A majority of the 25 most-populous U.S. cities now have cyber insurance or are looking into buying it, according to a Wall Street Journal survey. A ransomware attack on Atlanta earlier this year -- one of the biggest reported breaches of a city’s network -- served as a warning to officials everywhere of the constant barrage from hackers.
A federal government transparency website made public dozens, if not hundreds, of Social Security numbers and other personal information in a design error during a system upgrade. The error, on a Freedom of Information Act request portal, was fixed after CNN alerted the government to the situation.
California lawmakers rallied enough votes to pass the nation’s toughest net neutrality law to prevent Internet providers from favoring certain websites, setting up a fight with federal regulators who voted last year to erase such rules. If Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signs the law in the coming weeks, California will become the powerhouse in a growing group of states at odds with the Federal Communications Commission in a clash that could end up before the Supreme Court.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google is taking action to weed out scam artists who advertise on its platform aiming to defraud customers seeking technical support online. The move comes after a Wall Street Journal investigation found fraudsters were exploiting Google’s advertising system by purchasing search ads and masquerading as authorized service agents for companies such as Apple Inc.
The company that holds the copyrights to the 2015 film “The Cobbler” must pay $17,000 to cover the attorneys fees of a man who was accused of downloading the movie. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Aug. 27 affirmed the dismissal of the copyright infringement lawsuit against the man, Thomas Gonzales, and the fees award against Cobbler Nevada LLC.
British foreign minister Jeremy Hunt accused Google of abandoning its moral values by failing to remove child abuse content while launching a version of its search engine in China that will block some websites. The British government has repeatedly criticized online platforms such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook for failing to remove abusive material or sexual content posted online even after they were notified.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) is calling on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate whether Google’s search and digital advertising practices are stifling the marketplace. Hatch sent a letter to FTC Chairman Joseph Simons expressing concern about reports in recent years ranging from Google restricting competing advertising services to collecting data from users’ Gmail inbox contents.
Russia is experimenting with more precise technology to block individual online services after an attempt to shut down banned messaging service Telegram failed, but Moscow has yet to find a way to shut it down without hitting other traffic. Telegram, which has 200 million global users and has been popular in countries including Russia and Iran, has been banned in Russia because it refused to comply with a court order to give security services access to users’ encrypted messages.
Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey and Facebook chief operations officer Sheryl Sandberg will testify in an open hearing at the Senate Intelligence Committee next week, the committee’s chairman has confirmed. Larry Page, chief executive of Google parent company Alphabet, was also invited but has not confirmed his attendance, a committee spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch.
The Federal Trade Commission might have a renewed interest in justice for crowdfunding backers. Emails seen by The Verge show that the agency is investigating at least one crowdfunding campaign gone bad — the iBackPack — which raised more than $700,000 across both Indiegogo and Kickstarter.
President Trump signaled that the White House isn’t looking to regulate Google and the way it displays search results, a day after his administration said it was exploring whether to set new rules in response to charges that the tech giant is biased against conservatives. Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump repeated his belief that Google and its tech peers, including Facebook and Google, mistreat users whose politics hew to the right and “silence a very large part of this country.”
An apparent Iranian influence operation targeting Internet users worldwide is significantly bigger than previously identified, Reuters has found, encompassing a sprawling network of anonymous websites and social media accounts in 11 different languages. Facebook and other companies said last week that multiple social media accounts and websites were part of an Iranian project to covertly influence public opinion in other countries.
U.S. President Donald Trump unblocked some additional Twitter users after a federal judge in May said preventing people from following him violated individuals constitutional rights. U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan ruled on May 23 that comments on the president’s account, and those of other government officials, were public forums and that blocking Twitter Inc users for their views violated their right to free speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
A New York man charged with trying to defraud Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg is fighting extradition from Ecuador where he was arrested after fleeing before his trial in the United States more than three years ago. Paul Ceglia, 45, a wood pellet salesman, faced charges of mail fraud and wire fraud over his alleged forging of documents to extort Facebook and Zuckerberg.
A close political ally of President Moon Jae-in of South Korea conspired with a team of online bloggers to illegally influence public opinion ahead of Mr. Moon’s election last year, a special counsel said. The special counsel, Huh Ik-bum, whose investigation was authorized by the National Assembly, found no evidence that Mr. Moon himself was involved in the alleged scheme.
Instagram is adding three new tools to prevent the spread of misinformation on the platform. “We’ve been focused on the safety of our platform since the very beginning, and today’s updates build upon our existing tools, such as our spam and abusive content filters and the ability to report or block accounts," Instagram co-founder and chief technology officer Mike Krieger said in a press release.
More than a dozen tech NGOs and human rights groups have issued an open letter calling on Google to stop work on a censored search engine project in China. Organizations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now and others released the letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Tuesday, saying the tech giant's plans to release a censored version of its search engine app to users in China represent an "alarming capitulation by Google on human rights."
The Trump administration is “taking a look” at whether Google and its search engine should be regulated by the government, Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s economic adviser, said outside the White House. The announcement puts the search giant squarely in the White House’s crosshairs amid wider allegations against the tech industry that it systematically discriminates against conservatives on social media and other platforms.
A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction continuing a prohibition on the Trump administration proposal to make available blueprints for so-called ghost guns, untraceable weapons that can be manufactured on a 3D printer, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said. The injunction extends a ruling last month that barred the Trump administration from taking steps that would allow the firm Defense Distributed to disseminate 3D gun blueprints.
Germany’s antitrust watchdog is planning on taking the first steps in its investigation of Facebook after alleging that the company abused its market dominance with data collection practices. “We are conscious that this should, and must, go quickly,” Federal Cartel Office President Andreas Mundt said in a news conference.
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