Ars Technica

In a ruling, the European Union’s General Court rejected Intel’s appeal of a €1.06 billion ($1.44 billion) penalty for antitrust violations. Instead, the EU General Court upheld the record-breaking penalty against the US computer chip giant, which had been issued in 2009 by the EU Commission.

Intel had been seeking annulment of the large penalty for what the EU Commission previously ruled to have been the company's antitrust infringement actions. But the General Court determined that Intel, the predominant player in the computer microchip market -- holding a market share of roughly 70 percent or more -- had acted anticompetitively in attempting to squeeze out AMD, its main rival, between 2002 and 2007.

Specifically, the Court explained that Intel paid bribes to a large German retail chain called Media-Saturn, so that it only stocked computers with Intel chips, rather than those using AMD’s microprocessors. This, the Court argued, constituted clear antitrust abuse. “The General Court finds that those payments were capable of making access to the mark more difficult for AMD,” and that Intel strategically chose this approach to achieve such an effect.

With Verizon struggling to bring FiOS to every corner of New York City as promised, the company has been arguing with landlords about gaining access to buildings where tenants might want to buy Verizon's fiber-based Internet, phone, and TV service.

Verizon's fiber now passes buildings in "90 percent of the Bronx, 89 percent of Brooklyn, 94 percent of Manhattan, 90 percent of Queens and virtually the entirety of Staten Island," the company says. That's short of the 100 percent Verizon was supposed to achieve by June 30, 2014 according to its franchise agreement. And the percentage of buildings where residents can actually buy FiOS is lower.

Verizon now blames Sandy but claimed it was "ahead of schedule" after the storm.

"The various percentages refer to the amount of fiber in the streets and avenues, our obligation. The numbers have nothing to do with building penetration," Verizon spokesperson John Bonomo said.

Verizon has been filing petitions with the State Public Service Commission to gain access to several hundred buildings in order to conduct pre-installation surveys and then wire up the buildings. In some cases these petitions have allowed Verizon access, but other attempts were plagued by miscommunications and mistakes.

When Netflix agreed to pay Comcast for a direct connection to the ISP's network, video performance improved immediately. Verizon subscribers aren't so lucky.

Although Netflix and Verizon confirmed on April 28 that they had struck a paid peering deal, performance continued to drop in May and could remain poor for months while the companies upgrade infrastructure.

"Verizon FiOS is down two slots and now ranks behind DSL providers Frontier and Windstream," Netflix wrote after releasing its monthly speed index.

In the US, Netflix performance on Verizon FiOS dropped from 1.99Mbps in April to 1.90Mbps in May, and performance on Verizon DSL dropped from 1.08Mbps to 1.05Mbps. This is the average performance of all Netflix streams on each ISP's network. The drops are small, but they show that the paid peering deal didn't make any immediate impact.

The federal judge that had temporarily ordered the National Security Agency to preserve all evidence in a longstanding surveillance case, including data gathered specifically under the government’s Section 702 program, has now reversed that order.

“In order to protect national security programs, I cannot issue a ruling at this time. The Court rescinds the June 5 order,” said Judge Jeffrey White said.

In April 2008, Verizon signed a franchise agreement in which it promised the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) that it would build its "state-of-the-art fiber-optic network throughout the entire City by mid-year 2014."

The June 30, 2014 deadline is about to pass without Verizon meeting the requirement. The company is blaming Hurricane Sandy from October 2012 -- even though Verizon was still claiming to be "ahead of schedule" in April 2013.

Cable companies that stand to benefit the most from an end to net neutrality have been bankrolling so-called “consumer advocacy” groups that aim to kill it.

Such non-profits like Broadband for America and the American Consumer Institute (ACI), both of which claim to be “independent consumer advocacy groups” and have been fighting against classifying Internet service providers (ISPs) as a utility (a move that would make it easier to enact net neutrality rules in the future), have been shown to be heavily funded by the cable industry.

According to a disclosure obtained by Vice from the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA), an ISP-supported trade group, most of Broadband for America’s recent $3.5 million budget comes from a $2 million donation from NCTA. Vice further uncovered that, based on its tax return filings, Broadband for America has retained the DCI Group, an "infamous lobbying firm," that Vice argues specializes in building fake consumer interest groups that actually serve corporate interests.

What's more, Vice found that the American Consumer Institute, which similarly opposes reclassification of ISPs, has been bankrolled by an ISP lobby group called Mywireless.com that has been a consistent financial contributor to ACI since 2010. "This kind of funding has been very common since the beginning of the net neutrality debate," Tim Karr, director of strategy at the advocacy organization Free Press, said.

In addition, according to Todd O’Boyle, media and democracy program director at Common Cause, such industry-funded groups can be quite effective if not called out for their conflicts of interest. "The problem that we see is that the media will quote these people without identifying those conflicts," O'Boyle said. "They have been very good at infiltrating grassroots causes without properly disclosing sources of funding."

A researcher has uncovered another severe vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptographic library. It allows attackers to decrypt and modify Web, e-mail, and virtual private network traffic protected by the transport layer security (TLS) protocol, the Internet's most widely used method for encrypting traffic traveling between end users and servers.

Library updates are available on the front page of the OpenSSL website. People who administer servers running OpenSSL should update as soon as possible. The underlying vulnerability, formally cataloged as CVE-2014-0224, resides in the ChangeCipherSpec processing, according to an overview by Lepidum, the software developer that discovered the flaw and reported it privately to OpenSSL. It makes it possible for attackers who can monitor a connection between an end user and server to force weak cryptographic keys on client devices. Attackers can then exploit those keys to decrypt the traffic or even modify the data before sending it to its intended destination.

"OpenSSL's ChangeCipherSpec processing has a serious vulnerability," the Lepidum advisory stated. "This vulnerability allows malicious intermediate nodes to intercept encrypted data and decrypt them while forcing SSL clients to use weak keys which are exposed to the malicious nodes. There are risks of tampering with the exploits on contents and authentication information over encrypted communication via web browsing, e-mail and VPN, when the software uses the affected version of OpenSSL."

Europeans may browse the Internet without fear of infringing copyrights, as the European Union Court of Justice ruled in a decision that ends a four-year legal battle threatening the open Internet.

In the case, the court slapped down the Newspaper Licensing Agency's (NLA) claim that the technological underpinnings of Web surfing amounted to infringement. The court ruled that "on-screen copies and the cached copies made by an end-user in the course of viewing a website satisfy the conditions" of infringement exemptions spelled out in the EU Copyright Directive.

The NLA's opponent in the case was the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA). The PR group hailed the decision. The NLA is the body that distributes reproductions of newspaper content. Its main argument was the cost that the licensing public relations companies pay for the reproductions should factor in to what is temporarily copied on a reader's computer.

How sensitive are local cops when it comes to disclosing information about stingrays, the fake cell phone towers used to track targeted phones? Apparently, they're sensitive enough to involve the United States Marshals Service with an ongoing case in Florida.

After being informed of a straightforward public records request to learn more about the Sarasota Police Department's use of stingrays, the US Marshals suddenly moved the stack of paper records hundreds of miles away. It's a move that will frustrate ongoing efforts by the American Civil Liberties Union (ALCU) to access the documents in question.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's long quest to make key rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) public is nearing its end. EFF lawyer Mark Rumold faced off with Department of Justice attorney Steven Bressler in the same courtroom they had sparred in 14 months ago.

They were overseen by the same judge, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers.

Things weren't the same, though. The lawsuit has changed dramatically, due in part to the Snowden leaks about government surveillance, which began to appear in newspapers in June 2013. And the scope of the case has narrowed. That's partly because the EFF has focused its demands on what it believes are the most important documents: several still-secret FISC opinions, as well as one memo from the White House's Office of Legal Counsel, comprising some 52 pages.

It's also narrowed because the Department of Justice has released some of the documents that were asked for. The most striking revelation from those documents was that some FISC judges sharply criticized the National Security Agency's record of compliance with rules the court had set out for handling its giant database of phone calls and other data.