Mental Illness No Excuse to Illegally Download Files, Court Says
A Scottish court has rejected mitigating pleas of mental illness by a file-sharer convicted of copyright infringement, The Register reports. Although Anne Muir, 58, admitted to downloading 30,000 songs from a peer-to-peer network to boost her self-esteem, her defense attorney Lorenzo Alonzi argued his client was suffering from depression. “Learning this new technology and picking [...]
The shadowy hacker coalition Anonymous’ most recent DDoS attacks against 11 organizations across the world have caused more than 550 hours of downtime and 742 service interruptions since the web assaults began Sept. 17, PandaLabs reports. The latest attacks that began Oct. 6 on the Spanish Copyright Protection Society, the Spanish Culture Ministry and Promusicae websites [...]
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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) notified around 100 agencies and companies that significant levels of sensitive employee and customer data is being regularly leaked on peer-to-peer networks (P2P), such as BearShare and LimeWire. Along with the warnings, the FTC released new educational materials to make organizations more cognizant of the threat and best practices to [...]
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Peer-to-peer networks can be useful to increase the rate and volume of information exchange. However, this also has its drawbacks as two security researchers demonstrated at the ShmooCon conference over the weekend. Larry Pesce and Mick Douglas took a look at the information individuals send via P2P applications and found even the most sensitive information [...]
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R. Edolphus Towns, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, has introduced the Secure Federal File Sharing Act, which will ban peer-to-peer applications on federal systems. The move follows the recent leak of a document on an ethics investigation into members of Congress via a P2P application. The bill will require the Office [...]
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