Law and Order

The TQP Development v. Newegg trial has ended, and the case is now in the hands of an eight-person jury here in Marshall.

TQP claims that a patent invented by a man named Michael Jones covers a vast swath of the Internet: any website, in fact, using the common encryption combination of SSL combined with the RC4 cipher. The patent-holding company owned by Erich Spangenberg, derided by its critics as a "patent troll," has collected $45 million from 139 companies. Online retailer Newegg won't pay and has pushed the case to a jury.

A jury of eight members has come to a verdict in the retrial between Apple and Samsung. The conclusion: Samsung has to pay Apple $290 million for patent infringement.

Apple is probably happier with this number than Samsung is. During the trial, Apple's attorney made clear that it wanted $380 million while Samsung only felt it had to pay $52 million. The outcome of $290 million is far closer to what Apple wanted to take than what Samsung wanted to give. Both sides did manage to agree that Samsung sold 10.7 million infringing devices.

Microsoft sued Acacia Research Corp. today, accusing the company of breaking a contract "to license various smartphone and mobile computing technologies to Microsoft," Reuters reported.

Tire company Bridgestone has slapped IBM with a huge lawsuit over a custom-built computer system that performed so poorly, it threw Bridgestone’s "entire business operation into chaos," the suit alleges, as reported by the Tennessean.

The system cost over $75 million and went live in January, 2012. It immediately experienced "system-wide failures" for three months, Bridgestone alleges:

A U.S. judge has shut down an online business listing operation that allegedly bilked more than US$14 million from U.S. small businesses and churches.

Judge Virginia Kendall of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, issued a temporary restraining order against the Canadian operation Monday at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's request.

The dramatic takedown of the Silk Road drug market and the arrest of its alleged owner on drug trafficking and murder-for-hire charges last month began in part with an offhand tip to Department of Homeland Security investigators in Maryland in mid-2011.

The informant told DHS investigators in Baltimore about an online drug bazaar where international sales of illicit drugs and other contraband were conducted with impunity and with the ease of buying cocktail stirrers or underwear on Amazon.

The US Supreme Court today denied a motion by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) for a court order against the National Security Agency (NSA)'s blanket collection of telephone records.

According to the New York Times, while the Court gave no reasons for the rejection, the reason was likely procedural: In its response to the EPIC petition, the government had argued that the petition did not meet the requirements for a writ of mandamus, and that the proper procedure for EPIC would be "...to file an action in federal district court, as other parties have done."

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty pushed by the Obama administration could complicate efforts to loosen restrictions on jailbreaking and unlocking smartphones, tablets, or other consumer electronics.

As part of a settlement announcement on Monday, Google has agreed to pay out $17 million to 37 U.S. states, as well as the District of Columbia, for ignoring anti-tracking protocols baked in to Apple's Safari Web browser.

According to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, the state attorneys general took Google to task over unauthorized placement of cookies on users' machines when they visited sites on the Internet search giant's DoubleClick ad network between 2011 and 2012, reports PCWorld.

Crime-fighting and intelligence agencies in the UK and the US have begun monitoring users of encrypted, anonymising online networks – the dark web – in a bid to track down paedophiles posting images of children being sexually abused.