Seagate faces class-action lawsuit over faulty 3TB hard drives
Hard drive failure is inevitable, but manufacturers will generally provide an estimate of how long their products will last, giving businesses and consumers plenty of time to backup their drives. When a hard drive fails unexpectedly and long before it should, it can cripple a business.
A class-action lawsuit has been brought against the hard drive manufacturer Seagate after many users reported that the company’s 3TB drives were failing at an alarming rate. The law firm Hagens Berman and Sheller has filed a case in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Net neutrality on trial: judges hear lawsuits against FCC
The Federal Communications Commission finds itself in court today, as the hearing gets underway to determine the legality of net neutrality rules. A total of 10 lawsuits have been brought against the commission by a number of cable and telecoms companies.
Earlier in the year the FCC banned service providers from creating internet fast lanes that could have been used to give those willing to pay for it a faster service, or to offer certain types of traffic preferential treatment. This could be the hearing that decides once and for all whether the idea of treating all web traffic equally is a workable option.
Patent troll claims HTTPS ownership, lawsuits ensue
Ah, don’t you love the smell of patent trolls in the morning?
In the latest news regarding these wonderful creatures, it was unveiled this week that a Texas company called CryptoPeak Solutions has sued basically everyone, everywhere, for using the HTTPS protocol.
AMD hit with deceptive marketing lawsuit over Bulldozer chip core claims
Chip-maker AMD faces a lawsuit for misleading adverts for its Bulldozer processors. The legal action has been started by Tony Dickey at the US District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division; the allegation is that the Bulldozer CPU is advertised as having 8 cores, but it effectively has just 4.
The architecture of the chip is such that each of the cores is unable to operate independently meaning that it functions in the same way as a 4-core processor. AMD faces allegations under the Consumer Legal Remedies Act, California’s Unfair Competition Law, as well as false advertising, fraud, breach of express warrant, negligent misrepresentation and unjust enrichment.
Apple hit with lawsuit over iOS 9's Wi-Fi Assist
The Wi-Fi Assist feature found in iOS 9 has caught some people unawares, and many have complained that they have been landed with large bills due to increased data usage. Two individuals have filed a class action lawsuit in California against Apple, alleging that the company failed to properly explain how Wi-Fi Assist works.
While Wi-Fi Assist can be disabled, the plaintiffs say that Apple should reimburse anyone who found they were pushed over their data usage limits. The company now needs to defend itself against charges of violating Unfair Competition Law, False Advertising Law, and negligent misrepresentation. Apple is also accused of downplaying the risk of exceeding data limits.
Amazon lawsuit aims to kill fake reviews
The ability to read reviews of products before making a purchase is one of the great advantages of online shopping. But how do you know that what you're reading is a genuine review and not just glowing praise planted by the seller or manufacturer? Fake reviews are a serious problem, and Amazon is trying to do something about it.
The retail giant has filed a lawsuit against 1,114 individuals for writing "false, misleading, and inauthentic" reviews. Amazon says that the fakers are tarnishing its reputation, and the attempt to clean up the site is something that will be welcomed by consumers.
Lawsuit fights Uber's user location tracking plans
Uber has faced numerous complaints since its inception in 2010, including suggestions that drivers are not properly vetted. Now the taxi service is facing legal action over plans to track the location of its customers whether the app is running in the foreground or background on their phones.
The new policy is due to come into force on July 15, but the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a complaint with the FTC saying that the policy change is unfair and should be investigated by the commission. It will be possible to opt out of this location tracking, but EPIC feels this is unreasonable.
That iPhone 6 storage lawsuit is so bogus I just laugh
Oh the irony! I got up yesterday morning planning to write a version of the post you read now, choosing instead to look back at readers' life-changing tech. The trigger: Motorola starting the New Year with a 64GB Moto X model and my previous day's personal tech devices wrap-up, which got me to thinking abut smartphone differentiation. Processing power, graphics chips, and the like are passé. Who really cares but a minority of gadget geeks? But storage matters to everyone, and Apple gets it—as iPhone 6 and 6 Plus capacities demonstrate.
My feeds are full of reports this morning about a lawsuit filed against Apple alleging that iOS 8 consumes too much storage and, as such, the company misrepresents the amount available. I would have looked so smart writing yesterday about how much Apple gives that competitors don't. That's okay, now my analysis has a news hook. The point, for people reading no more than two paragraphs of any story: iPhone 6 capacities outclass competitors, and the problem of operating systems consuming much of available storage isn't new or exclusive to the fruit-logo company. Just look to Google and Microsoft, for example.
Rockstar Consortium sells patents for $900 million, ending Android lawsuits
The patent wars are cooling down. Rockstar Consortium's litigation against numerous Android handset manufacturers has come to an end after the group sold 4,000 patents to RPX Corp. The intellectual property risk mitigation company bought the patents for $900 million, ending lawsuits against HTC, LG and Samsung.
Apple, BlackBerry, Ericsson, Microsoft, and Sony formed Rockstar Consortium back in 2011 to purchase around 6,000 patents from the bankrupt Nortel Network Corp for $4.5 billion. 2,000 of the patents had previously been shared between the members of the consortium, and the remainder have now exchanged hands for less a quarter of the original sale price.
Getty Images fires lawsuit at Microsoft for "massive" copyright infringement
Getty Images Inc is suing Microsoft for "massive infringement" of copyright. Microsoft's recently released Bing Image Widget enables people to display images on a website based on search terms. The automatically generated code creates image slideshows and galleries that pull in images from Bing -- Getty's complaint centers around the fact that the widget displays unlicensed images from its catalog that are subject to copyright. The Seattle-based stock image company says that Microsoft has turned the images that can be found online into "a vast, unlicensed clip art collection".
The lawsuit, filed at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, says that the injury caused to Getty is "incalculable" and calls for the widget to be blocked immediately. The level of damages sought is not specified, but Getty's lawsuit suggests that the company has more than 80 million unique images in its library. Getty has its own image embedding tool, and John Lapham, general counsel for the company, explained to Reuters that it is "only available for non-commercial websites and includes photographer attribution".
LinkedIn to face lawsuit for spamming users' email address books
A judge in the Northern District of California has paved the way for a lawsuit against the social network LinkedIn for violating the privacy of its users. The complaint was that LinkedIn "violated several state and federal laws by harvesting email addresses from the contact lists of email accounts associated with Plaintiffs’ LinkedIn accounts and by sending repeated invitations to join LinkedIn to the harvested email addresses". It relates to the fact that LinkedIn not only used the address books of those signing up for accounts to tout for business by sending out an email to that effect, but also sent follow-up email if there was no response.
US district judge Lucy Koh ruled that while users granted permission for LinkedIn to access their contact list it is this 'spamming' that is likely to land the company in court again. The judge outlined the process users were complaining about, explaining that LinkedIn sent an email to connected in users' address books -- albeit with initial permission -- sends the same email a week later if the recipient has not joined LinkedIn, and a third email if another week passes without a signup.
Kim Dotcom offers $5m reward in Megaupload piracy lawsuit
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is offering $5 million to whistleblowers willing to help him fight his online piracy case. The German national believes that the information being used against him by the US and New Zealand governments was obtained illegally.
"We are asking for information that proves unlawful or corrupt conduct by the US government, the New Zealand government, spy agencies, law enforcement and Hollywood," he said in an interview with TorrentFreak.com.
Apple to pay out $53m in iPhone 'water damage' lawsuit
153,000 iPhone and iPod owners are in line for a payout from Apple after the company agreed to a $53 million settlement to a 2010 lawsuit. The class action suit concerned malfunctioning devices that the Cupertino, Calif. based company claimed had been damaged after coming into contact with water.
A "liquid damage policy" allowed Apple to deny warranty coverage if the liquid indicator inside the device changed color from white to pink or red, "proving" contact with water.
A 7-inch tablet from Apple would just create more lawsuits
Apple is one of the most important companies in the world of consumer technology and one that has changed the destiny of the smartphone and the tablet. It came as a big surprise when the Cupertino, California-based company announced the iPad more than two years ago. In 2010, Apple made waves with its first tablet generating $9.566 billion in revenue from the iPad alone, and in 2012 it's making headlines again with a smaller, seven inch tablet it hasn’t even announced yet.
In 2010 Apple had the market all to itself, with the iPad dominating 83 percent of the tablet market. Why? The iPad wasn't designed to have the most cutting edge software or hardware in terms of features or speed, but it was conceived to offer easy-to-use software with hardware to match it, wrapped in a good looking package. It sold 14.789 million units in 2010 alone, so it's clear the idea caught on. The original iPad was released in a time when tablets weren't as popular as they are today, and despite previous efforts by Microsoft with the TabletPC, they never caught up. So what's changed?
First an outage, now a lawsuit: US, Canadian Blackberry users want compensation
Research in Motion will now need to fight off class action suits in both the United States and Canada, following a four-day outage earlier this month which started overseas but quickly spread worldwide. The outage left some without email, web browsing, and instant messaging for several days.
RIM apologized for the issues and offered free apps and enterprise tech support for its customers' troubles, but that was not enough. The US effort was filed on Wednesday in the US District Court for the Central District of California in Santa Ana, and the Canadian suit in the Quebec Superior Court. Both efforts seek class-action status.
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