A former Bush campaign official has been charged with plotting to jam the phone networks of political opponents during the November 2002 election. James Tobin, 44, of Bangor, Maine, the former regional director of the Republican National Committee in New England, faces charges of conspiracy to commit telephone harassment and aiding and abetting telephone harassment. He face a jail sentence of up to five years if convicted.
New Zealand is considering making evidence gathered by a hacker admissible as evidence in court, raising the spectre of vigilante hackers.
A bill to be introduced to New Zealand's Parliament early next year will clarify the legal status of evidence of an offence gained by hacking, as well as other evidence collected through illegal acts.
Evidence of electronic or any other crime gathered by a hacker illegally intruding into a suspect's computer system would probably be admissible in a New Zealand court, according to lawyers and Police e-crime unit chief Maarten Kleintjes.
Two men were given suspended jail sentences Friday for stealing personal data of subscribers to Japanese broadband services provider Softbank Corp. in an effort to extort money from the company.
Yutaka Tomiyasu, 24, and Takuya Mori, 35, were arrested in May for illegally accessing personal information on Softbank customers after obtaining passwords to hack into the company's database.
Less than a week after a collecting a $536 million settlement from Microsoft Corp. over antitrust complaints in Europe, Novell Inc. filed a lawsuit accusing the software giant of violating U.S. antitrust laws. The suit, which dovetails with the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust case against Microsoft, claims the company used its market dominance in the mid-1990s to keep the WordPerfect word processing program and Quattro Pro spreadsheet application from gaining wider commercial acceptance.
Dutch authorities have charged two teenagers with cyber crimes on suspicion of bringing down government Web sites last month by flooding them with traffic, public prosecutor said on Friday.
The boys from the southern Dutch town of Breda were arrested earlier this week after a raid on their houses in which computers were confiscated. There could be more arrests, the public prosecution service said.
The two are believed to have hacked into other computers to launch a mass visit to government Web sites, which collapsed under the strain.
Four former Microsoft Corp. employees were charged with stealing $32.4 million worth of software and selling it on the side.
According to the complaint filed Monday, the employees ordered software available to Microsoft employees for free to use for business purposes, then sold it to online software retailers. The complaint said the employees blocked managers from getting routine e-mail notification that the workers were ordering the software.
A Connecticut man was arrested on Tuesday on charges that he illegally sold a secret source code used for Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 programs, federal prosecutors said. The Manhattan United States Attorney's Office said William P. Genovese, Jr., 27, was charged with unlawfully distributing a trade secret, a charge that carries a prison sentence of up to 10 years and a $250,000 fine if he is convicted.
An 11-year-old boy in central China took his mother to court for breaking a promise to buy him a computer if he did well at school, a news report said last Monday.
The woman told her son she would buy him a computer if he scored average marks of more than 94% for his school work, the Hong Kong edition of the China Daily reported.
However, she welshed on the deal when he achieved an average of 97%, telling him she could not afford to buy the computer, the newspaper said.
NOKIA, the world's largest mobile phone maker, has filed copyright infringement lawsuits against two of its competitors, Sagem of France and Vitelcom of Spain. Sagem is a leading French technology firm and maker of mobile phones, which in the first nine months of this year shipped some 15 million handsets – about 10 per cent of the total shipped by Nokia during the same time.
Nokia says Sagem's top-of-the-line myX5-2 model, in particular, bears a resemblance to its 6000 series handsets.
Nick Marinellis, the mastermind behind a 419 scam which stole more than £2m from unsuspecting internet users, has been sentenced to at least four years behind bars.
Marinellis, 40, pleaded guilty in a court in New South Wales, Australia to 10 counts of fraud and one count of perverting the course of justice.
Prosecutors told the court that Marinellis masterminded a scam involving the distribution of spam emails which conned gullible people into believing they could claim millions of dollars through lottery winnings or a bogus inheritance.
