Law and Order

Don't mess with Apple about the curves on the corners of its smartphones. Oh, and if you're an Android developer, God forbid if you try and copy the Bounce.

Days after the members of the Russian band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in a grueling penal colony, hackers attacked the website of the court that sentenced them.

AnonymousRussia, an off-shoot of the worldwide “hacktivist” group Anonymous, claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s attack. “We are American group Anonymous. We don't forget and we don't forgive,” read the post, written in Russian.

California's state legislature passed the Location Privacy Act of 2012 (SB-1434) on Wednesday, which would make it mandatory for law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant before gathering any GPS or other location-tracking data that a suspect's cell phone might be sending back to its carrier.

One of the most maddening things about Facebook is that regardless of how careful you are about building up walls around your personal information, they can come tumbling down in an instant thanks to overly sharing friends with a poor sense of personal boundaries.

This is especially true if you happen to run an alleged crime syndicate and one of your gangsta friends has rolled over for the Feds.

Sabu, the hacker who turned informant on the rampaging Anonymous offshoots Antisec and LulzSec, is getting a six-month reprieve from being sentenced on 12 counts of violating federal law, due to his continued cooperation with the feds, prosecutors told a court Tuesday.

A 45-year-old woman has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison for participating in what the U.S. Attorney's office said was a sophisticated computer hacking and ATM cash out scheme.

U.S. District Judge Steve Jones sentenced Sonya Martin for conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Authorities said she was from Nigeria and Chicago. U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates said the charges stemmed from a scheme where hackers obtained access into the computer network of a payment processor located in Atlanta.

It was mostly a civil day, by the standards of this trial—but that might just be because both sides are so tired, and because the jury isn't around to watch. Apple and Samsung attorneys fired off their final concerns about the jury instructions and the jury verdict form to US District Judge Lucy Koh today, less than 24 hours before the case heads to a jury.

Last January, the US Supreme Court ruled that the police must obtain a warrant before secretly attaching a GPS tracking device to your car, at least for any length of time. The decision in Jones v. United States was heralded as a small victory for those of us who like our gadgets but love our privacy even more.

Britain has told the Ecuadorean authorities it believes officials can enter its embassy in London and arrest Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, according to Ecuador's minister for foreign affairs, Ricardo Patino.

The development came two months after Assange walked into the embassy in a bid to avoid being extradited to Sweden where he faces allegations of sexual assault. At a news conference on Wednesday, Patino said Ecuador would announce its decision regarding Assange's asylum request at 7am (noon GMT) on Thursday.

Apple on Monday rested its case on that Samsung ripped off the design of the iPhone and iPad while building its own mobile products. Meanwhile, three of the Samsung phones that Apple labeled as infringing were tossed from the trial.