John Lister

Comcast is to offer cellphone service next year, targeting its existing customers. It will use a combination of cellphone towers leased from Verizon and its own wireless hotspots. The company is not revealing too many details at this point, but it ... appears it believes it will be able to offer a wider coverage area by using its existing network of around 14 million wireless hotspots. Customers Own Routers Part of Network That network is so large because it not only covers devices in public places such as coffee shops but also uses a "guest mode" on the wireless routers of many cable ... (view more)

Opponents of proposed changes that could make government surveillance of computers easier have warned time is running out. The changes will take effect on December 1 unless Congress passes a law to stop them. The debate involves the Federal Rules of ... Criminal Procedure, which is effectively the rulebook of the judicial system. Rule 41 sets out how search warrants work in federal cases. Earlier this year the Supreme Court agreed to a request from the Justice Department for three changes to Rule 41. The first is an exception to the usual principle that a local judge can only issue a search ... (view more)

The House of Representatives has passed a bill banning companies from gagging clauses that stop customers leaving online reviews. But the law doesn't mean customers are exempt from libel and related laws. The Consumer Review Fairness Act doesn't ... affect the legality of writing reviews itself. Neither is it anything to do with criminal law. Instead it's all about the terms and conditions that companies insist customers agree to before placing an order. These documents sometimes include a non-disparagement clause that says customers won't publish negative reviews of the companies ... (view more)

Netflix has called upon the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to examine whether data caps are harming the expansion of broadband data. The company, which also has close interest on the subject, says the FCC might have a legal duty to take ... action on the matter. The company complained in particular about monthly data limits on home broadband such as those imposed by Comcast, which recently enforced a 300GB a month cap on some customers - along with steep overage fees ($10 per 50GB). However, Comcast now says the cap has been bumped to 1TB , with unlimited data available in some areas, ... (view more)

Elon Musk, the man behind the Tesla electric cars, says that the "Autopilot" and other self-driving systems will never be perfectly safe. Instead, he insists that safety for such features is improving, and the latest changes would have prevented a ... recent death. In the case of Tesla models, the autopilot cars are not fully autonomous in the same way as self-driving cars, such as Google's test vehicles . Instead, the technology is pitched somewhere between such cars and the far more common 'cruise control' feature. The Autopilot feature on the Tesla Model S combines a windshield camera, a radar ... (view more)

A hack of nearly 800,000 accounts on an adult entertainment site could be among the most embarrassing ever. The breach at "Brazzers" may expose some of the very personal tastes of the site's users. The stolen data doesn't come from the main Brazzers ... site, which sells access to videos the company has made itself. Instead, it comes from the site's discussion forum, where users can discuss the scenes on the site and talk about what they'd like to see in future videos. Passwords Stored Without Encryption The data is said to include 790,724 email addresses (not including ... (view more)

Several tech giants have backed Microsoft in its attempt to overturn what it calls a gagging order over government data requests. The company says such orders are a double breach of the constitution. The case relates to the Store Communications Act, ... which is related to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. In a nutshell, the law allows law enforcement officials to get a court order forcing tech companies to hand over details of customer activity, if it relates to an ongoing investigation. The controversial part is that the government can also ask the court to order the tech company not ... (view more)

An attempt to prevent the piracy of Warner Brothers movies has backfired, with several Warner Brothers official pages being reported in violation to Google. It appears to be an overzealous campaign by an agency hired to protect the company's ... copyright. The TorrentFreak site noticed the blunder while looking through a database of filings made to Google to report alleged breaches of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Such reports are designed to persuade Google to remove copyright-infringing sites from its search index. (Source: torrentfreak.com ) This doesn't remove the page ... (view more)

A 2012 hacking incident has turned out to be far worse than initially believed. It turns out that the theft of more than 60 million account details also included passwords. Online storage company Dropbox admitted to the breach at the time, but only ... said a list of email addresses of customers had been stolen. It either didn't know or didn't say that passwords were also compromised. The incident was particularly embarrassing at the time, as the hack proved simple thanks to a Dropbox employee's poor lack of judgement. The employee's LinkedIn password had been stolen as part of a ... (view more)

A high profile extradition case involving an alleged piracy site will be streamed online. The judge in the Kim Dotcom hearing imposed some restrictions on the streaming, though they are unlikely to make much difference. Dotcom, who changed his legal ... name from Kim Schmitz, was the man behind the controversial file hosting site Megaupload. Prosecutors in the US say he broke the law because the site was widely used for sharing files that breached copyright such as unauthorized movie video files. The heart of the case is what level of responsibility Dotcom bears for the actions of users. He ... (view more)