The US House of Representatives has scheduled to vote on the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) for Wednesday or Thursday, and the pro and anti camps are marshaling their forces to try and sway the result.
China and the United States will set up a working group on cyber-security, US Secretary of State John Kerry said, as the two sides moved to ease months of tensions and mutual accusations of hacking and Internet theft.
Speaking to reporters in Beijing during a visit to China, Kerry said the United States and China had agreed on the need to speed up action on cyber security, an area that Washington says is its top national security concern.
A senior judge from Sweden’s supreme court, Justice Stefan Lindskog, has told an Australian audience that Julian Assange’s argument he cannot stand trial in Sweden without being extradited to the USA is not as black and white as the wikileaker would have us believe.
Lindskog yesterday told an audience at the University of Adelaide that unless Assange is charged with a crime that directly correlates to a law on the books of both Sweden and the USA, the Scandinavian nation won’t be able to hand him over.
The urgent race for such visas—highly desired by Microsoft, Apple, Google and other leading technology companies—coincides with congressional plans to increase the number available to tech-savvy foreigners.
The race to secure one of the 85,000 so-called H-1B visas available for the 2014 budget year started Monday and requests will be accepted through at least Friday. If petitions outpace the availability in the first week, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for the first time since 2008 will use a lottery to pick which companies get visas to award to prospective employees.
South Korea will be stepping up its cooperation with the United States, particularly in the area of cyber warfare, to better deal with emerging threats. This comes on the back of last month's cyberattack, which was the largest the country had witnessed in two years.
The Yonhap News Agency reported Monday the South Korea's defense ministry said it will increase its cyber warfare forces and develop deterrence scenarios in partnership with the U.S. The deterrence methods will help the country be more prepared against an unprovoked attack in times of peace and war, it noted.
Over the pond, the US Justice Department has become so paranoid about hackers that it is bringing about a prosecution campaign which seems to take the Salem Witch trials for inspiration.
This week Andrew Auernheimer was jailed for 41 months because he dared to obtain the personal data of more than 100,000 iPad owners from AT&T's publicly accessible website.
New Chinese Premier Li Keqiang dismissed hacking accusations against China as “groundless” on Sunday and said his government was committed to strong ties with Washington.
Referring to allegations that China’s military was behind massive hacking attacks on U.S. entities, Li reiterated Beijing’s statements that China is a major target of global hackers and opposes all such criminal activity.
Having worked on several continents, I know how difficult it can be to adjust to different cultures.
In Poland, for example, men kiss men at work. In the United States, on the other hand, they sue for that kind of thing.
So you have to feel for any American who is suddenly asked very nicely by his employer to leave the deep safety of the nation and venture to, say, the United Kingdom. They're different there. They're tight-lipped and generally superior. Kinder employers, therefore, create little handbooks to prepare unwitting expats for a new world.
China has expressed a willingness to cooperate with the United States and others to combat hacking, after a top US official warned the international community was losing patience with Beijing.
Foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying, while reiterating China's position that it is a victim of attacks in cyberspace, said Beijing was in favour of global cooperation on the issue.
There was some brief rejoicing around Washington on March 11, when Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) announced legislation that would order the Librarian of Congress to reconsider the decision that makes it a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to unlock a cell phone without the permission of the carrier. Previously, the Librarian had exempted cell phone unlocking from the DMCA, but in January made a puzzling ruling that changed all that.
