Articles by David Vranicar

The National Security Agency's efforts to include "backdoors" in U.S. companies' security products, networks and devices -- thereby making it easier for the NSA to snoop around -- could hurt business abroad Specifically, foreign countries could come to view U.S. firms' relationship with Washington much the same way that the U.S. views Chinese compa...

Smugglers who have long taken advantage of delays in Apple product releases in China will have a harder go of it when the company launches its newest iPhone models The devices, the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c, will be launched almost simultaneously in the U.S. and China. This will complicate the practice of smuggling products into mainland China from H...

China's Supreme Court announced new guidelines for Internet use, including years-long jail stints for people who author "online rumors" that are viewed more than 5,000 times or reposted 500 times Such a post would qualify as defamation, which in China carries a max sentence of three years in jail. Should a post "seriously endanger social order and ...

Shi Tao, a Chinese reporter who was incarcerated in 2005 after Yahoo divulged his email details, has been released from prison Shi was first arrested in 2004 and charged with disclosing state secrets, namely emailing details of a government memo about keeping a lid on news coverage of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The email was...

Sonny Dickson, a teenager in Australia, leaked photos on his website purportedly showing an Apple fingerprint scanner. The photos were published less than one week before huge Apple events in California and China Dickson, whose roommates are Mom and Dad, has long leaked Apple product info on his website. This most recent get, however, might be his ...

Apple has invited Chinese journalists to a Sept. 11 event in Beijing to announce... well, no one really knows, but it could be a big deal One of the likelier reasons for the Beijing event -- set to kick off mere hours after the company is expected to unveil its new iPhone in the U.S. -- would seem to be the introduction of a new, lower-end iPhone, ...

Ministry of Sound, a London night club and dance music brand, is suing music streaming service Spotify for copyright infringement Ministry of Sound claims that Spotify has refused to delete users' playlists that copy Ministry of Sound compilation albums, some of which contain "Ministry of Sound" in their titles. The brand is thus seeking damages an...

Yahoo China ceased providing news and community services Sunday, a move experts say signals that Yahoo is pulling the plug on its Chinese service People attempting to access Yahoo China are now automatically redirected to now.taobao.com, a public welfare site run by China-based Alibaba Group, which operated Yahoo China and used to own a large stake...

Apple has acquired AlgoTrim, a Swedish software developer that specializes in compression algorithms for mobile phones AlgoTrim developed algorithms for "lossless" compression, whereby processing instructions in operating systems and applications are not only sped up but require less flash memory....

BlackBerry is looking to spin off its BlackBerry Messenger service into a separate business to compete with other instant messaging apps The company announced in May that it would make BBM, once available only on BlackBerry devices, available to devices running on iOS and Android....

Nokia sent a letter to India's commerce ministry threatening to leave the country because of Indian taxes The letter said that the "political risk" in India was increasing due to tax claims from the government. India's passage in March of a retroactive income tax violates a bilateral treaty between India and Nokia's native Finland, Nokia says....

China's Communist Party used Twitter-like social media platform Sina Weibo to report the details of the trial of Bo Xilai, a former Party star who is in the process of being taken down on corruption charges The court overseeing the case, located in the eastern city of Jinan, set up a Weibo account to peddle information about the proceedings. Such t...

The U.S. government is investigating bribes that Microsoft is alleged to have given to officials in Russia and Pakistan in return for contracts, marking the expansion of an ongoing probe The Russia investigation apparently centers on software resellers funneling kickbacks to execs at a state-owned company in order to win a deal. In Pakistan, meanwh...

Brazil has proposed new laws that would force e-businesses selling to Brazil-based consumers to store personal data about said customers on local servers Google and Facebook have raised objections to the plan, saying that such requirements would, in the words of Facebook Brazil, "entail huge costs and inefficiencies in online business in the countr...

Alan Rusbridger, the editor for The Guardian, wrote a column Monday detailing how British law enforcement had destroyed hard drives at the newspaper's offices in London The destruction was purportedly to prevent additional leaks about the National Security Agency....

The partner of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist with The Guardian who has published a slew of articles detailing National Security Agency surveillance programs, was detained for nearly nine hours Sunday at London's Heathrow Airport Greenwald's partner, David Miranda, was en route from Berlin to his home in Rio de Janeiro when he was stopped by offic...

China's Ministry of Public Security and a cabinet-level research center are teaming up to probe IBM, Oracle and EMC over security issues The upcoming investigation could be more than a simple tit-for-tat in the ongoing cybersaga between the U.S. and China. The probe follows Edward Snowden's allegations that the National Security Agency hacked into ...

A recent tweet from Al-Qaeda asking for ideas on the "development of jihadist media" set off a deluge of responses mocking the extremist group Terrorism expert J.M. Berger, who has more than 13,000 followers, tweeted about Al-Qaeda's call for ideas along with the Islamic hashtag the group wanted to use. After that, the trolls took over....

A British man was unable to access Shakespeare's classic Hamlet at a public library because the library's WiFi network detected "violent content." The snafu was caused by a new Web filter that weeds out smut and violence, the British Library said, adding that it is "tweaking" the service. Hamlet, violence and all, is now accessible....

Norway's government will not allow Apple to take aerial photos of Oslo, the Norwegian capital, in the company's quest to create 3D images for its mapping app Satellite images of Norway are fair game, but taking aerial photos requires a license, and Apple's request has been denied....