Roy Mark

SOMEWHERE ON THE NET NEUTRALITY TRAIL — Some people are lucky. Others are damned lucky. Some are even double darn lots of damn lucky. I offer you as example A: my new good friend, Moby. Only an hour or so after the entertainer/activist stood on the Cannon House Office Building’s terrace Thursday afternoon calling for […]

WASHINGTON – From a formal Senate hearing to backroom intrigue in the House to political theater starring musician Moby, the issue of network neutrality swirled around Capitol Hill today. As cable industry spokesman Kyle McSlarrow said, “This [net neutrality] is now the number one issue.” Proponents of net neutrality want Congress to enact legislation prohibiting […]

The Department of Justice (DoJ) raised the stakes in its campaign against online gambling sites yesterday with money laundering indictments against Antigua-based Worldwide Telesports (WWTS) and its operators. William Scott and Jessica Davis, already U.S. fugitives stemming from a 1998 illegal gambling indictment, are charged with laundering approximately $250 million worth of Internet-based wagers. The […]

And then there was AT&T. The phone company is now the only one named in various media reports that hasn’t denied its complicity in the National Security Agency (NSA)’s alleged domestic spying program. One day after BellSouth rejected claims that it turned over customer calling records, Verizon issued a denial of its own. “Contrary to […]

XM Radio’s newest gadget is illegal and should be pulled from the market, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The RIAA claims XM’s compulsory license gives satellite radio companies only the right to publicly perform copyrighted works in a non-interactive, radio-like service. The RIAA is seeking $150,000 […]

We didn’t do it, BellSouth said Monday, in response to claims it turned over customer calling records to the National Security Agency (NSA). The company conducted an internal review to determine the facts in response to media reports that it provided massive amounts of customer calling information under a contract with the NSA, the company […]

EBay’s Buy It Now feature lives on … for now. In a significant victory for the online auction giant, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that eBay may continue to offer the service even though two courts have determined it infringes on patents held by MercExchange. The justices did not disagree with the infringement decision, […]

A former Department of Education (DoE) network security employee was sentenced to five months in prison Friday for placing spyware on his boss’s computer. In March, Kenneth Kwak, 34, pleaded guilty to one count of intentionally gaining unauthorized access to a government computer and obtaining information. In addition to prison time, Kwak was fined $40,000 […]

UPDATED: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that both a district and a federal appeals court erred in determining whether a permanent injunction is due to MercExchange in its patent-infringement battle with online auction giant eBay. The justices ordered the case back to a lower court to determine if a permanent injunction is justified, a […]

UPDATED: The Department of Justice (DoJ) and Microsoft have agreed to a two-year extension of the communications protocol licensing program portion of Microsoft’s final antitrust settlement with the government. The DoJ Friday told U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who presided over the Microsoft trial, the extension is necessary due to Microsoft’s difficulty in improving the […]

WASHINGTON — Remember CAPPS II? Total Information Awareness? Information signatures? John Poindexter? Three years ago, the Bush Administration sparked a firestorm of controversy over its various data mining programs designed to gather intelligence through electronic sources such as the Internet, telephone and fax lines on possible terrorist activities. There was only one problem with the […]

WASHINGTON — Seeking to make it a crime to conceal data breaches involving personal information, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee Thursday jumped into the data breach debate playing out on Capitol Hill. The Cybersecurity Enhancement and Consumer Data Protection Act of 2006 (H.R. 5318) would require disclosure to the government for any breaches involving 10,000 […]