The head of the Securities and Exchange Commission made it clear that the agency won't bend the rules for cryptocurrency when it comes to defining what is or what isn't a security. "We are not going to do any violence to the traditional definition of a security that has worked for a long time," U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton said.
Facebook users will no longer have their uploaded videos with copyrighted background music taken down thanks to a slew of deals with all the major record labels plus many indies. When users upload videos with music with the new rules in effect, they’ll be quickly notified if that song is allowed via the deals and fine to share, or if their video will be muted unless they submit a dispute to the copyright holder who then okays it through Facebook’s Rights Manager tool.
The state of Washington said it had sued Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google for allegedly violating state campaign finance law by failing to maintain information about who buys election ads. The state's attorney general, Bob Ferguson, said he was seeking penalties against the companies and an injunction for failing to disclose ad spending in state elections since 2013.
One of the world's leading DNA-testing companies recently disclosed that a researcher had found on a private server the email addresses and hashed passwords of every customer that had signed up for its service. MyHeritage said in a blog post that the breach involved roughly 92 million user accounts that were created through October of last year.
A top Democrat in Congress is calling on the U.S. government to investigate Google, the latest sign that some of the party's lawmakers are ready to challenge the tech industry after befriending it in the past. In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission dated May 31, Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison urged the watchdog agency to take a closer look at Google and its parent company, Alphabet, given that European regulators recently found that the search giant harmed its rivals and fined it $2.7 billion.
Facebook Inc. is disputing a New York Times report about how it shares data with device makers from Apple and Amazon to Samsung. But U.S. lawmakers were skeptical and demanded more accountability for Facebook’s frequent privacy lapses.
U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm has asked Europe’s second-highest court to throw out a 997 million euro ($1.2 billion) fine levied by European Union antitrust regulators, citing numerous errors in the EU decision. The European Commission penalized the company in January for paying Apple to use only its chips in its iPhones and iPads, giving rival Intel no chance of getting a share of the market.
Finance ministers of the European Union’s three Nordic countries have urged their partners to shelve a plan to tax large corporations for their digital turnover, saying it could damage the European economy. The call could further weaken the plan proposed by the European Commission in March. It has already attracted criticism from smaller EU states and a lukewarm response from Germany’s new government.
Consumers are now paying to hand over their genetic code -- their most sensitive individual identifier -- to Ancestry LLC and other DNA testing companies, that could monetize it far into the future. But a three-month review by McClatchy, including visits to Ancestry’s headquarters and a main testing lab, reveals a pattern of breached promises to customers, security concerns and inflated marketing pledges that could give consumers some pause.
Read the article: McClatchy
As Facebook sought to become the world’s dominant social media service, it struck agreements allowing phone and other device makers access to vast amounts of its users’ personal information. Facebook has reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers — including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung — over the last decade, starting before Facebook apps were widely available on smartphones, company officials said.
Apple has approved an updated version of the Telegram messaging service, a day after Telegram complained that it had been prevented from getting software improvements into the hands of iPhone owners worldwide. Telegram Chief Executive Pavel Durov announced the turnabout on Twitter, thanking Apple and CEO Tim Cook for getting the latest Telegram version “to millions of users, despite the recent setbacks.”
In a blog post, Spotify wrote that it doesn't "aim to play judge and jury" and is "moving away from implementing a policy around artist conduct." Bloomberg News reported that some previously removed artists would be placed back on the platform's playlists, while others (R. Kelly, specifically) would not be.
The hacking threat to critical infrastructure in the United States and beyond is growing larger, with nation states and other malicious actors looking to gain a foothold in sensitive technologies to conduct espionage and potentially stage disruptive or destructive attacks. Dragos, a firm that specializes in industrial cybersecurity, has released new research asserting that a hacker group responsible for deploying highly sophisticated, destructive malware to an industrial plant in the Middle East last year has begun to expand its operations beyond its initial targets.
AT&T has given up its years-long quest to cripple the Federal Trade Commission's authority to regulate broadband providers. Just weeks ago, AT&T said it intended to appeal its loss in the case to the U.S. Supreme Court before a deadline of May 29. But today, AT&T informed court officials that it has decided not to file a petition to the Supreme Court and did not ask for a deadline extension.
Global domain name system overlord ICANN’s latest attempt to deal with compliance with European data protection law has been dealt a blow after a German court rejected its request to force a registrar to keep gathering people’s information. The DNS overseer filed a lawsuit in Bonn against German domain registrar EPGA the day the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force.
A U.S. federal judge dismissed two lawsuits by Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab that sought to overturn bans on the use of the security software maker’s products in U.S. government networks. The company said it would seek to appeal the decision, which leaves in place prohibitions included in a funding bill passed by Congress and an order from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Malicious actors are exploiting the upcoming 2018 FIFA World Cup to conduct phishing attacks only two weeks before the tournament kicks off. Researchers at cyber security company Kaspersky Lab have detected a spike in the number of phishing pages appearing during match ticket sales, alongside a general rise in the number of football-related spam and World Cup-themed attacks.
The Trump administration issued a fresh warning about malicious North Korean cyber activity, as that nation’s leader dispatched a top adviser to New York to prepare for a possible summit on its nuclear arsenal. The technical alert from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security highlighted two pieces of malware said to have been used to target U.S. infrastructure and aerospace, financial and media companies for at least nine years to steal information and remotely manipulate networks.
A fight over private information and the Internet's domain name system is heading to a German court, in a proxy battle between European legislators and American intellectual property lawyers. On the same day that new European GDPR privacy legislation took effect, DNS overseer and U.S. corporation ICANN filed a lawsuit against German domain registrar EPGA in Bonn, asking that it be forced to keep gathering private information on people who buy web addresses.
A young computer hacker who prosecutors say unwittingly worked with a Russian spy agency was sentenced to five years in prison for using data stolen in a massive Yahoo data breach to gain access to private emails. U.S. Judge Vince Chhabria also fined Karim Baratov $250,000 during a sentencing hearing in San Francisco.
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