Hackers broke into Fox’s political Twitter account early Monday, posting updates saying President Barack Obama had been assassinated. A series of six tweets coming from the FoxNewsPolitics account reported that Obama had been shot to death in Iowa and the shooter was unknown.
See more on www.twitter.com/salaratrizadeh
Internet miners voted Monday to allow virtually unlimited new domain names based on themes as varied as company brands, entertainment and political causes, in the system’s biggest shake-up since it started 26 years ago.
Groups able to pay the $185,000 application can petition next year for new updates to “.com” and “.net” with suffixes using nearly any word in any language, including in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers decided at a meeting in Singapore.
California Senate Does Not Pass Social Networking Privacy Bill.
On June 2, 2011 the California State Senate for the second time did not pass a Senate Bill that would require social media networks to adopt default settings restricting the display of their users’ personally identifiable information.
The bill, S.B. 242, known as the ,”Social Networking Privacy Act” was introduced by Senator Ellen Corbett earlier this year. The bill required social media networks to adopt default settings prohibiting the display of “personal identifying information”, such as address, telephone number, driver’s license, social security number, and credit card numbers. It also required the networks to advise users of their ability to change the settings for display of personal information in “plain language.” Finally, it required networks to remove personal identifying information “in a timely manner” upon request.
A former San Francisco computer engineer convicted of locking other city officials out of the city’s network has been ordered to pay nearly $1.5 million in restitution.
A judge also ordered 45-year-old Terry Childs on Tuesday to forfeit the $11,000 he had on him when he was arrested as a down payment toward the money he owes his former employer, San Francisco’s Department of Technology. A jury convicted Terry Childs last year of changing the passwords to the city government’s computer network in July 2008. Following a 12-day stalemate, Mr. Childs finally surrendered the new passwords to then-Mayor Gavin Newsom during a jailhouse visit.
To read more go to http://www.ap.org/
WASHINGTON (AP) – A federal appeals court has dismissed two legal challenges to new Federal Communications Commission regulations that prohibit phone and cable companies from interfering with Internet traffic on their broadband networks.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Monday dismissed lawsuits filed by Verizon Communications Inc. and Metro PCS Communications Inc. on technical grounds. The court said the companies filed their challenges prematurely since the rules have not yet been published in the federal register.
Read more at http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_TEC_FCC_INTERNET_RULES?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-04-04-18-07-26
GENEVA (AP) – A Swiss court has ruled that Google Inc. must guarantee anonymity before publishing faces and license plates in its Street View service in Switzerland.
A ruling published Monday by the Swiss Federal Administrative Court affects any new ground-level pictures that the popular Internet search engine publishes.
Read more at http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_SWITZERLAND_GOOGLE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-04-04-13-30-55
Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and the companies that sell software for the iPhone and iPod touch at the App Store have lost over $450 million to piracy since the store opened in July 2008 according to an analysis by 24/7 Wall St. There have been over 3 billion applications downloaded since the App program began. Bernstein analyst, Toni Sacconaghi, estimated that between 13% and 21% of those downloads are from paid applications. According to this analysis, the average price of an application purchased at the App Store is $3. Sacconaghi estimated that Apple’s revenue from the App Store is between $60 million and $110 million per quarter. That amount has certainly increased since this research report was published because of the rapid growth of the number of applications.
However, behind all this success lies an insidious force that has plagued the music, software, and movie industry for decades. Developers of iPhone applications have reported alarming piracy rates for their software, and the ease with which users may obtain pirated versions of paid applications for free is only increasing. The total number of applications available at the store, including those which are free and those which require payment, is in excess of 100,000.
Anyone who is familiar with the iPhone is likely to know that these phones can be “jailbroken” or, to use the more common term “unlocked”. Jailbreaking an iPhone modifies the OEM Apple iPhone OS. This allows the user to circumvent the limitations put on the phone by Apple. Apart from the ability to modify the OS itself to allow for customizing of icons, backgrounds, functionality and processes, a jailbroken iPhone permits the installation of applications from sources other than the iTunes store. It is even possible to use an unlocked phone for access to carrier services other than AT&T (NYSE:T) and the Apple-assigned retailers outside the US. The great majority of iPhones sold in China are unlocked and Apple partner, China Unicom (NYSE:CHU), have only begun to sell locked phones in the last three months.
For over a year, the news media has reported extensively on proposed rules from the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) concerning “net neutrality.” Today, the FCC released its anticipated order placing “network neutrality” requirements on broadband internet access providers. In this e-bulletin we provide a background on developments leading up to the FCC’s action, and a brief overview of the order.
Background
The term “network neutrality” refers to the general principle that all content available on the Internet should receive equal precedence, such that Internet Service Providers (“ISPs”) do not discriminate between different types or sources of traffic.
NEW YORK (AP) – Google Inc., the top Web search provider, said Tuesday it will allocate about $8.5 million to Internet privacy and policy organizations as part of a class action settlement involving its Buzz social hub.
The lawsuit had been filed by users of Google’s free e-mail service, Gmail. In February, Google added a new social hub called Buzz, which let Gmail users track their frequently e-mailed contacts’ status updates and other information shared online. But frequent e-mails don’t necessarily mean people are actually “friends.” The class action suit said Google violated privacy rights by automatically adding Buzz to Gmail without making it clear what information would be shared and with whom.
The settlement acknowledges that Google has made many changes to Buzz to ease privacy concerns. Google is creating an $8.5 million fund, mainly to go to Internet privacy and policy organizations. The company said it will also make additional efforts to teach users about privacy on Buzz.
Facebook Inc. will probably put off its initial public offering until 2012, giving Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg more time to gain users and boost sales, three people familiar with the matter said.
Facebook would benefit from another year of growth absent the added scrutiny that comes with a public listing, instead of holding an IPO in 2011 as investors speculated, said the people, who asked not to be identified because Facebook doesn’t discuss share-sale plans. Still, Zuckerberg, who holds board control, could push for a stock sale at any time, they said.
Waiting lets Zuckerberg, 26, hone the skills needed to steer a company that issues quarterly results while facing criticism on such matters as user privacy. Facebook, valued at $24.9 billion, would use the time to propel its user base beyond the 500 million mark reached this month and add to sales that two of the people said may double to at least $1.4 billion in 2010 from $700 million to $800 million last year.
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