IDG News Service

AT&T is backing Microsoft in its challenge of a US search warrant for private email communications located in a facility in Dublin, Ireland.

The telecommunications company filed in a New York court asking permission to submit an amicus curiae brief in support of Microsoft. Described as a "friend of the court," an amicus curiae is not directly involved in a litigation but believes it may be impacted or has views on the matter before the court.

Along with Verizon, all three companies have expressed concern that the US government's demands for data held abroad could alienate overseas customers from placing their data with US providers, particularly after the disclosures of surveillance abroad by the US National Security Agency.

Personal information, including Social Security numbers and call records, was accessed for an unknown number of AT&T Mobility customers by people outside of the company, AT&T has confirmed.

The breach took place between April 9-21, but was only disclosed recently in a filing with California regulators.

While AT&T wouldn't say how many customers were affected, state law requires such disclosures if an incident affects at least 500 customers in California.

"Employees of one of our service providers violated our strict privacy and security guidelines by accessing your account without authorization," the company said in a letter to affected customers. "AT&T believes the employees accessed your account as part of an effort to request codes from AT&T than are used to unlock AT&T mobile phones in the secondary mobile phone market."

All bits running over the Internet are not equal and should not be treated that way by broadband providers, despite network neutrality advocates' calls for traffic neutral regulations, Cisco Systems said.

A huge number of Internet-connected devices with a wide variety of traffic requirements, including billions of machine-to-machine connections, will come online over the next four years, Cisco predicted in its Visual Networking Index Global Forecast and Service Adoption.

Some Web-based applications, including rapidly growing video services, home health monitoring and public safety apps, will demand priority access to the network, while others, like most Web browsing and email, may live with slight delays, said Jeff Campbell, Cisco's vice president for government and community relations.

“We really have a multiplicity of applications and services that are now running across the network, some of which require dramatically different treatment than others," he said.

Some network neutrality advocates have objected to US Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler's proposed rules that would allow broadband providers to engage in "commercially reasonable" traffic management. It's important that the FCC ensure an open Internet, but it's also important that "we have a robust network," Campbell said. The FCC should allow broadband providers to maintain quality of service "to ensure that some applications will run properly and effectively on the Internet," Campbell said. "That means using the intelligence of the network to ensure that those bits receive the quality of service they need."

China is attacking secret surveillance programs of the US government with harsh words from its state-controlled press, accusing Cisco of helping the US in cyber espionage.

China Youth Daily also published an editorial alleging that US networking gear supplier Cisco had aided the spying activities. While the company has helped build China's Internet infrastructure, Cisco also deliberately installed backdoor surveillance tools into its equipment, the editorial said.

The company "has played a disgraceful role, becoming a pillar to help spread the US' power over the Internet," it added. The editorial demanded that all Cisco equipment be checked for security threats and that China create an organization to inspect networking gear, especially imported products.

Following up on a jury verdict, Apple has asked a court in California to order Samsung Electronics to stop using features that were found to infringe three of its patents.

The company has also asked the court to review damages awarded by the jury or to order a retrial.

The injunction sought by Apple in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose division would cover features such as 'slide-to-unlock' on phone home screens for unlocking a device, auto-correct for prompts on the spelling of words, and the so-called 'quick links' feature for scanning text to identify certain types of structures such as phone numbers, dates and email addresses.

Apple said it was not asking the court to bar entire product lines from the marketplace, but for an injunction that proposes to stop Samsung from further use of the specific features that the jury found to infringe Apple's three patents, and those features not more than "colorably different."

Apple has proposed a one-month "sunset period" for delay in enforcement. During this period, Samsung can "swap-in the non-infringing alternatives that it claims are already available and easy to implement," according to the redacted public version of the filing. Having represented that it can design around Apple's patents completely and quickly, Samsung cannot complain that Apple's narrowly-tailored injunction will deprive the public of a single Samsung product, it added.

Chalk up another victory for corporate surveillance: Five years after advocates came up with an easy way to let you browse the Web with just a little privacy, the Do Not Track system is in tatters and that pair of boots you looked at online in April is still stalking you from website to website.

With a single browser setting, these advocates thought, users would be able to communicate a preference for their privacy. It would be easier than downloading add-on software or creating a blacklist of specific companies to block. Do Not Track, or DNT, would be the Web's version of the telemarketer Do Not Call list.

Today DNT hangs by a thread, neutered by a failure among stakeholders to reach agreement. Yes, if you turn it on in your browser, it sends a signal in the form of an HTTP header to Web companies' servers. But it probably won't change what data they collect. That's because most websites either don't honor DNT -- it's currently a voluntary system -- or they interpret it in different ways. Another problem -- perhaps the biggest -- is that Web companies, ad agencies and the other stakeholders have never reached agreement on what "do not track" really means.

Web users who are hopeful about DNT got a small boost in California. State Attorney General Kamala Harris issued guidelines to help companies comply with a new state law requiring them to disclose whether they honor users' DNT requests. But the law doesn't force them to use the system.

A public utility in the US was compromised after attackers took advantage of a weak password security system, according to a US Department of Homeland Security team that studies cyberattacks against critical infrastructure.

The utility's control system was accessible via Internet-facing hosts and used a simple password system, wrote the Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) in a report on incidents covering the first quarter of 2014. The utility, which was not identified, was vulnerable to a brute-force attack, where hackers try different combinations of passwords until the right one is found.

An investigation showed the utility was attacked before.

"It was determined that the systems were likely exposed to numerous security threats, and previous intrusion activity was also identified," ICS-CERT wrote in the report. ICS-CERT warned that it is easy for hackers using search engines such as Google and SHODAN to find Internet-connected control systems "that were not intended to be Internet facing."

The report described a second cyberattack but did not specify what type of organization was affected. In that instance, an Internet-connected control system that operated a mechanical device was accessed by an attacker using a cellular modem. The access has been gained using a SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) protocol, the team wrote. "The device was directly Internet accessible and was not protected by a firewall or authentication access controls," ICS-CERT wrote.

If you're worried about an Internet "fast lane" squeezing out all the futuristic connected devices you're hoping to use around your home, fear not.

The vaunted Internet of Things, which already includes a variety of industrial sensors and machines and a growing number of consumer devices, is likely to make itself more at home in the coming years. Some such devices, like the connected refrigerator, are still more curiosity than useful tool. But others are playing important roles in health care and home security, taking advantage of always-on broadband connections to keep people and machines elsewhere informed in real time.

The question of IoT and net neutrality is likely to revolve mostly around connected devices that use home broadband connections. However, people involved in the IoT device and services business said they don't see a need for priority traffic handling now, and it hasn't been a hot topic in the industry. Even if consumers' broadband speeds were affected by a paid-priority scheme, it probably wouldn't get bad enough to hurt IoT, said Tom Lee, co-founder of IoT cloud provider Ayla Networks.

"If it's good enough to satisfy most Netflix consumers, it almost automatically satisfies the needs of the IoT things," Lee said. But if providers of connected-health services are allowed to pay for priority, they probably will, Steve Hilton of IoT consultancy Machnation said. And though there may be objections to it, prioritizing those narrow streams of traffic probably wouldn't affect anything else consumers are trying to do, he said.

Critics have derided Microsoft's $7.5 billion acquisition of Nokia's Devices and Services business, but the deal may be closing at the perfect moment -- during a slowdown in smartphone innovation.

The acquisition closed after an almost eight-month long approval process. The new subsidiary, dubbed the Microsoft Mobile and the Devices division and headed by former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, has a tremendous amount of work to do to become a serious contender either at the high end or low end of the smartphone market.

However, this may be an opportune time for Microsoft and its thousands of new employees. Innovation has slowed down in the high-end segment of the mobile phone market. New products such as the Galaxy S5 from Samsung Electronics, HTC's One M8 and the Xperia Z2 from Sony are only small upgrades compared to their predecessors.

"This market isn't moving forward quite as quickly as it has in the past. While it is taking a breather, Microsoft and Nokia can up the game and try to close the gap," said Neil Mawston, executive director at Strategy Analytics. Microsoft has recognized this chance to make up some lost ground.

"The pace of innovation we are delivering is, I'll argue, accelerating, while some of our leading competitors appear to be slowing down. If you're behind you have to go faster than the guy in front of you to catch up and that's exactly what we are trying to do," said Greg Sullivan, director of Windows Phone at Microsoft.

The company is making progress on both hardware and software. Microsoft has to make sure it gets access to upcoming processors especially from Qualcomm -- including the Snapdragon 805, and then the 64-bit ARM-based Snapdragon 808 and 810 -- quicker than it has in the past.

The transition from copper-based telephone systems to IP networks in the US could become swept up in political fallout as the Federal Communications Commission figures out how to regulate such networks in ways that will appease the courts.

A switch to IP-based networks has been progressing for years in the US, but a January ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit calls into doubt the FCC's authority in several areas, such as prohibiting voice-over-IP providers from degrading service or blocking calls from competing carriers, and requiring them to offer service to all customers who want it. And the technological changes are rekindling the debate over whether the FCC as an entity should continue to exist at all, or at the least whether it needs a major transition itself.

The IP transition, combined with the network neutrality ruling, puts several features of the traditional telephone network, long taken for granted by customers, in doubt, said Harold Feld, senior vice president at digital rights group Public Knowledge. After the net neutrality ruling, "the FCC can no longer require VoIP providers to complete phone calls [and] can no longer prohibit VoIP carriers from blocking calls," Feld wrote in a January blog post.

The copper-to-IP "revolution necessitates an equally fundamental transformation of the legacy regulatory framework," AT&T's lawyers wrote in a later FCC filing. "Today's rules were designed for a voice-centric world in which [incumbent carrier] ILECs owned 99 percent of access lines, and there is no rational basis for sustaining them in a world where ILECs have rapidly declining minority market shares and voice is becoming just one applications among many riding over converged, data-centric networks."