Hacker collective Anonymous has a reputation for targeting authoritarian regimes, and the government crackdown in Syria has led the group to begin hammering away. Anonymous has just released a cache of emails from the mail servers used by Syria's Ministry of Presidential Affairs. The correspondence contain plenty of dirty little secrets, but Anonymous also happily exposed dozens of terrible passwords.
Rambus, a memory technology licensing company, announced today it has signed a patent license agreement with GPU maker Nvidia that will be valid for the next years. As part of the five-year deal, the two sides agreed to settle all outstanding claims against each other, ending what had become a bitter and stretched out legal dispute over various patent innovations.
The breakup between Acer and its former Chief Executive Officer, Gianfranco Lanci, was mildy tense, but swift and free of any drama when the two parted ways almost a year ago. And it probably would have stayed that way too, except Lanci accepted a gig with Lenovo, a move that prompted Acer to file a lawsuit in Italy for an alleged breache of a non-compete clause Lanci signed with his former company.
Courts have said it again and again: consumers have the right to resell their used physical media. That's why used game sales are booming at GameStop and you can pick up old Michael Jackson CDs at a buck a pop down at your local flea market. But do those same rights apply to digital versions? Can you "resell" an iTunes track? We'll know soon enough, as the concept is slated to have its day in court soon.
Oracle wants no part of a court-ordered $272 million award levied against SAP AG for copyright infringement and will the roll the dice on a retrial instead. The $272 million verdict is a little more than a billion dollars less than what Oracle was originally owed until U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton cut the original $1.3 billion award in September of last year, calling it "grossly excessive."
Twitter is i hot legal water with the government of Brazil today, which has filed a lawsuit against the micro-blogging company. At issue are a number of Twitter accounts that Brazilian authorities say are being used to warn drivers of police traffic controls. The fines are set to start rolling in if Twitter does not close these accounts. 
After being ordered to provide the decryption code for her laptop last month, a Colorado is claiming that she no-longer remembers the key. The laptop belonging to Ramona Fricosu was seized as part of a mortgage fraud case in 2010. The government has spent the last few years working to force her to decrypt the hard drive, claiming that doing so would not violate her 5th Amendment right not to incriminate herself. 
Robert De Niro's character in the movie Heat offered up some words of wisdom for those who operate in the criminal world. He said, "Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner." BTJunkie, one of the largest torrent search engines in the world, might not have been doing anything illegal, but with all that's been happening lately, the site's founder thought it best to take De Niro's words to heart and voluntarily shut down for good.
Well, that didn’t take long. One of the largest streaming sites taken down by U.S. authorities yesterday is already back up and running on a new domain, and boy are they upset. While the Department of Homeland Security ICE division was happy to accept a pat on the back for a job well done, one of the owners of Firstrow, a sports streaming site, says he will not give up until a court shuts the site down.Connect with MaximumPC
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