Law and Order

A teenager who was put on probation for molesting a 2-year-old, and restraining a 13-year-old, still can't have his rights to use social media taken away, a California Appeals court ruled.

The 15-year-old defendant, whose first name is given as Andre, was found guilty of holding the 13-year-old's arms while he ground his pelvis against her; and of touching the toddler's genitals. He was put on parole with a variety of conditions, including some relating to his use of computers.

On Tuesday, voters in California overwhelmingly approved Proposition 35, which ratcheted up penalties for those convicted of sex crimes, including human trafficking. The proposition included a provision requiring registered sex offenders to disclose to law enforcement all of their Internet connections and online identities.

Victims of a PIN pad tampering incident, which compromised customer information at dozens of Barnes & Noble stores, have filed three class-action lawsuits against the nation's largest book retailer.

In response to the breach, on Sept. 14, the company removed PIN pads from all of its nearly 700 stores nationwide after tampered devices were discovered at 63 locations in Illinois, New York, New Jersey, California, Massachusetts, Florida, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Connecticut.

No matter how enthusiastic you are about your candidate or your right to vote, before you put a photo of your ballot online, check to make sure what you're doing is not illegal.

That's right; illegal. That means tweeting a photo of your ballot, showing it on Instagram or Facebook or on other sites could lead to your being prosecuted. That hasn't stopped scads of voters from doing it anyway Tuesday.

Late Tuesday afternoon, the FCC announced it signed a consent decree (PDF) with AT&T in which the telecom company promised to refund consumers who had been unfairly pushed from a pay-as-you-go wireless data plan to a monthly data plan. AT&T instated the monthly data plan in 2009, but promised customers who were already buying wireless data through AT&T that they would be "grandfathered" into the new pricing structure, thus keeping their lower data rates.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has announced a new project that should make it easier for interested parties to search for information the organization received following their Freedom of Information Act requests, and to file their own requests.

"From cell phone location tracking, the use of surveillance drones, secret interpretations of electronic surveillance law, and the expanding use of biometrics, EFF wants to hold the government accountable and uphold your digital rights," they pointed out.

The damages award against illegal file-sharer Kywan Fisher will most likely send him to the poor house. Illinois federal court Judge John Lee ordered Fisher to fork out $1.5 million to adult entertainment company Flava Works this week, according to TorrentFreak.

Flava Works sued Fisher for sharing 10 movies he'd previously paid for via BitTorrent. The damages award amount was reached by fining Fisher $150,000 per movie. This is the largest damages award ever ordered in a BitTorrent case.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris has begun warning mobile application developers, and companies that have apps available for download, that failing to  "conspicuously" post privacy policies within 30 days could mean fines.

 Hollywood's lobbyists are a bit alarmed at the possibility that Megaupload users may be getting their data back.

The Motion Picture Association of America told a federal judge in Virginia today that any decision to allow users of the embattled file locker to access their own files could "compound the massive infringing conduct already at issue in this criminal litigation." Megaupload's servers with approximately 25 petabytes of data are currently unplugged, offline, and in storage at Dulles, Va.-based Carpathia Hosting.

A federal judge has ruled that police officers in Wisconsin did not violate the Fourth Amendment when they secretly installed cameras on private property without judicial approval.

The officers installed the cameras in an open field where they suspected the defendants, Manuel Mendoza and Marco Magana, were growing marijuana. The police eventually obtained a search warrant, but not until after some potentially incriminating images were captured by the cameras. The defendants have asked the judge to suppress all images collected prior to the issuance of the search warrant.