Articles by David Vranicar

Britain's National Fraud Intelligence Bureau has begun sending letters to people it suspects of operating websites that provide access to unauthorized content for "criminal gain." The letters state that law enforcement authorities are working with the government and "industry bodies" -- this would be Hollywood studios and the BPI, Britian's music i...

The anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 has prompted Chinese authorities to expand the list of words and phrases barred from Sina Weibo,the country's most trafficked microblogging platform This is par for the course in China, where in 2012,2011,2010, 2009 -- basically every year social media has been huge -- the Net police have ...

Increasingly testy rhetoric and increasingly legitimate concerns have prompted the United States and China to announce that they will hold regular high-level talks on standards of cyberbehavior The announcement precedes a meeting between President Obama and Chinese president Xi Jinping. That powwow will take place Friday in Rancho Mirage, Calif., ...

SoftBank has reached a national security agreement with U.S. authorities, perhaps clearing the way for the Japanese company to purchase Sprint Nextel U.S. officials have expressed concerns about potential ties between SoftBank and Chinese telecommunications firms like Huawei.

Well, President Obama will definitely have something to talk about Beijing announced that China will conduct its first "digital war games," a proclamation that will likely do nothing to allay United States concerns about China's propensity for hacking and cyberespionage....

The European Commission is taking a closer look at whether Apple is engaging in unfair sales practices The EC, which is the executive branch of the European Union, sent a questionnaire last week to several European mobile network operators probing Apple's distribution terms -- specifically, whether those terms preclude rivals from offering a better...

Kim Dotcom, founder of the seized file-sharing site Megaupload, hinted via Twitter that he might sue the slew of companies using two-step authentication, for which Dotcom claims to own the patent. Dotcom provided a link to a patent that deals with two layers of identification, corroborating his purported ownership. That said, it is hard to know if...

SAP, a German software heavyweight, announced that it plans to recruit hundreds of people with autism in a quest to staff employees who "think differently." The company said it would hire 650 autistic people by 2020, which would account for about 1 percent of its multinational workforce....

Despite cries from the Left, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp is still up and running. The same, however, can't be said for Guantanamo's WiFi The United States military turned off wireless Internet service at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base amid threats from the hacker collective Anonymous. Officials have also nixed access to social networks such as...

A series of subsidiaries spanning numerous countries have helped Apple avoid billions in United States taxes, congressional investigators reported Monday Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., head of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which is looking into Apple's suspected transgressions, said that Apple "sought the holy grail of tax avoida...

After a three-month lull, China's People's Liberation Army has resumed hack attacks against United States companies and government agencies Despite a ballyhooed February report from private security firm Mandiant, and despite public complaints from the Pentagon, Unit 61398, the PLA group made famous by the report, is again back to its hacking ways....

In what likely amounts to a combination of headline-chasing and genuine frustration, members of the British Parliament sounded off this week on Google and the company's tax practices. Margaret Hodge, chair of the public accounts committee, told Matt Brittin, Google's northern Europe boss, that Google's behavior on taxes was "devious" and "unethica...

What next, Antarctica? Citing illegal subsidies, the European Commission is considering trade duties against Chinese telecommunications equipment makers Huawei and ZTE. ...

A federal court in Germany has told Google that it must remove offensive or defamatory suggestions from its autocomplete function when it receives a complaint The case that prompted the ruling started with a German businessman who, upon culling through Google.de, found that he was associated with scientology and fraud. (He was apparently neither a...

Francois Hollande, France's president, is mulling a potential tax on smartphones, laptops and tablets in order to fund the nation's cherished cultural exception The revenue generated from such a tax would be earmarked for the cultural exception, which supports French music, film and visual art. France currently spends north of US$130 million a year...

China has been having a good go at Apple lately, having slammed the company in March for substandard post-sale service and quickly following that up with charges of copyright infringement The latest accusation: tax evasion.

In what is believed to be one of the biggest robberies ever executed, cyberthieves stole nearly US$50 million from a pair of Middle Eastern banks. Far from bullying their way into vaults, members of this crime ring reportedly hacked into credit card processing firms and withdrew money from ATMs in 27 different countries. The plan worked by increas...

Ren Zhengfei, the founder and CEO of Huawei Technologies, spoke to the media for the first time on Thursday Ren, formerly a member of the Chinese military, has been the focal point of Western skepticism toward Huawei -- which resulted in the company beingbarred from a broadband project in Australia, as well as being labeled as untrustworthy in a U...

Police in Beijing arrested 11 suspects believed to be involved with a major high-definition downloading ring The website, silu.com, was running what has been called an "unprecedented" operation. It reportedly boasted more than 400,000 registered members and offered under-the-table downloads for nearly 19,000 films and TV series. The catalog includ...

National Cheng Kung University may not have a fight song -- but it is definitely willing to fight For the second time in a year, the Taiwanese university has sued Apple. The most recent suit is for alleged infringement of the university's patents relating to video compression technology in Apple software such as FaceTime and QuickTime....