Roy Mark

Using Virginia’s first-in-the-nation anti-phishing law, America Online (AOL) filed three civil lawsuits today seeking $18 million in damages against unidentified phishers. According to the John Doe lawsuits, the phishers sent official-looking e-mails to AOL members in an attempt to trick and lure them to Web sites that mimic the appearance and feel of official AOL […]

UPDATED: If politics makes strange bedfellows, “certified e-mail” is making a lot of disparate groups downright kinky. This afternoon, groups from across the political spectrum — from the Gun Owners of America to MoveOn.org to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) — will all bed down together to rise up against America Online’s (AOL) plan to […]

Internet telephone service is explosively growing from a nascent idea to a viable market contender to traditional phone service, according to the latest numbers released by the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA). According to TIA, the number of residential Voice over IP customers more than tripled to 4.2 million users last year and is expected to […]

The much lamented gap between rural and non-rural home broadband adoption, though still substantial, is narrowing. According to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 24 percent of adult rural Americans went online with a high-speed connection by end of 2005, compared to 39 percent of home broadband users in urban […]

Forget stalkers and ex-spouses as the primary consumers of online black market phone data. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) says lawyers are the primary buyers driving the market, raising significant ethical issues for the legal profession. EPIC prompted a series of hearings and investigations involving Congress, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal […]

A credit card processor settled charges with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Thursday over what the FTC characterizes as the largest known compromise of financial data to date. Last June, CardSystems revealed it exposed personal information on more than 40 million credit cards after hackers cracked into the firm’s computer system. The FTC said CardSytems’s […]

The nation’s top tech execs are urging the Bush administration to bring the country’s spectrum public policy into the 21st century. According to a new report by the Technology CEO Council, a public policy advocacy group of IT executives, current public policy is creating an artificial spectrum scarcity that needs to be addressed to accommodate […]

California tightened its anti-piracy screws Wednesday when it enacted a new law lowering the felony threshold to 100 counterfeit CDs. Previously, the threshold for a felony copyright violation was 1,000 copies. Under a new measure signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the felony threshold is now the same for illegal CDs as it is for movies. […]

The congressional hearings probing data brokers that sell personal phone records have concluded, but the lawmakers’ investigation continues. As part of its latest update on the probe, House Energy and Commerce Committee investigators identified 22 more Web sites selling unauthorized personal phone data, including cell phone roaming records, the date and time of the calls, […]

The rapid pace of technology is not, as the government argues, making it more difficult to conduct national security surveillance. Instead, technology is inadvertently making it easier for the government to spy on its citizens, and the laws designed to protect privacy rights are not keeping up, according to a new report issued today by […]

A federal judge Tuesday afternoon denied a Department of Justice (DoJ) motion for additional hearings on government exemptions for any possible shutdown of Research in Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry wireless e-mail service. U.S. District Judge James Spencer, who is set to begin a hearing Friday on the long-running patent dispute between RIM and NTP, refused the […]

Four U.S. senators want to reserve the empty spaces between broadcast channels for unlicensed wireless broadband providers, launching a third high-speed Internet competitor to cable companies and the incumbent Bells. The Wireless Innovation Act of 2006 (WINN Act) seeks to exploit the small swaths of spectrum that broadcasters maintain as interference buffers. Those spaces, known […]