The 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 Krista Hughes WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Business associations from the United States, Japan and Europe told Chinese officials on Monday they still have “strong concerns” about bank information technology rules and urged Beijing to formally suspend them. The joint letter, from 31 trade associations, increases pressure over rules pushing China's state-owned banks to buy technology from domestic vendors, which the U.S. trade office has said could breach China's international trade commitments
Read moreChina will punish web portal and social media firm Sina Corp after it was identified as operating the most complained about major website in the country, the Internet regulator said on Friday, the latest blow in an ongoing online crackdown. Representatives from Sina, which also operates China's most popular microblog Weibo Corp, discussed “the issues of breaking the law and the recent large quantity of Internet user complaints” with officials from the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) and its Beijing branch, the regulator said in a statement on its website. Since President Xi Jinping came to power in early 2013, he has overseen a broad campaign to bring China's Internet under the government's control
Read more(Reuters) – Penn State University’s president says a re-evaluation of the school’s fraternity system may be needed after a fraternity was suspended for posting online photographs of nude women, some of them apparently unconscious. In a statement on Penn State’s website, President Eric Barron said he was “shocked and angered by the apparent disregard for not only the law, but also human dignity.” Barron called the images showing the women naked or partially clothed “highly inappropriate and disturbing.” The Kappa Delta Rho fraternity was suspended as of March 3, accused of hosting private Facebook pages and posting pictures that members took of mostly undressed women who were passed out or sleeping. “This evidence, which is still being gathered by the State College Police, is appalling, offensive and inconsistent with our community’s values
Read moreBy Joseph Menn SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – President Barack Obama is expected to announce an executive order directing the government and companies to share more information about cybersecurity threats in response to attacks like that on Sony Entertainment. As in other policy areas where Obama has been unable to get legislation through the now Republican-controlled Congress, the White House is turning to more limited administrative actions to advance its agenda as much as it can. The announcement could be tonight or tomorrow, when the U.S.
Read more(Reuters) – Two U.S. senators on Tuesday revived legislation that seeks to allocate more airwaves to public Wi-Fi by requiring regulators to quickly test how shared radio frequencies could coexist alongside those used for communications among smart cars. The bill by Senators Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, and Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, would direct the Federal Communications Commission to study how more spectrum can be freed up for public use without interfering with connected vehicles, which are incumbent users.
Read moreBy Warren Strobel WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Calling the destructive cyberattack on Sony Pictures “a game changer,” a top White House official on Tuesday announced a new intelligence unit to coordinate analysis of cyberthreats, modeled on similar U.S. government efforts to fight terrorism. Lisa Monaco, President Barack Obama's homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, said the new agency will rapidly pool and disseminate data on cyberbreaches, which she said are ballooning in size and sophistication, to U.S
Read moreThe U.S. military’s ability to defend its own computer networks is “not where it should be,” Ashton Carter, President Barack Obama’s nominee to lead the Pentagon, said on Wednesday. Carter said the U.S.
Read moreBy Saqib Iqbal Ahmed NEW YORK (Reuters) – Twitter Inc shares are poised for a big move after it reports quarterly results on Thursday, according to options-market data, with user growth at the social media service possibly holding the key to whether shares rise or fall, analysts said. On Wednesday, the cost of a Twitter straddle, in which an investor buys an at-the-money put option and a similar call option, suggests a move of about 12 percent in either direction by Friday.
Read moreBy Maria Tsvetkova MOSCOW (Reuters) – One of Vladimir Putin's main opponents may have broken a taboo by publishing what he says is the pseudonym used by one the Russian president's daughters to stay out of the spotlight. Putin has made his and his family's private life little less than a state secret, keeping his rarely-photographed daughters Yekaterina, 28, and Maria, 29, out of sight and managing his divorce with the minimum fuss.
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