Law and Order

A British man has been arrested in England and charged by the United States and Britain with hacking into US government computer systems, including those run by the military, to steal confidential data and disrupt operations, authorities said.

Lauri Love and three co-conspirators allegedly infiltrated thousands of systems including those of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the US space agency NASA and the US Environmental Protection Agency, according to a US grand jury indictment made public on Monday.

A 12-year old boy from Montreal, Canada has pleaded guilty to hacking into government websites in the name of hacker collective, Anonymous.

The report in the Toronto Sun says the boy's motives were not political but rather he handed information to Anonymous in exchange for video games.

The criminal trial of former News Corp executive Rebekah Brooks and several of the company's former employees involved in an alleged phone-hacking scandal starts here Monday, kicking off a courtroom drama that could further embarrass both the media giant and the British government.

Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission on Thursday fined the local unit of South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. for undermining the reputation of Taiwanese mobile phone maker HTC Corp.

In a notice on its website, the consumer protection body said that Samsung had organized an Internet campaign in violation of fair trade rules to praise Samsung smartphones while slamming those of HTC.

A site founded by a former moderator of one of the most popular file-hosting and uploader hangouts has admitted today that his site was a honeypot setup to capture data on pirate activity. WDF, a former senior staff member at popular discussion forum WJunction, says that in the 12 months since his site went online he’s been grabbing information about uploaders and file-hosts. “I suckered shitloads of you,” he said today as he announced the acquisition of his site by a U.S.-based anti-piracy company.

Attaching a GPS to a car without a search warrant is unconstitutional, the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled [click here for PDF] on Tuesday.

The decision comes as a victory for the privacy groups that filed an amicus brief [click here for PDF] in November 2012, asking that the court consider whether law enforcement agents should have to obtain a warrant based on probable cause before attaching a GPS tracker to a car and tracking its movements. The case involves a GPS tracker that police attached to a car belonging to Harry Katzin.

In a rare move, a federal court in Idaho recently ordered a software developer's computer seized and its contents copied without prior notice because the developer described himself as a 'hacker' on his website.

Judge Lynn Winmill, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho, issued the ruling even as he acknowledged it was "very rare" and "extraordinary." Nonetheless, he maintained it was necessary under the circumstances. "The tipping point for the Court comes from evidence that the defendants - in their own words - are hackers," Winmill wrote.

If you call yourself a hacker online you automatically lose rights under the US constitution, a court has ruled.

The US District Court for the State of Idaho ruled that an ICS product developer's computer could be seized without him being notified or even heard from in court.

A consumer VPN service called CryptoSeal Privacy has shut down rather than risk government intrusions that could cost the company money in legal fees and threaten user privacy.

CryptoSeal will continue offering its business-focused VPN, but the consumer service is done, the company announced:

isoHunt, a search engine for BitTorrent files founded more than a decade ago, has agreed today to shut down all its operations worldwide. The company, founded by Canadian Gary Fung, has also accepted a judgment that it must pay the movie studios that sued it $110 million.