In a case that illustrates the difficulty many Internet companies face in expanding to China, Yahoo is asking a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit brought by civil rights advocates charging that it was responsible for the imprisonment and alleged torture of two Chinese citizens after it disclosed their identities to government officials. Yahoo says its Chinese subsidiaries had no choice but to comply with Chinese government disclosure rules.
According to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act, the FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, The surveillance system, which is far more intricately woven into the nation’s telecom infrastructure than observers had suspected, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land line operators, internet telephony providers, and cellular companies.
According to researchers with two security firms, software included with high-end memory sticks sold by Sony can make personal computers vulnerable to attack by computer hackers. They claim Sony’s MicroVault USB memory stick and fingerprint reader creates a hidden directory on the computer’s hard drive, leaving room for hackers to secretly infect personal computers.