Sony Chief Executive Officer Howard Stringer apologized to users of its PlayStation Network, breaking his silence on one of the biggest Internet security break-ins ever, but failing to provide a date when services would resume. Stringer’s comments come after he faced criticism of his leadership since Sony revealed hackers had compromised the data of more than 100 million accounts.
Read the article: http://ow.ly/4OoPe (Source: Reuters)
Less than a week after news of a security breach sparked an uproar, Sony Corp. has shut down its online-gaming unit after a hacker infiltrated the network in the second such attack on the company in the last month. Sony Online Entertainment, known for creating massive multi-player games such as EverQuest and The Matrix Online, suspended service, according to a statement.
Read the article: http://ow.ly/4Lz3A (Source: Los Angeles Times)
Less than a week after news of a security breach sparked an uproar, Sony Corp. has shut down its online-gaming unit after a hacker infiltrated the network in the second such attack on the company in the last month. Sony Online Entertainment, known for creating massive multi-player games such as EverQuest and The Matrix Online, suspended service, according to a statement.
Read the article: http://ow.ly/4Lz3A (Source: Los Angeles Times)
Sony acknowledged that the personal information of its PlayStation Network customers has been compromised. The company posted an update on its blog warning its more than 70 million customers that their personal information, including customer names, addresses, e-mail addresses, birthdays, PlayStation Network and Qriocity passwords, and user names, as well as online user handles, was obtained illegally by an “unauthorized person.”
Read the article: http://ow.ly/4HzfK (Source: CNET News)
Gamers and government officials are irate over Sony’s admission that a massive security breach gave hackers access to large amounts of personal data from the company’s PlayStation Network and, surprise(!), one gamer has already filed a lawsuit. Meanwhile, analysts estimate the hammered game company could lose billions of dollars from the debacle.
Read the article: http://ow.ly/4IAfA (Source: msnbc.com)
Switzerland’s top administrative court backed the Swiss privacy watchdog and ruled against Google Inc.’s Street View map service in Switzerland, saying the service infringes privacy in a ruling. Switzerland’s Federal Data Protection Commissioner Hanspeter Thuer and Google had been locked in a battle over the Web giant’s popular Street View application ever since the mapping service went live there in 2009.
Read the article: http://ow.ly/4t8r6 (Source: The Wall Street Journal)
Google settled with the Federal Trade Commission over charges of deceptive privacy practices in its introduction last year of Buzz, the social networking tool in Gmail. Under the settlement, Google agreed to start a privacy program and undergo privacy audits for 20 years; it faces $16,000 fines for future privacy misrepresentations.
Read the article: http://ow.ly/4pMES (Source: The New York Times)
A Berlin court has ruled, according to Deutsche Welle, that it’s legal for Google to take the street-level pictures, striking down a lawsuit brought on by a German woman who sued Google over Street View and cited privacy and property rights. The case is complicated, because the woman who sued did so out of the possibility that her privacy might be invaded — e.g. if Google Street View happened to take photos of the front of her house, and that the camera on top of the Google Street View vehicle would see over the hedge in front of it.
Read the article: http://ow.ly/4jfzY (Source: CNET News)
Cybercriminals are increasingly moving from stealing just personal data to capturing trade secrets and other corporate intellectual capital that they can easily sell through the underground market, according to a new report from McAfee and the SAIC. In the release of a new study, “Underground Economies: Intellectual Capital and Sensitive Corporate Data Now the Latest CybercrimeScience Applications International Corporate find that the theft of trade secrets, marketing plans, R&D data, and even source code is on the rise, especially as such information is often unprotected. Currency”, McAfee and the
Read the article: http://ow.ly/4o1ez (Source: CNET News)
India will seek to block the internet’s newly-formed red-light district after a global agency governing the web approved .xxx suffix for pornography websites, a senior government official said. “India along with many other countries from the Middle East and Indonesia opposed the grant of the domain in the first place, and we would proceed to block the whole domain, as it goes against the IT Act and Indian laws,” said a senior official at the ministry of IT.
Read the article: http://ow.ly/4niYY (Source: The Economic Times)
A U.S. judge rejected a $125 million settlement that would have allowed Google Inc. to create the world’s biggest digital-book library. Opponents of the deal said it violated international law.
The agency governing Internet addresses approved the creation of a new red-light district on the Web, but the decision may not end years of fighting over the contentious plan. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers authorized the creation of an .xxx suffix for pornography Web sites.
Read the article: http://ow.ly/4hYBa (Source: The New York Times)
Social-networking sites such as Facebook, or search engines such as Google, may face court action if they fail to obey planned EU data privacy rules, European Union justice chief Viviane Reding said. Reding will propose an overhaul of the EU’s 16-year-old laws on data protection in the coming months to enforce more safeguards on how personal information is used.
Read the article: http://ow.ly/4goOK (Source: Reuters)
The Federal Trade Commission accepted a settlement with Internet messaging service Twitter Inc. to resolve charges that Twitter deceived consumers and put their privacy at risk by not safeguarding personal information. The settlement bars Twitter from misleading consumers about the extent to which it protects the security, privacy and confidentiality of non-public consumer information for 20 years, according to a statement posted on the FTC website.
Read the article: http://ow.ly/4dwYi (Source: Bloomberg)
The California nonprofit organization that operates the Internet’s levers has always been a target for global heavies like Russia and China that prefer the United Nations in charge of the Web. But these days, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is fending off attacks from a seemingly unlikely opposition: the Obama administration.
Read the article: http://ow.ly/458Sl (Source: The Washington Post)
The Obama administration is quietly seeking the power for it and other governments to veto future top-level domain names, a move that raises questions about free expression, national sovereignty, and the role of states in shaping the future of the Internet. At stake is who will have authority over the next wave of suffixes to supplement the venerable .com, .org, and .net. At least 115 proposals are expected this year, including .car, .health, .nyc, .movie, and .web, and the application process could be finalized at a meeting in San Francisco next month.
Read the article: http://goo.gl/htxmp (Source: CNET News)
Facebook, facing potential fines for violating strict privacy laws in Germany, agreed to let users in the country better shield their e-mail contacts from unwanted advertisements and solicitations it sends. Facebook, which has more than 10 million users in Germany, agreed to modify its Friend Finder service to let Germans better block its ability to contact people, including non-Facebook users culled from a user’s e-mail address books.
Read the article: http://goo.gl/52O4f (Source: The New York Times)
Personal data collected by Google’s UK Street View cars has been deleted. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which has been criticised for not taking a more hardline stance against Google, confirmed the deletion.
Read the article: http://goo.gl/WpjSL (Source: BBC News)
A Japanese woman is suing Google for displaying images of underwear hanging on her washing line on its Street View function. The woman, who has not been named, is suing the Internet giant for 600,000 Yen, claiming the images caused her psychological distress, according to Japan’s Mainichi newspaper.
Read the article: http://goo.gl/n46qk (Source: The Telegraph)
Few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner’s real name — even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off. These phones don’t keep secrets. They are sharing this personal data widely and regularly, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.
Read the article: http://goo.gl/hI0z6 (Source: The Wall Street Journal)
McDonald’s Corp. says some of its customers’ private information was exposed during a data breach. The company said Monday that a third party was able to get past security measures and see into a database of its customer information that included e-mail, phone numbers, addresses, birthdates and other specifics that they provided when signing up for online promotions or other subscriptions to its websites.
Read the article: http://goo.gl/XZ6JX (Source: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
The Federal Trade Commission advocated a plan that lets consumers on the Internet choose whether they want information about their browsing habits to be collected, an option known as “do not track.” The FTC’s proposal, a framework for commercial use of consumer data, would make consumer privacy the default position and would let Web users decide whether Internet sites and advertisers can build profiles of their browsing and buying habits as well as collect other personal information.
Read the article: http://goo.gl/AqS0J (Source: The New York Times)
A computer hacker who calls himself “The Jester” claimed responsibility for the cyber attack which took down the WikiLeaks site, shortly before it started posting hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables. The Jester, who describes himself as a “hacktivist for good,” said he took the controversial site down “for attempting to endanger the lives of our troops, ‘other assets’ & foreign relations.”
Read the article: http://goo.gl/mfMlA (Source: CNN)
The UK’s information commissioner has said that wi-fi data accidentally collected by Google’s Street View cars will be deleted “as soon as possible.” Deputy information commissioner David Smith told the BBC that there would be no further enquiries into the matter.
Read the article: http://goo.gl/o7VHb (Source: BBC News)
Europe’s effort to regulate online “cookies” is crumbling, exposing how tough it is to curb the practice of tracking Internet users’ movements on the Web. Seeking to be a leader in protecting online privacy, the European Union last year passed a law requiring companies to obtain consent from Web users when tracking files such as cookies are placed on users’ computers, but Internet companies, advertisers, lawmakers, privacy advocates and EU member nations can’t agree on the law’s meaning.
Read the article: http://goo.gl/9icvA (Source: The Wall Street Journal)
A Chinese woman was sentenced to one year in a labor camp after she forwarded a satirical microblog message that urged recipients to attack the Japanese pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo, human rights groupsTwitter said. The woman, Cheng Jianping, 46, was accused of “disturbing social order” for resending a message from her fiancé that mocked young nationalists who held anti-Japanese rallies in several cities last month.
Read the article: http://goo.gl/1lsXD (Source: The New York Times)
The United States faces a major threat in the future from cyber technologies that will require civil-military coordination to shield networks from attack, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said. “I think there is a huge future threat. And there is a considerable current threat,” Gates told The Wall Street Journal CEO Council.
Read the article: http://goo.gl/jV1J8 (Source: Reuters)
After Facebook’s struggle with one privacy issue after another this year, some in the industry are raising privacy questions about Facebook’s new messaging system. As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained the new system at a press conference, he never touched on how the company plans on keeping users’ messages private and secure.
Read the article: http://goo.gl/3s6SZ (Source: Computerworld)
