Articles about The Law

There is a boom in initial coin offerings (ICOs) in 2017, where firms are mainly offering in-app tokens for investors. These arrangements only work in a given ecosystem and represent companies that are trying hard to not offer "securities" due to the SEC, regulations, etc.

Many firms have taken in funds through ICOs that are far more than their true value and with such a supply of offerings, the quality of the typical ICO event has dropped precipitously. ICOs work as a crowdfunding tool where a percentage of the newly issued currency is provided to new investors in exchange for traditional money or a different cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin. In response to this unregulated and seemingly out of control market, the Chinese authorities recently banned ICOs to slow down the market while regulations can be enacted.

Continue reading →

UK prime minister Theresa May has called on the likes of Microsoft, Google, Twitter and Facebook to act faster to remove terrorism-related and extremist content. At the moment, it takes an average of 36 hours to remove content shared by the likes of Isis, and May wants this slashed to just two hours.

But even this is not enough for the government. It wants technologies to be developed -- or refined -- that will identify this sort of content and prevent it from getting online in the first place. Facebook agrees -- its love of AI is well-known -- but the solution to online extremism is not as simple as saying "technology firms need to do more."

Continue reading →

The Kodi addons site TVAddons vanished from the internet a little while ago before reappearing with a new domain. The site faced legal action over claims it provides access to pirated content, and there have been suggestions that the original TVAddons domain is being used by a law firm to spy on users.

The team behind TVAddons insists that this is not the case, and wants to set the record straight once and for all. It says that, in fact, everything possible has been done to protect user privacy. So are tvaddons.ag and xbmchub.com being used to gather evidence about Kodi users?

Continue reading →

In an alarming but long-feared move, Chinese authorities announced on September 4, 2017, that from then on fundraising Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) will not be allowed to take place on the domestic market. ICO technology can be used as a tool to collect funds from backers to launch new blockchain projects.

The Chinese regulators instructed companies that have already completed their fundraising ICOs to refund the payments to their backers, and the public and financial institutions are asked to report to the authorities all suspicious fundraising activities involving ICOs and cryptocurrencies. Naturally, this development threw the Chinese blockchain community into disarray.

Continue reading →

The cryptocurrency market is now in a massive correction which has wiped out over $50 billion from its market cap high reached at the beginning of the month. The downward pressure seems to center on rumors that China wants to ban Bitcoin, the most valuable cryptocurrency.

I say rumors because there seems to be no official information from China that a ban is, indeed, in the cards. That has not stopped various websites from giving them too much credence, which adds to the instability that we have seen recently.

Continue reading →

That Facebook is causing ripples when it comes to privacy will come as little surprise to anyone. Like Google, the social network and its users have an interesting relationship with privacy. Facebook is facing a particular problem in Europe, and the latest installment of the saga sees the company being fined €1.2 million ($1.44 million) by the Spanish data regulator AEPD.

After an investigation into Facebook, the regulator found that the company had gathered sensitive personal data without consent, and this constituted a very serious infringement of data protection laws. The investigation also identified two "serious" violations, including tracking users through the use of Like buttons embedded in non-Facebook pages.

Continue reading →

Software providers increasingly refer to general, standardized conditions on their website in their contracts. Oracle is a good example of this. In the case of cloud software, there is a reference to an URL for almost all conditions. It goes without saying that you read the online terms before you sign a new whale of a contract.

Only then you know exactly how you are entitled to use the software you purchase. However, it is equally important to monitor the online terms after signing the contract.

Continue reading →

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal has ruled that the legality of mass surveillance in the UK should be decided by the European Court of Justice. The ECJ has already ruled that governments engaging in "general and indiscriminate retention" of data is illegal, and this led campaign group Privacy International to bring a case.

The ruling means that only targeted interception of data and communication is permissible, something which the Investigatory Powers Act -- also known as the snooper's charter -- goes far beyond.

Continue reading →

Lenovo has settled with the Federal Trade Commission after selling laptops with VisualDiscovery adware pre-installed. The Superfish-developed adware was installed without users' consent and made machines vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.

On top of this, the adware shared users' browsing data with third parties. As part of the settlement, Lenovo must gain explicit consent from users before engaging in similar tactics in the future, and must not misrepresent software that serves to inject ads into browsing sessions. The FTC did not, however, prohibit Lenovo from installing adware on its hardware, nor did it impose a financial penalty on the Chinese company.

Continue reading →

A Romanian worker's "right to a private life" was breached when his employer read private messages sent using his work Yahoo Messenger account. The European Court of Human Rights agreed with Bogdan Bărbulescu that previous court hearings had failed to address the issue correctly.

A majority of 11 out of 17 judges said that Bărbulescu's right to a private life was infringed upon when his employer read through chat logs containing both private and professional content.

Continue reading →

Saturday night's fight between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor is set to be the most pirated sporting event in history. In the US, it's Showtime that will be airing the fight as a pay-per-view event, but links to live streams are already popping up online ahead of August 26th's event.

The broadcaster has already taken pre-emptive court action to kill a number of pirate streams but it is -- predictably -- turning in to a game of whack-a-mole, and once the fight kicks off it will be near-impossible to close new streams that have popped up and stop people watching for free.

Continue reading →

Online hate crimes are to be treated as seriously as abuse offenses committed offline as the UK's Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) aims to crack down on abuse and harassment on the likes of Facebook and Twitter. New policies covering hate crime relating to race, religion disability, sexuality -- including, for the first time, specific bisexual hate crimes -- will lead to harsher sentences for offenders.

Alison Saunders, director of public prosecutions, wants to do more to fight online abuse because of the risk of it escalating into the sort of extremist hate seen in relation to events in Charlottesville. She says that abuse of all kind, and on all platforms, should be treated with equal severity.

Continue reading →

It has been difficult to avoid talk of Kodi for one reason or another recently, and it's something that's likely to be on the lips of fans of UK football now the 2017/18 Premier League season has started up.

Watching pirated streams of football matches through IPTV providers and other services has long been a popular use for Kodi, and the English Premier League (EPL) has had enough. The organization previously obtained a High Court order blocking illegal streams in real-time, and a more recently obtained injunction extended this ability. With the new season now under way, football fans are discovering that they now need a VPN like IPVanish to get their fix.

Continue reading →

The Department of Justice is trying to force a web host to reveal the IP addresses of over 1.3 million visitors to an anti-Trump website. The DoJ is also requesting contact information, email content and photos.

The site -- #DisruptJ20 -- was used to organize protests against Donald Trump on the day of his inauguration. DreamHost says that it is fighting the warrant that has been issued, because the "information could be used to identify any individuals who used this site to exercise and express political speech protected under the Constitution's First Amendment. That should be enough to set alarm bells off in anyone's mind."

Continue reading →

HBO has had something of a rough time of things lately, suffering not only a hack that led to a series of leaks, but also a Game of Thrones leak via a distribution partner. Police in India have now arrested four people in connection with the leak of the episode The Spoils of War.

Shortly after the leak occurred, HBO's distribution partner Star India admitted it was the source of the episode. Now three employees and one former employee of Prime Focus Technology -- a company which processes Game of Thrones ready for streaming on Hotstar -- are being questioned in relation to the leak.

Continue reading →