Court orders spammers to pay $3.7 million
A federal court has ordered members of an alleged international spam ring to give up $3.7 million that they made while sending out illegal e-mail messages pitching bogus weight-loss products and human growth hormone pills. Read more...

China will still require Green Dam Web filter program

US agencies require net neutrality with broadband grants

Facebook simplifies privacy settings, calls them too complex

Lawsuit seeks refund for Clear subscribers

TSA asked to ensure safety of customer data after Clear closing

We're serious about cybersecurity this time, says U.S. official

China iPhone deal faces trademark conflict

The Pirate Bay: Users can delete accounts ahead of sale

Microsoft: We're not gouging Europe on Windows 7 pricing

More Compliance Stories

Internet cafe company offers $7.8 million for The Pirate Bay
The owners of The Pirate Bay have agreed to sell the site to a Swedish Internet cafe operator for 60 million Swedish kronor (US$7.8 million), the company said on Tuesday.

Pirate Party finds France fertile territory
Sweden's Pirate Party won 7.13 percent of the vote in elections earlier this month. Its campaign for the respect of privacy, the reform of copyright law and the abolition of the patent system earned it a seat in the European Parliament, and it may yet gain another seat there, if planned changes to the number of seats attributed to each country win approval.

Pirate Party finds France fertile territory
Sweden's Pirate Party won 7.13 percent of the vote in elections earlier this month. Its campaign for the respect of privacy, the reform of copyright law and the abolition of the patent system earned it a seat in the European Parliament, and it may yet gain another seat there, if planned changes to the number of seats attributed to each country win approval.

Five Steps to HITECH Preparedness
CSOs in healthcare organizations know that the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, signed into law in February 2009, includes new privacy requirements that experts have called "the biggest change to the health care privacy and security environment since the original HIPAA privacy rule." These include:

PCI Debate Ignores Planned Improvement Cycle
Recent Congressional hearings [.pdf link] tackled the subject of how well PCI DSS is helping the industry. Both before and since those hearings, myriad industry pundits have spent copious amounts of their time bashing PCI and complaining that is does not work and therefore should be abandoned. And let me tell you firsthand, PCI does not work as of June 2009, and that is precisely the point.

The fight over open source 'leeches'

Cybersecurity, Microsoft's Bing, Google's Wave
This busy week for IT news was capped on Friday when President Barack Obama outlined U.S. cybersecurity plans, which have been anticipated for a while now. We also had been awaiting Microsoft's public release of its new search engine, which it said it has named "Bing." And Google made waves with a new "mega" application as well.

Information Systems Audit: The Basics
In the early days of computers, many people were suspicious of their ability to replace human beings performing complex tasks. The first business software applications were mostly in the domain of finance and accounting. The numbers from paper statements and receipts were entered into the computer, which would perform calculations and create reports. Computers were audited using sampling techniques. An auditor would collect the original paper statements and receipts, manually perform the calculations used to create each report, and compare the results of the manual calculation with those generated by the computer. In the early days, accountants would often find programming errors, and these were computer audit findings.

EU slaps Intel, IT job fare
The European Commission's hefty fine on Intel for violating antitrust regulations was inarguably the top IT news of the week. Nothing else came close.

Update 2: EU fines Intel $1.44B in antitrust case
The European Commission Wednesday found Intel guilty of antitrust violations in the market for PC microprocessors and fined it $1.44 billion.

Editors' Picks

Don't trash your tired old desktop PC -- pump it up with a few inexpensive upgrades. Microsoft's Windows 7 pricing plans may derail efforts to make users move away from XP and forget Vista. Also see Preston Gralla: Don't believe the $120 Windows 7 pricetag. Trademark owners say cybersquatting on the Web has gone too far -- and they're pushing back. The goal is to have all the original Lunar Orbiter image files processed by February, producing a moon atlas with a resolution higher than anything previously seen.

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Get the latest news, reviews and more about Microsoft's newest desktop operating system.

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