BSA fires off writs against online resellers
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Watchdog cries foul over 'dodgy' software auctions The Business Software Alliance (BSA) has begun an international clampdown against people selling illegitimate software online.â¦
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By Simon Fluendy, Financial Mail on Sunday, London  Dec. 10--A crackdown on broadband internet providers after a torrent of  consumer complaints about poor service will be announced this week.
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Eleven firms are barred as part of action against scams which left dial-up net users in the UK with big bills.
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Banks are being accused of pressuring customers into taking out costly loans to try to clear their debts.
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Microsoft is taking action against US resellers who are using dodgy Certificates of Authenticity (COA) to pass off counterfeit software as the real deal.
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Cracks down on double-glazers, telcos next The UK's Information Commissioner has served enforcement notices on five companies involved in direct marketing for calling people who had already made it clear they weren't interested.â¦
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British record companies trade association the BPI (British Phonographic Industry) has announced it is to begin a rolling programme of legal action against &#39;major filesharers&#39; who illegally make copyright music available to millions of people across the
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(InfoWorld) - The trouble at Franklin D. Azar & Associates PC began with pornographic spam. Last May the Aurora, Colorado, law firm was being bombarded with offensive messages, and enough of it was seeping through the company's spam filters that employees complained to management, and IT administrator Kevin Rea was told to do something. What happened next, as detailed in federal court filings, shows how the fight against spammers can backfire. Spammers have been using increasingly sophisticated techniques to evade filters, so that over the past few years and despite predictions to the contrary, unsolicited e-mail continues to plague businesses worldwide. On the morning of May 21, Rea dialed up the spam settings on the Barracuda Spam Firewall 200 Azar & Associates was using to block unwanted mail. The changes made it harder for spam to land on the desktops of company employees but they also had one unforeseen consequence: the Barracuda Networks Inc. appliance began blocking e-mail from the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, including a notice advising company lawyers of a May 30 hearing in a civil lawsuit. Azar & Associates lawyers blew their court date and this week the judge overseeing the matter ordered the company to pay attorney fees and expenses incurred by the lawyers who showed up representing the other side of the case. Rea did not return a call seeking comment on the matter. What happened to Azar & Associates is unusual, but reflects a legitimate worry for law firms. "This is an IT guy's nightmare if you work in a law firm," said Matt Kesner, chief technology officer with Fenwick & West LLP, a Bay Area law firm with about 250 attorneys. "It doesn't take a very high percentage of false positives in the anti-spam world to misidentify a crucial piece of correspondence." Fenwick & West has missed e-mailed court notices in the past, although it has not blown court dates as a consequence, Kesner said. Over the past 10 years U.S. state and federal courts have increasingly done business electronically in a move to become more efficient and more environmentally friendly. This charge has been led by the federal court system, which uses an electronic document system called Case Management/Electronic Case Filing (CM/ECF), in nearly 200 courts across the country. All federal bankruptcy and district courts use CM/ECF and soon it will be standard in the appellate courts, according to Richard Carelli, a spokesman with the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. "You can be notified other ways, but by and large the business of law is carried on electronically, at least in the federal courts," Carelli said. Putting the federal courts, which use the uscourts.gov domain, on a "whitelist" of approved senders is one way to avoid problems receiving e-mail. In fact, the Colorado federal court judge in the Azar & Associates case criticized the law firm for not whitelisting his court's domain name. "It would have been a very simple task to whitelist the... [domain] to insure that such e-mails within this domain would always be received." The judge's order will probably end up costing Azar & Associates several thousand dollars, said Venkat Balasubramani, principal of Balasubramani Law, who has blogged about the issue. But despite the persistence of spammers, Balasubramani doesn't think that the CM/ECF system is really in any trouble. "I don't think the scourge of spam is going to hurt the viability of CM/ECF," he said. "I see this decision as a little bit of an aberration." Kesner, who was a lawyer before taking over the CTO job at Fenwick & West , points out that missed appointments happen when parties are notified by postal mail as well. He avoids whitelists because they must be manually maintained and there is the possibility for human error. But Fenwick & West IT staff uses several mail filtering systems, each considered to have a low frequency of error and they've also programmed their filters to allow more spam than other businesses because of concern over this issue. His advice for legal IT staff? "You test like crazy," he said. "And then you pray and genuflect."
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Online retailers don't own Mondays anymore.
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Lycos Europe appeared to have pulled a controversial antispam screensaver program from its site last week, after coming under fire from both security experts and the spammers themselves.
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The Business Software Alliance, a leading software industry organization, has announced a new approach to fighting piracy in the workplace: up to $1 million in cash to those whistle-blowers who rat out their employers. But the reward is only paid out if the BSA receives a cash settlement from the company.
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Â· Company accused of circumventing bribery lawÂ·  Firm accuses ex-manager of taking kickbacks
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The organization has filed a civil lawsuit against the online bookstore, alleging that selling subscriptions to two cockfighting magazines violates animal cruelty laws.
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The BSA trade group ups its reward for information on U.K. companies that are using illegal software.
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Business & money: Â· Store group challenges Tesco view on pricesÂ· Pledge to give a better deal to smaller suppliers
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Blog: Newspaper reports  publisher Scholastic to take  legal action against peer-to-peer sites, book distributor and online retailer over unauthorized release of  book.
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Online merchants in the United States have become better at weeding out fraudulent credit card orders, a new survey indicates. But shipping overseas remains a risky venture. By Joanna Glasner.