Egypt blocks 5 top VPN providers

Egypt this week introduced unexpected blocks against the websites of 5 of the most well-known VPN services in the industry. It should come as no surprise that 4 out of the 5 of the blocked sites offer completely free (albeit with restrictions) VPN services and are likely to be some of the most utilised across …

Google isn’t a Generic Trademark, Ninth Circuit Court Rules

The Ninth Circuit has for the second time ruled [PDF] that “Google” isn’t a generic trademark. The US district court had already reached this conclusion in 2014. The court’s opinion delves deeply into definitions,  says plainly that “verb use does not automatically constitute generic use.” This eviscerates the plaintiff’s case because, as Judge Watford says …

Over 75% of health organizations live below cybersecurity poverty line

George DeCesare, Kaiser Permanente Chief Technology Risk Officer, speaking at the Privacy & Security Forum in San Francisco on Thursday May 11, said “Seventy-five percent of the healthcare industry is below the cybersecurity poverty line,” DeCesare said at the HIMSS and Healthcare IT News Privacy & Security Forum. It’s going to become more important than …

Net Neutrality fight turning nasty

Although net neutrality it’s a topic that doesn’t stir much interest in your average consumer, those who have opinions hold them very strongly and is it turning nasty? Verizon vice president in charge of what is called “public policy” (i.e., lobbying), Craig Sillman says a lot of these public policy” advocates, like Free Press and Fight for …

Phishing attacks using IDNs are hard to block

Chrome and Firefox developers in an attempt to find a balance between showing internationalized domain names and protecting users from phishing are sounding an alarm that phishing attacks that using internationalised domains are hard to block. The latest version of Google Chrome, released earlier this week, restricts how domain names that use non-Latin characters are …

97 Tech Companies including Apple, Microsoft and Facebook fight travel ban in court

Silicon Valley companies are stepping a fight with the Trump administration. On Sunday night, technology giants Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter, Uber and many others filed a legal brief opposing the administration’s contentious entry ban. The move represents a rare coordinated action across a broad swath of the industry — about a hundred companies …

ICANN Spent $32 million on IANA transition

ICANN Spent a whooping $32 million on the IANA transition process for the period March 2014 to December 2016 , this is according to a presentation released last week. $15 Million went to “External Legal Advice”, $8.3 million went to third-party services, that included lobbying, puclic relattions and translation. In the period from July 2014 up …