Posts Tagged ‘Legal’

Oops! Android Vendors May Have Lost Their Linux Distribution Rights

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Android, which owns about half the market share for smartphones has been in the new lately because of the various patent purchases involving Apple, Microsoft and Google defensively buying from (what used to be) Novell, Nortel, IBM and other sources. However, FOSS Patents reports that there is an even more important item that may create a big problem for Android.
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NLRB: Some Employees’ Online Rants Cross the Line

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The National Labor Relations Board has taken the stance in several recent cases that employees’ griping about their employers in social media sites was “concerted activity” protected by federal labor laws. Many people have felt that those cases set a disturbing precedent and overly restricted employers’ ability to protect their reputations from being damaged by their own employees.

Guest blogger Brian Wassom explains what this might mean for your workplace.

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ConsumerBell Looks To Crowdsource Corporate Accountability

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ConsumerBell LogoDid Comcast just rake you over the coals and double the cost of your cable, internet, and television? You aren’t alone and ConsumerBell is here to protect you. No matter what company has potentially hurt you, consumers are the ones who should have control. By letting consumers join together, ConsumerBell looks to help those who have been mistreated by corporations and hold them accountable.
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Supreme Court Is Ill-Equipped To Handle Tech And Social Media Related Cases

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-Law Icon-Justice John Paul Stevens just turned 90 years old on Tuesday. As an aging member of society, it is no wonder that he and some of his fellow justices have no idea what certain new technologies are, how they are different from each other, why we need them, etc. But since, as members of the high court, they are the final word on justice in America, does it make sense that these men and women lack a basic understanding of just the beginning of a slew of technical issues likely to come before them in the next few years?
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Unvarnished: The Evil Side of Social Media?

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Unvarnished LogoRemember that time when you had a very vocal disagreement with someone at work, or with a client, and you hoped it would go away and time would heal any rifts or at least neutralize them? Well that might not happen if people were to abuse a site like Unvarnished. Did something not so professional that peeved someone? Messed up a big project? All that information might just appear on Unvarnished, courtesy of some “anonymous” posting.
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RockYou's Data Breach Takes A Turn For The Worse With Class Action Suit

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RockYou has come under fire recently after a SQL injection flaw resulted in a data breach which exposed over 32 million RockYou user emails and passwords. Rather than immediately solving the problem however, RockYou was complacent. As Nik Cubrilovic pointed out, “They have not taken steps to rectify the problems that caused the breach and have not addressed their users in a suitable or adequate manner. An appropriate response would have been to take the site down for a period of a few hours and enforce that users enter new passwords, which would be stored in a hashed or encrypted form.” Two weeks later a class action has been filed.
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Who Will Protect the Children?

So, the latest thing is age-verification for minors, where sites like MySpace and Facebook confirm the identities of members under 18 and restrict access only to other children or parent-approved adults. Sounds good and solves a basic online security problem, and a big one at that, right?

Well, yes and no. As the New York Times reported last week, “Online Age Verification for Children Brings Privacy Worries” since the cost of doing this kind of business can be kind of steep – at least under current proposals. The Times discussed one company in particular, eGuardian of Ontario, CA, which “asks a parent to submit the birth date, address, school and gender of a child, then it asks schools to confirm the information.”
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