Wallace denies wrongdoing in fed anti-spyware case
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The man at the center of the nation&#39;s first spyware case â- businessman notorious for his junk Internet mailings â -s federal regulators were politically
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Security rival says Microsoft is withholding spyware APIs for the Windows update, but the software giant denies it.
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The attorney general denies claims he concealed from an anti-bribery watchdog  secret payments to a Saudi prince.
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A former community college coach charged with providing false information about athletes to several schools pleaded not guilty Thursday to 36 counts of embezzlement, fraud and theft of federal funds.
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Swiss watchmaker Swatch, official timekeeper to the Athens Olympics, denies allegations of tax and customs duty evasion.
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The leader of a ring that sold weight-loss drugs and other controlled substances over the Internet pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge yesterday even as he defended his business and insisted that he never intended to harm patients.
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Business & money: Â· Former Independent chief denies fraud chargesÂ· Company's accounts were a 'mystery quagmire'
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The longtime general manager of a defunct city nightclub says his former boss is not telling the truth about the clubâs role in a computer spyware operation.
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A federal judge declined to accept a guilty plea Tuesday from a former software engineer at America Online Inc. who had been accused of stealing 92 million screen names and e-mail addresses of subscribers for use in an Internet marketing scheme.
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The former CEO of Computer Associates pleaded not guilty to federal securities fraud and other charges yesterday in a multibillion-dollar accounting scandal at the business software maker.
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Microsoft will not demand the withdrawal of evidence submitted against it in a European antitrust case by two parties that have since dropped their support for the case, a spokesman said Wednesday.
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The judge who dismissed a second capital murder case against John Allen Muhammad will not reconsider his conclusion the convicted sniper was denied a speedy trial in the slaying of an FBI analyst.
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American banking heir Matthew Mellon decided not to give evidence against claims he paid a private detective agency to electronically snoop on his estranged wife.   His barrister, Nicholas Purnell QC, told London's Southwark Crown Court he was not calling witnesses.
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The founder of a Japanese investment fund, Yoshiaki Murakami, pleaded not guilty Thursday to insider trading.
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Organizations and law enforcement agencies fighting spyware are making progress, but new tools in an antispyware bill stalled in the U.S. Congress could improve the efforts, a member of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said Monday.One of the spyware bills passed by the House of Representatives earlier this year, the Spy Act, would give the FTC authority to impose civil fines on companies that distribute spyware to consumers&#39; computers. The bill, along with the Internet Spyware Prevention (or I-SPY) Act, have&#160;stalled in the Senate&#160;since passing the House in May and June.The FTC has the authority to collect profits from spyware operations and collect money for consumer redress, but it lacks the authority to impose other fines, as it does when going after spammers, said Commissioner Jon Leibowitz, speaking at a spyware forum in Washington, D.C.Assigning a dollar figure to consumer harm is tricky in many spyware cases, especially when the spyware delivers pop-up advertisements to computers, Leibowitz said. It&#39;s sometimes difficult to get courts to assign large consumer damages to pop-up cases, he said.In some cases, spyware damages are assessed by judges &quot;who don&#39;t even use computers,&quot; said Dave Koehler, with the FTC&#39;s Bureau of Consumer Protection.The Spy Act would allow the FTC to fine spyware vendors up to $3 million for hijacking computers, delivering unwanted adware, and other violations, and $1 million for collecting personal data without permission, in addition to going after the vendor&#39;s profits and seeking consumer redress.Additional authority to impose civil fines would give the FTC &quot;an enormous deterrent,&quot; Leibowitz said.&quot;Right now, companies know that the worst they can do is lose their profits,&quot; he added. &quot;They&#39;re not going to get fined on top of that.&quot;The FTC has brought several spyware actions against companies. In February, the agency settled&#160;a case against adware distributor DirectRevenue. In that case, DirectRevenue settled for $1.5 million, based on its profits, but the founders of the company had received more than $20 million in venture-capital funding, Leibowitz said.While participants in the spyware forum said there continue to be many challenges, including a growing trend of foreign spyware vendors, the cost of spyware to U.S. consumers seems to be falling. Consumer Reports estimated that spyware cost U.S. consumers $2.6 billion in 2006, but only $1.7 billion in 2007, noted Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a supporter of StopBadware.org, a consumer-protection effort aimed at spyware and other malicious code.The drop in the cost of spyware can be attributed to a number of factors, Schwartz said. Antispyware technology is getting better, the FTC has taken action against spyware vendors, and StopBadware.org has distributed a&#160;list of malicious Web sites, he said. In addition, some states have taken action against spyware, and cybersecurity groups&#39; public education programs seem to be working, he said.But Ron Teixeira, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA), noted that consumers may know more about spyware, but they aren&#39;t always acting on their knowledge. A survey released by the NCSA and McAfee earlier this month found 78 percent of respondents&#39; computers didn&#39;t have all three of what the NCSA calls the &quot;core protection&quot; software: anti-virus, antispyware, and firewall.&quot;We&#39;re not seeing a huge increase in the actual behavior change,&quot; he said.
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The Web site of a law firm employing the husband of U.S. Federal Trade Commission chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras contradicts an FTC explanation that Majoras has no conflict of interest in reviewing DoubleClick&#39;s $3.1 billion acquisition by Google, two privacy groups said Thursday.On Wednesday, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD)&#160;asked Majoras to recuse herself from the merger review, saying her husband, John Majoras, is a partner with Jones Day, the law firm that is advising DoubleClick on antitrust issues relating to the acquisition.DoubleClick and the FTC have denied that Jones Day has represented the company before the FTC.But on Thursday, EPIC and CDD filed a second complaint with the FTC, showing a cached Web page claiming that Jones Day is advising DoubleClick &quot;on the international and U.S. antitrust and competition law aspects of its planned $3.1 billion acquisition by Google Inc.&quot; The Jones Day Web page was later changed, the groups said.EPIC and CDD said Thursday they were filing a Freedom of Information Act request seeking all records on the relationship between Jones Day and DoubleClick.One conclusion to draw is that &quot;Jones Day has sought to conceal the nature, scope, and duration of the relationship with its client DoubleClick by altering web pages,&quot; said a letter signed by executive directors of both organizations. FTC spokespeople who denied the relationship were &quot;either misinformed or willfully misled the public,&quot; the letter says.An FTC spokeswoman declined to comment on the new complaint. Representatives of Jones Day and DoubleClick weren&#39;t immediately available for comment.The FTC and DoubleClick downplayed the connection Wednesday, saying Jones Day has not advised DoubleClick on matters before the FTC. Instead, Simpson Thacher &amp; Bartlett has been DoubleClick&#39;s outside counsel since July of 2005 and has advised it in matters before the FTC, DoubleClick said in a statement.&quot;Jones Day was not engaged to represent, and has not represented DoubleClick before the Federal Trade Commission or appeared before the commission on DoubleClick&#8217;s behalf,&quot; the company said.In April, EPIC, CDD, and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG)&#160;asked the FTC to block Google&#39;s acquisition of DoubleClick&#160;unless the combined company made changes to its privacy practices. The combined company would hold a vast amount of private information on Web users, the groups said.
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Two men accused of aiding a Romanian man charged with hacking into the online ordering system of the world's largest computer equipment distributor pleaded not guilty Monday to charges of mail fraud and conspiracy to commit mail fraud.