Law and Order

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 has been the source of both controversy and consternation since it became law 15 years ago. Because of the DMCA, it became illegal to defeat the encryption on a DVD you purchased so you could watch a movie on your Linux computer.

It became illegal to make a binary copy of a movie so you could watch it on your iPad. Now, because the Librarian of Congress has decided it to be this way, it’s now illegal to unlock phones purchased on or after January 26.

The National Police Agency said Thursday it will promote communications with ethical hackers as part of efforts to better combat cybercrime and cyber-attacks.

The agency hopes the move will enable it to collect more information on such crimes, including the use of viruses to remotely control computers. This is the agency's first organized effort to promote relations with ethical hackers, although some investigators have formed such relationships on their own.

Federal authorities announced Wednesday they had disrupted a massive cybercrime ring, charging three alleged hackers with using "one of the most financially destructive computer viruses in history" to steal millions of dollars from banks around the world.

Felix Tsai was as far from a hacker as you could get. He was a lawyer.

In the mid ’90s, he practiced corporate law for a firm in Manhattan. During the dot-com boom he did mergers and acquisitions. But he never loved his work. After quitting law and starting a pair of tech-minded companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, he realized that what he really wanted to be was a programmer. So he went to bootcamp. And now he is.

Pirate Party Australia hopes to field candidates in every state and territory after the party won the right to contest its first ever Australian election.

The Australian Electoral Commission confirmed the official registration of the party today, a process the party said it had "quietly" undertaken beginning late last year.

The mystery surrounding an Algerian man dubbed the ''smiling hacker'' has deepened, with prosecutors unable to say when he will appear in court and US officials refusing to specify what laws he has broken.

Hamza Bendelladj, 24, was arrested on Jan 6 while his plane was on the tarmac at Suvarnabumi airport.

An Ontario judge has refused a US request for unfettered access to the data on Megaupload servers hosted in Canada. The ruling is another sign that overseas courts are not giving US officials the degree of deference they've grown accustomed to in this case under US law.

Back in August 2012, we reported on how the American Civil Liberties Union was compelling the FBI to fully disclose how it interprets the results of the United States v. Jones case—a unanimous Supreme Court decision establishing that law enforcement does not have the authority to put a warrantless GPS tracker on a suspect’s car.

A federal judge in California has ordered Apple and Amazon.com to sit down and attempt to settle a lawsuit between them over Amazon's use of the "Appstore" name for its online application marketplace.

U.S. District Court Judge Elizabeth Laporte told both parties on Tuesday that they must attempt to reach a settlement ahead of their next scheduled appearance in court on March 21.

 Lie about your identity on Facebook or delete files from your work laptop before you quit and you could run afoul of a 29-year-old US computer security law that some experts say has been changed so often it no longer makes sense.

The US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act has come under renewed criticism after last week's suicide of internet activist Aaron Swartz, who could have faced prison time for alleged hacking to download millions of academic articles from a private database through a network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.