Tech Law

TECH TREK

Russia to Host Snowden Family Reunion

Lon Snowden, the father of famed leaker Edward Snowden, and the family's lawyer have obtained visas to travel to Russia, where Edward Snowden has been granted temporary asylum as the U.S. seeks to extradite him on federal charges. Speaking on ABC News' This Week, the senior Snowden and the lawyer di...

The NSA reportedly is reading communications between Americans and foreigners abroad, despite its denials. The NSA responded to the allegations by stating its activities are lawful attempts to gather intelligence about foreign powers and their agents, foreign organizations, foreign persons or intern...

Hot air, maybe. But it's Edward Snowden, so it's news. Pavel Durov, the 28-year-old Russian CEO of social network site VKontakte, has offered Snowden a job as a security software developer. VKontakte is akin to Facebook and has 100 million active users, mostly from Eastern Europe. Last week, Russia ...

Ireland-based Freedom Hosting, which hosted several servers on the Tor Project's hidden network, has been taken down through a vulnerability in the Firefox browser -- and the FBI is widely suspected of being the attacker. The FBI reportedly is seeking to extradite Freedom Hosting's owner, Eric Eoin ...

TECH TREK

2 Brits Jailed for Courtroom Web Use

Two men from near London, a 21-year-old and 29-year-old, have each been sentenced to two months in jail following contempt of court convictions for misusing the Internet while serving on a jury. The 21-year-old posted a Facebook message during a sex offense prosecution, saying that he wanted to "f**...

Australia has recommended changes to copyright law that would allow Aussie citizens cheaper access to IT hardware, software and digital downloads after a parliamentary inquiry found no good reason for prices to be so high Down Under. The inquiry sought to unearth why IT prices were so much higher in...

Remote-control vehicles once primarily inhabited the territory of hobbyists. People would take their planes out to a field on a Saturday afternoon and spin a few lazy circles in the sky. With the advent of unmanned aerial vehicles, drones and other high-tech applications, however, it has quickly bec...

Britain is simultaneously investigating and praising Chinese telecommunication firm Huawei. OK, so the UK didn't out and compliment Huawei. Less than a week after British authorities launched a cybersecurity review of the company, however, Prime Minister David Cameron said that British telecommunica...

A proposal to restrict the NSA's surveillance of Americans' phone calls was defeated by a mere 12 votes in the House of Representatives on Wednesday in a battle that drew unusual bipartisan support at a time when partisanship is running at an all-time-high. Reps. Justin Amash, R-Mich., and John Co...

Lawmakers in Finland will vote on a crowdsourced legislative proposal that, if approved, would change the nation's copyright laws. Last year, Finland's constitution was modified to allow citizens to submit proposals to Parliament, so long as said proposals obtained 50,000 supporters within six month...

In a nod to developing nations like India and Brazil, Facebook will unveil plans for "Facebook for Every Phone," which is designed to make Facebook accessible on technologically humble feature phones. Facebook, which already boasts more than 1.1 billion users, now wants to target the 100 million peo...

TECH TREK

Germany Caught Nuzzling With NSA

It turns out that Germany, Europe's most outspoken critic in the wake of U.S. snooping revelations, has itself used a National Security Agency spying program and collaborated with the NSA on surveillance. Takes one to know one. Germany's foreign intelligence service, called the "BND," and its dome...

TECH TREK

Rain Forest 1, Amazon 0

A group of countries in Latin America seems to have successfully blocked online retail giant Amazon from using ".amazon" as an Internet address suffix. A committee from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees top-level domain names, recommended that .amazon be preclud...

Google, which is fighting government requests for data in two courts and demanding greater transparency in the wake of the brouhaha over the NSA's PRISM program, reportedly also is experimenting with encrypting files on Google Drive. Some files may already have been encrypted. In related news, a co...

The definition of sportmanship may lie to some extent in the eye of the beholder, but on Monday the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service reportedly recognized the video game League of Legends as a professional sport. The decision enables the most elite of players in the field to qualify for Inte...

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