Florida on a recently issued California warrant. The notorious website publishes mugshots and then demands payment for their removal.
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