Another day, another post-employment dispute over a social media account. [......]
Archive for the ‘Policy & Law’ Category
More details have emerged about how the seven alleged Estonian and Russian hackers indicted by the US Wednesday managed to hijack over 4 million computers worldwide—many of them at government agencies and large companies—and rake in over $14 million from legitimate businesses. [......]
Jacob Appelbaum speaks on behalf of WikiLeaks at The Next Hope conference in New York City in July 2010 The Justice Department is entitled to records of the Twitter accounts used by three current and former WikiLeaks associates, a federal judge ruled Thursday, dealing a victory to prosecutors in a routine records demand that turned into a fierce court battle over online privacy and free speech. In a 60-page opinion (PDF), US District Court Judge Liam O’Grady in Alexandria, Virginia upheld a magistrate’s decision earlier this year allowing prosecutors to obtain information on the accounts, including records showing when they sent direct messages to one another, and from what Internet IP addresses. The ruling does not expose the content of the messages, nor information on other Twitter users who follow the accounts[......]
The US Senate has decided the Federal Communications Commission's Net Neutrality rules are OK after all. Senators voted down S.J. Res 6 ("Disapproval of Federal Communications Commission Rule Regulating the Internet and Broadband Industry Practices") which criticized the FCC's rules, 52-46 on Thursday morning[......]
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there," wrote L.P. Hartley in his terrific novel The Go-Between . [......]
In a Monday court filing, Warner Brothers admitted that it has issued takedown notices for files without looking at them first. The studio also acknowledged that it issued takedown notices for a number of URLs that its adversary, the locker site Hotfile, says were obviously not Warner Brothers' content. Hotfile has been locked in a legal battle with Hollywood studios since February; the studios accuse the site of facilitating copyright infringement on a massive scale. [......]
Amazon.com, the most vociferous opponent of collecting sales tax on purchases shipped outside its home state of Washington, has had a change of heart in the wake of today's new Senate tax bill, the Marketplace Fairness Act . "Amazon strongly supports enactment of the Enzi-Durbin-Alexander bill and will work with Congress, retailers, and the states to get this bi-partisan legislation passed," said Paul Misener, Amazon vice president, global public policy, in a press release . [......]
The US Department of Justice has charged seven people in Russia and Estonia with 27 counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, and computer intrusion, accusing them of spreading malware to over 4 million computers worldwide to drive traffic to clients' Internet advertising. The alleged hackers used malware to alter the network settings of infected computers and created a network of "rogue" Domain Name Service users to reroute computer users' clicks to advertisers' sites. They also replaced ads on webpages with those of paying customers, a Department of Justice spokesperson told Ars Technica. [......]
A scathing new report on corporate tax breaks is out, and telcos and media companies figure prominently. Authored by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy , the survey focuses on 280 corporations that it concludes paid, on average, far less than the 35 percent corporate income tax tithe. [......]
Ten Senators, led by Dick Durbin (D-IL), Mike Enzi (R-WY), and Lamar Alexander (R-TN), this morning introduced a new Internet sales tax bill called the " Marketplace Fairness Act ." The bill gives states broad authority to require that online sellers like Amazon collect and remit state sales taxes so that online and offline retailers all operate under the same rules. Companies have long been required to collect sales tax in states where they have a physical presence[......]
A new survey of the social networking habits of teenagers says that the majority have online experiences that help them feel good about themselves or make them feel closer to someone else on the network. [......]
Barnes & Noble claims that Microsoft is attempting to stifle competition in the mobile device market and has asked the Department of Justice to investigate, reports Bloomberg . In a letter to Gene Kimmelman, the DoJ's chief counsel for competition policy, Barnes & Noble argues that by demanding patent royalties for Android devices, "Microsoft is attempting to raise its rivals' costs in order to drive out competition and to deter innovation in mobile devices." Microsoft sued Barnes & Noble in March, claiming that the company's NOOK and NOOK Color tablets infringe on five Microsoft-held user interface patents. This lawsuit came after the two companies failed to agree on license terms for patents that Microsoft says are infringed upon by Android[......]
The second of two GPS trackers found recently on the vehicle of a young man in California. Police say nightclub manager Antoine Jones was the ringleader of a cocaine trafficking operation, and they had enough evidence to convince a jury he was guilty. There's just one problem: a key part of the government's case came from a GPS tracking device the police secretly attached to Jones' car[......]
Some members of Congress are still bent on overturning the FCC's not-in-effect-until-Thanksgiving net neutrality rules. In a vote coming up this week, the Senate will vote on S.J. [......]
A Kansas man was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison "for selling $1 million worth of counterfeit Cisco computer equipment," the US Attorney's office for the District of Kansas said . Timothy Weatherly, 29, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to traffic in counterfeit goods and making false statements to smuggle goods into the United States, related to the operation of a business called Deals Direct in 2005 and 2006. [......]
