January 2015

Günther Oettinger, the European Union’s digital economy commissioner, called on Google to offer more concessions in a long-standing antitrust investigation that the company is facing in the European Union.

Oettinger said that while he respected what Google’s founders had achieved, the company must honor European rules over how it operates across the 28-member bloc. “Google has to bring more offers to us,” Oettinger said, when questioned about Europe’s continuing antitrust investigation. “Google must be ready for a convincing compromise.” Oettinger said that the European Commission wanted to find a resolution to the lengthy Google antitrust case by mid-2015. His colleague, Margrethe Vestager, Europe’s new competition commissioner, is leading the case.

The Justice Department revealed the existence of yet another database of American telephone records, adding new details to the disclosures in recent years about mass government surveillance.

This database was maintained by the Drug Enforcement Administration and contained the records of calls made between phone numbers in the United States and overseas. The phone records were retained even if there was no evidence the callers were involved in criminal activity. The government stored the numbers, the time and date of the call and the length. But, the database did not include names or other personal identifying information or the content of the conversation. It contained records of calls between Americans and people in countries that had connections to international drug trafficking and related criminal activities. Depending on how broadly the government interpreted that definition, it could have collected information on calls to many countries around the world.

The trail that led American officials to blame North Korea for the destructive cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in November winds back to 2010, when the National Security Agency scrambled to break into the computer systems of a country considered one of the most impenetrable targets on earth. Spurred by growing concern about North Korea’s maturing capabilities, the American spy agency drilled into the Chinese networks that connect North Korea to the outside world, picked through connections in Malaysia favored by North Korean hackers and penetrated directly into the North with the help of South Korea and other American allies, according to former United States and foreign officials, computer experts later briefed on the operations and a newly disclosed NSA document.

A classified security agency program expanded into an ambitious effort, officials said, to place malware that could track the internal workings of many of the computers and networks used by the North’s hackers, a force that South Korea’s military recently said numbers roughly 6,000 people. Most are commanded by the country’s main intelligence service, called the Reconnaissance General Bureau, and Bureau 121, its secretive hacking unit, with a large outpost in China. The evidence gathered by the “early warning radar” of software painstakingly hidden to monitor North Korea’s activities proved critical in persuading President Obama to accuse the government of Kim Jong-un of ordering the Sony attack, according to the officials and experts, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the classified NSA operation.

Turn said it would stop using tracking cookies that are impossible to delete. "We have heard the concerns and are actively re-evaluating this method," said Max Ochoa, Turn's chief privacy officer.

He said the company plans aims to suspend the practice by "early February." Turn's zombie cookie was exploiting a hidden undeletable number that Verizon uses to track its customers on their smartphones on tablets. Turn used the Verizon number to respawn tracking cookies that users had deleted. The company said it will now re-evaluate its practices.