John Lister

A U.S. senator wants to close a legal loophole that allows law enforcement officials to read private emails without first obtaining a warrant. If successful, the change would mean users of webmail services, such as Gmail and Hotmail, will receive ... extra protection against prying eyes. Private email content is currently protected by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. However, email usage is far greater today than it was then, and new procedures leave open the opportunity for officials to read private emails in secret. Years ago most email users downloaded their messages, which ... (view more)

US-based Internet firms will begin an anti-piracy partnership with major copyright holders by the end of 2012. However, it's a purely voluntary operation and customers thought to be pirating will get warnings before suffering any consequences. ... Several countries around the world, most notably France, have introduced "three strikes" legislation, under which customers suspected of illegally sharing copyrighted material get two warnings before having their Internet suspended or cut off altogether. These controversial laws have faced legal challenges. Critics argue it's unfair to punish people ... (view more)

On top of an existing jail term, one of the co-founders of The Pirate Bay website is facing even more legal trouble in his native Sweden. Meanwhile, Google has taken additional steps to make The Pirate Bay website less visible. Gottfrid Svartholm is ... one of four men convicted of copyright-related offenses linked to The Pirate Bay. Although it doesn't host any content, the website allows users to search for torrent files, which can then be used to share copyright protected data files. Svartholm Charged with Piracy, Hacking Prosecutors said The Pirate Bay site owners profited from illegal ... (view more)

Web hosting company GoDaddy suffered an outage this week that knocked thousands of small business websites offline. It appears hackers may have been responsible, but at the moment it's unclear exactly who was behind the attack. GoDaddy is best known ... for helping users register domain names, also called URLs or website addresses. However, GoDaddy also hosts millions of large and small websites, physically storing the data for the site's pages on GoDaddy's computers. GoDaddy Sites Down For Hours GoDaddy's customer websites and email services began suffering "intermittent outages" on ... (view more)

After initially indicating that it would not fix an Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) security bug until Windows 8's official October, 2012 release, Microsoft now says it will provide a patch "shortly". The problem is associated with Adobe Flash, software ... that supports multimedia and interactive content for web pages. A recently discovered bug in Flash led to Adobe issuing a security update for the Flash Player. The security update addressed six individual security flaws, all rated 'critical' by Adobe. Any one of them could allow a hacker to crash a computer when trying, for example, to disrupt a ... (view more)

The man convicted of infecting 72,000 computers has been sentenced to two and a half years behind bars. Joshua Schichtel created a network of hijacked machines and then -- for a fee -- allowed others to control them. Schichtel first came to the ... attention of authorities in 2004. At the time, he was part of a group charged with using infected computers to carry out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Earlier DDoS Attack Goes Unpunished Under a DDosS attack, a hacker uses many computers to send service requests to legitimate website servers. Because servers are set up to respond to all ... (view more)

Bitcoin currency exchange BitFloor is in big trouble after a security blunder resulted in the theft of $250,000. The heist at the BitFloor "exchange" came after operators did the online equivalent of leaving the keys in the door. Bitcoin is a ... virtual currency that isn't controlled by a government and therefore isn't subject to any seizure of funds. With no government backing, Bitcoin has value only so long as enough people agree to use it. Unlike most currencies, Bitcoin exists only online, with no physical currency (like coins or bills). Each Bitcoin exists solely as a unique identification ... (view more)

Tim Berners-Lee, the man many people credit with creating the World Wide Web, says Sweden has benefitted most from Internet usage. Berners-Lee ranks the United States and United Kingdom in second and third place, respectively. His rankings are based ... on data from multiple sources, including more than 80 factors across seven categories. The categories range from the availability of technology that allows the web to flourish (such as broadband cabling) to whether national laws and regulations promote or hinder the web. Berners-Lee's rankings also consider how useful and relevant the sites in ... (view more)

A hacking group says it has acquired personal information associated with 12 million Apple user accounts, and that it got those details by hacking into an FBI agent's computer. So far, the group has published data from one million of those Apple ... accounts. The publication comes from LulzSec , a group whose name is a combination of "security" and a slang term for carrying out online activities for the sake of amusement ("Lulz"). Last summer, the same group leaked documents belonging to Sony Pictures. LulzSec claimed it ceased operations after a 50-day campaign. But later it re-emerged ... (view more)

The US Air Force (USAF) has made a public appeal for tech experts to help design cyber weapons. The call for help comes in a solicitation document, which is a formal request for non-military organizations to submit ideas. To encourage a response, ... the Air Force has announced that it could award contracts worth a total of $10 million. The document asks for ideas that could help the USAF "disrupt, deny, degrade, destroy, or deceive an adversary's ability to use the cyberspace domain to his advantage." It specifically refers to using cyber technology to weaken an enemy's ability to wage physical ... (view more)