Court deals blow to alleged 'Web crammers'
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FTC alleged in 2003 complaint that defendants had failed to disclose the terms of Internet service packages.
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The Court of Appeals of Virginia upheld yesterday what is believed to be the first conviction in the nation under a state anti-spamming law that makes it a felony to send unsolicited mass e-mails.
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A practice used by scammers to siphon off hits from users who misspell URLs in their browsers could be rendered impossible this year, as the organization responsible for the Internet's domain name system may end the program that makes the practice possible.
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Federal investigators overstepped constitutional bounds by searching stored e-mails without a warrant in a fraud investigation, a federal appeals court ruled yester day.
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In the early days of the Internet, when you mistyped a Web address or entered an address that did not exist, your browser was redirected to a Web site with a stark, black-and-white message: "Error Page Not Found."
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A judge in Helsinki has dismissed cases against two men charged with violating a European copyright directive, saying that the CSS technology the men are charged with hacking doesn't constitute much of a copy protection in the first place.
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Though communications protections exist, the law is fuzzy regarding internet and e-mail activity. Watch out for the legalization of digital mind readers tracing internet users' thoughts and interests, and trampling privacy rights in the process.
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A federal judge has set off a free speech tempest after shutting down a U.S. Web site for posting internal documents accusing a Cayman Islands' bank branch of money laundering and tax evasion schemes.
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Suspect accused of stealing and distributing source code over the Internet.
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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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Saving Web 2.0 for all mankind Silicon Justice February has been a banner month for website immunity in the US.â¦
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An overzealous spam filter led to an expensive mix-up for an Aurora, Colorado law firm that missed a court date when it missed an e-mail notification.
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A US federal appeals court yesterday upheld a district court ruling in favor of an individual whose e-mail records were copied by government investigators from servers at Yahoo and another ISP. In so doing, the court may have prevented the government from loosely applying a key tool in its ability to obtain e-mail records without a warrant: the Stored Communications Act.
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Federal investigators overstepped constitutional bounds by searching e-mails without a warrant during a fraud investigation related to an herbal supplement company known for its "Smiling Bob" ads, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.
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Misusing e-mail or browsing the wrong sites can cost you your job.
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The Supreme Court on Tuesday sidestepped a dispute over whether Internet providers can be forced to identify subscribers illegally swapping music and movies online. -AP
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A federal appeals court handed Google Inc a setback in a patent fight on Wednesday, tossing out part of a summary judgment in the Web search engine's favor in a lawsuit filed by Hyperphrase Technologies, LLC.