Jailbreakers may find it more difficult to find pirated apps from the App Store thanks to Apple's latest legal maneuvers. The company has reportedly been sending DMCA takedown notices to Apptrackr, a popular service for tracking down cracked apps, in order to try and cut off pirated app downloads at the source. [......]
Archive for the ‘Policy & Law’ Category
Microsoft today filed a legal complaint against Comet, a UK retailer which the company alleges sold 94,000 sets of Windows Vista and Windows XP recovery CDs without Microsoft's blessing. While Microsoft called the CDs counterfeits, Comet says it was acting in good faith, supplying customers with recovery discs when Microsoft would not. Microsoft noted that the recovery CDs were sold to customers who had purchased Windows-loaded PCs and laptops. [......]
I work on occasion from my local public library, a wonderful spot with huge glass windows overlooking an attached park. [......]
On Thursday, wireless telecom giant Verizon Wireless said it would begin charging consumers a $2 "convenience fee" for some bill payments starting January 15. That decision, which Verizon said was necessary to cover the costs of processing some payments, caught the attention of the Federal Communications Commission. Verizon then decided the fee wasn't such a hot idea after all[......]
A federal appeals court on Thursday reinstated a closely watched lawsuit accusing the federal government of working with the nation’s largest telecommunication companies to illegally funnel Americans’ electronic communications to the National Security Agency without court warrants. While the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals revived the long-running case brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the three-judge panel unanimously refused to rule on the merits of the case, or whether it was true the United States breached the public’s Fourth Amendment rights by undertaking an ongoing dragnet surveillance program the EFF said commenced under the Bush administration following 9/11. The San Francisco-based appeals court reversed a San Francisco federal judge who tossed the case against the government nearly three years ago[......]
We may not have heard much about patent licensing firm Lodsys in recent months, but independent app developers are still working together to fight the patent bully. [......]
Thanks to a flaw in WiFi Protected Setup, most home and small business routers could be giving away free WiFi. On December 27, the Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team issued a warning about a vulnerability in wireless routers that use WiFi Protected Setup (WPS) to allow new devices to be connected to them. Within a day of the discovery, researchers at a Maryland-based computer security firm developed a tool that exploits that vulnerability, and has made a version available as open source[......]
GoDaddy gained more domains than it lost on Move Your Domain Day, a reaction to the company's former support for the Stop Online Piracy Act. According to DailyChanges (via TechDirt ), the combined domain transfers in and new registrations outstripped transfers out by a large margin. Still, the numbers were big enough for GoDaddy: the company went on record as opposed to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) midway through the day[......]
One sign of a good judge is being able to set aside his or her personal feelings to uphold the law when it conflicts. [......]
Legislators, regulators, and litigators aren't known for snap decisions, so tech policy stories tend to drag on… and on. But they do come to a resolution eventually, and some of this year's most important stories wound their way to a more-or-less satisfying conclusion. [......]
Apple was recently awarded a patent related to multitouch input processing, which the Internet immediately characterized as a "key multitouch patent" that Apple could use to target Android handset makers. While the patent does describe a useful—and perhaps even important—part of Apple's multitouch technology, it certainly isn't a "thermonuclear" option that Apple could use to wipe out its smartphone competition. Read the comments on this post [......]
The stratfor.com website, breached by members of Anonymous on December 24 The Antisec wing of Anonymous revealed on Saturday that it had compromised the servers of the private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting Inc.—allegedly seizing millions of internal documents and thousands of credit card numbers from the company, more commonly known as Stratfor. That would be a major breach of private information from any firm. But this hack could prove particularly significant, because Stratfor serves as an information-gathering resource and open source intelligence analysis for both the US military and for major corporations[......]
Righthaven's domain name went up for auction on Monday in order to satisfy court judgments against the copyright trolling firm. The auction for righthaven.com is taking place at Snapnames and will remain open through 3:15pm EST on January 6, 2012. [......]
Google began promoting its new flight search tool above those of third-party airline booking sites earlier this month. This has caused rivals to claim that Google is "violating the spirit" of a commitment it made to the Department of Justice when it acquired travel software company ITA Software, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal . Google's purchase of ITA, which was completed in April, was cleared by the DOJ after Google promised to make travel data available to competitors and build tools to drive more traffic to airline and online travel agency sites[......]
A Web-based civic action site is providing a way for people irate about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) to voice their opinions in a very literal way. Reverse Robocall , a site set up by Shaun Dakin and Aaron Titus, allows users to record a message through the site and perform their own robocalls to politicians and lobbyists. For a fee of $10, Reverse Robocall will let you record a message that will be delivered as a phone call to the offices of the co-sponsors of SOPA and each of the associations and lobbying groups that have backed the bill in Congress—88 in all. [......]
