Legal

Anonymous first took credit for the DDOS attack that downed CIA.gov Friday, then said it was just reporting the outage, before discovering it had, actually, been behind the attack. CIA.gov is down again today, though it would be wise to wait to give credit this time.

Getting hacked is not good. Getting hacked then outed for keeping customer passwords in plain text is an epic not good.

Netflix has agreed to pay $9 million to settle a suit over its illegally long retention of customer rental records. It is now redoubling efforts to get law changed that keeps it from posting to Facebook lists of the things its customers are renting right now.

Members of Anonymous are claiming credit for a DDOS attack that took down CIA.gov about 3:10 p.m. ,Eastern time. Few other details are available, but it's likely the attack is related to the massive retaliatory strike Anonymous launched in the wake of the MegaUpload raids.

A German court has thrown out a Motorola Mobility patent lawsuit against Apple, breaking a recent run of courtroom successes for the company.

A jury in Texas gave the verdict that two patents of Eolas Technologies that enable Internet browsers to host embedded interactive applications were invalid, in a protracted legal battle which involved top Internet companies like Google and Amazon.com.

The former owner of two Illinois technology companies was sentenced Thursday to serve 30 months in prison for participating in a conspiracy to defraud a U.S. Federal Communications Commission program to help schools and libraries in poor areas connect to the Internet, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

Google is at odds with Apple, Microsoft and Cisco over the licensing and litigation of patents. While Google wants to make the most of patents it will receive if its acquisition of Motorola is approved, the others want to change the way so-called essential patents are licensed.

Famous troll Eolas now says any "interaction with images inside a browser" is their patent.

The changes Samsung Electronics has made to the Galaxy Tab 10.1N are enough to no longer infringe on Apple's intellectual property rights, a judge at the district court in Düsseldorf, Germany, decided on Thursday.

Two Swedish nationals with the same names as top executives of e-commerce startup Klarna were arrested on Saturday in New York and charged with criminal sexual abuse.

Rambus and Nvidia have settled past lawsuits and signed a patent agreement covering a broad range of integrated circuit products, Rambus said on Wednesday.