Top 10 Stories

Dark Reading - The Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) rolls out a retail ISAC following the National Retail Federation's (NRF) announcement last month of an intel-sharing platform planned for June. First, there was no official intelligence-sharing mechanism for the retail industry, and now there are two. The Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) announced the launch yesterday of the Retail Cyber Intelligence Sharing Center (R-CISC), an information sharing and analysis center (ISAC) with the backing of...

Beta news - Like many tech journalists (and non-journalists for that matter), I gave up on Internet Explorer quite some time ago, opting for Firefox initially. I also dabbled with Opera and Waterfox, amongst others, but for a number of years it was Firefox that delivered web pages to me. Sadly, I noticed that things started to slow down. New versions were more bloated and sluggish, and in the search for better performance, I ended...

VOA news - U.S. communications regulators are proposing widespread changes in the way the Internet is operated in the country. The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 Thursday to offer a plan that could allow such major Internet-service providers as AT&T and Comcast to make deals with companies like Google and Facebook to provide them with faster paths for their content to consumers.  

  Bloomberg - The $43 billion online-advertising network built by companies like Yahoo! and Google is jeopardising consumer privacy and giving hackers an easy path to infect computers, a U.S. congressional investigation found. Now, armed with a better understanding of the opaque mechanics of Web ads, Senator Carl Levin and other lawmakers are asking whether stricter rules are needed to protect consumers, setting up a battle with companies that shaped the Internet.  

Government Technology - A group that called itself Team Digi7al gained access to multiple confidential computer systems, including a Department of Homeland Security database. A computer hacker once told a congressional committee that he could take out the entire Internet in a half-hour. That was back when the World Wide Web was in its infancy and Google didn't even exist yet. No one has succeeded in that endeavor, but hackers have become so sophisticated that...

Washington Post - Silicon Valley once cheered the election of President Obama, comforted by his stance that Internet service providers should be banned from charging Web sites such as Facebook or Netflix for faster access to American homes. And for much of the past six years, tech firms felt shielded from the possibility that the Internet would ever have separate slow and fast lanes for traffic. But on Thursday, the government is poised to vote...

The Dickinson Press -  The Target data breach is now the subject of a massive court case, and Wednesday, nearly 100 lawyers from across the country crowded into a St. Paul courtroom as the legal jockeying began. More than 140 lawsuits — filed against Target by consumers, shareholders and banks — have been consolidated before U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson. With so many players, the judge made it clear that resolving the mess will be...

The Register - After repeated delays by prosecutors, alleged LulzSec “leader” Matthew Flannery has finally had a trial date set, for July this year, in a case expected to last just two days. Working under the name Aush0k, Flannery was originally pitched to the media as a “significant risk” and a “leader” of LulzSec, a claim many doubted at the time, especially when it emerged that his victim was the Website of a small and...

Ars Technica - Man used LogMeIn to access point-of-sale terminals of other shops, feds say. A former Subway sandwich shop franchisee pled guilty to taking part in a scheme to hack point-of-sale terminals for at least 13 stores and obtaining gift cards worth $40,000.  Shahin Abdollahi, who also ran a business that sold and maintained point-of-sale terminals, sold the computerized checkout registers to the Subway shops that were illegally accessed, according to federal prosecutors in...

Wired - Anonymously spilling personal gossip and corporate secrets online is all fun and games–until someone gets a subpoena. Startups like Secret and Whisper have defined a buzzy new category of social media, attracting millions of users and tens of millions of dollars in venture capital investments with the promise of allowing anyone to communicate with anonymity. But when it comes to actually revealing corporate and government secrets–a “whistleblowing” function that the two services either...