(Reuters) – Facebook Inc introduced free video calling in its Messenger phone app on Monday as the company seeks to transform its mobile messaging service into a full-featured platform with the same reach as its 1.4 billion user social network.
Read moreBy Andrew Chung NEW YORK (Reuters) – Online music streaming service Grooveshark could potentially have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to major record labels after a U.S. judge ruled ahead of its trial starting on Monday that Grooveshark’s copyright violations on nearly 5,000 songs were “willful” and made “in bad faith.” U.S. District Judge Thomas Griesa, who will preside over the trial in federal court in Manhattan, said in a court order on Thursday that because of Grooveshark’s actions he will tell jurors they can choose to award the statutory maximum of $150,000 in damages per song
Read morePaytm, an Indian online payments platform backed by China’s Alibaba, is pushing deeper into India’s booming e-commerce industry with a zero-commission mobile app marketplace targeted at small and medium-sized firms, the mainstay of the country’s economy.
Read moreThe U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to pass a bill that extends liability protection for companies that share information about cyber attacks, if they give the data to the U.S.
Read moreBy Nita Bhalla NEW DELHI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A major Indian jewellery chain has withdrawn an advert featuring Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan with a dark-skinned boy holding a parasol over her after it was slammed by activists and on social media for being racist and promoting child slavery. Kalyan Jewellers, which employs about 4,000 people across India, said the advertisement featured in a national newspaper on April 17 was intended to present “royalty, timeless beauty and elegance”
Read moreBy Patricia Zengerle WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill on Wednesday that would make it easier for private companies to share information about cyber security threats with each other and the government without fear of lawsuits
Read moreBlackBerry Ltd said on Tuesday it is launching a new certificate service that will help bring the security level it offers on smartphones to a slew of devices from cars to smart meters. Certicom, a subsidiary of BlackBerry and an industry pioneer in elliptic curve cryptography, announced a new offering that it contends will secure millions of devices, expected to be part of the growing Internet of Things (IoT) sphere. The company said it has already won a contract in Britain to issue certificates for the smart meter initiative there with more than 104 million smart meters and home energy management devices
Read moreBy Patricia Zengerle WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to consider, and pass, on Wednesday a long-awaited bill that would make it easier for companies to share information about cyber security threats with the government without fear of lawsuits.
Read moreIndonesian conglomerate Lippo Group has appointed Credit Suisse and Bank of America Merrill Lynch to lead its first round of funding, worth $200 million, for its e-commerce push.
Read moreBy Joseph Menn SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Hackers have managed to penetrate computer networks associated with the Israeli military in an espionage campaign that skillfully packages existing attack software with trick emails, according to security researchers at Blue Coat Systems Inc. The four-month-old effort, most likely by Arabic-speaking programmers, shows how the Middle East continues to be a hotbed for cyber espionage and how widely the ability to carry off such attacks has spread, the researchers said. Waylon Grange, a researcher with the Blue Coat [PRJCBB.UL] who discovered the campaign, said the vast majority of the hackers' software was cobbled together from widely available tools, such as the remote-access Trojan called Poison Ivy.
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