Tag: Policy

November 21, 2019

Amazon subsidiary Ring, which makes home surveillance equipment and cameras, has “partnerships” with more than 600 law enforcement agencies nationwide, allowing those police access to users’ footage. And while Ring says it sets terms around how and when it will […]

November 20, 2019

Tax return scammers usually strike early in the year, when they can turn the personal information of victims into fraudulent tax refund claims. But members of Akamai’s threat research team found a recent surge in “off-season” phishing attacks masquerading as […]

November 7, 2019

In an indictment filed on November 5, the Justice Department has charged two former employees of Twitter as acting as unregistered agents for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and falsifying documents provided to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to cover […]

November 6, 2019

Congress is taking yet another stab at addressing the near-complete lack of federal laws covering the absolutely massive trove of data that companies now collect on every one of us, which forms the backbone of basically the entire big tech […]

November 5, 2019

Once upon a time, there was a phone company—or rather, the phone company. AT&T Corp., the venerable “Ma Bell,” provided nearly all telephone service to nearly all Americans for decades… until it didn’t. The company infamously broke up on New […]

October 25, 2019

A New Jersey man has admitted he installed keyloggers and laptops on the networks of two companies and used them to steal data related to an emerging technology they were using. According to documents filed in US District Court for […]

October 23, 2019

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai may have belatedly concluded that federal regulation of broadband would be better for businesses than letting all 50 US states regulate Internet access. Speaking at the WSJ Tech Live conference yesterday, Pai said that […]

October 16, 2019

Reuters reports that the United States launched a “secret cyber operation” against Iran in September, following the alleged drone and missile attack by Iran on Saudi Arabian oil facilities. Unnamed officials told Reuters that the late-September cyberattack targeted Iran’s “propaganda” […]

October 9, 2019

Much in the same way that food labels are now required to disclose the potential presence of allergens such as peanuts, one Senator is proposing a law that would require tech companies to include a label on products disclosing the […]

October 1, 2019

When you visit a new website, your computer probably submits a request to the domain name system (DNS) to translate the domain name (like arstechnica.com) to an IP address. Currently, most DNS queries are unencrypted, which raises privacy and security […]

September 30, 2019

The U.S. Treasury has imposed sanctions against two Russian nationals accused of working for a notorious disinformation unit. In a statement, the Treasury said Igor Nesterov, 34; and Denis Kuzmin, 28, worked for the so-called Internet Research Agency, a secretive […]

September 30, 2019

Tesla and its CEO, Elon Musk, violated federal labor laws when it tried to hamper union organizing at its Fremont factory, a federal administrative law judge in California ruled on Friday. Among other things, Tesla security guards repeatedly ordered union […]

September 6, 2019

New York Attorney General Letitia James announced this morning that she’s leading an investigation into Facebook over antitrust issues — in other words, whether Facebook used its social media dominance to engage in anti-competitive behavior. In a statement, James said: […]

September 4, 2019

Mark Zuckerberg has “repeatedly lied to the American people about privacy,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said in a recent interview with the Willamette Week, a Portland alternative weekly newspaper. “I think he ought to be held personally accountable, which is […]

August 29, 2019

Amazon’s Ring business has been drawing headlines for its partnerships with police departments nationwide. These arrangements are mutually beneficial: law enforcement gets access to a sprawling, growing surveillance network it doesn’t have to maintain, and Ring gets a marketing boost […]

August 27, 2019

The United States and France have reached a deal over the taxation of digital services, French President Emmanuel Macron said at a Monday news conference alongside US President Donald Trump. But later in the same conference, Trump pointedly declined to […]

August 22, 2019

Few details have emerged about the coordinated ransomware attack that struck 22 local governments in Texas last week. But five local governments affected by the attack have been identified. On August 20, the Texas Department of Information Resources revised its […]

August 15, 2019

In a petition filed on August 13 in federal court in Seattle, the Justice Department asserted that Paige Thompson—the former Amazon employee accused of stealing data from Capital One credit card applications—had done far more, including “major cyber intrusions that […]

August 14, 2019

Verizon has sued the City of Rochester, New York, in order to avoid paying fees for deploying 5G equipment and fiber lines. Verizon’s lawsuit, filed in US District Court for the Western District of New York on Thursday, claims that […]

August 12, 2019

Robert Chang, a Stanford ophthalmologist, normally stays busy prescribing drops and performing eye surgery. But a few years ago, he decided to jump on a hot new trend in his field: artificial intelligence. Doctors like Chang often rely on eye […]