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Today’s topics include Microsoft’s victory in its appeal of a federal court order demanding access to email stored overseas, the European Union’s filing of additional antitrust charges against Google, Samsung’s plan to unveil a next-generation Galaxy Note 7 Phablet and Kaspersky Lab’s discovery of more than 150 vulnerabilities in industrial control systems.
Yesterday, Microsoft scored a big legal victory in a closely watched federal appeals court case with data privacy implications for individuals and businesses around the world.
On July 14, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York reversed an earlier District Court ruling that ordered Microsoft to turn over Outlook.com emails sought by the U.S. Department of Justice that were stored on in a data center located in Ireland.
In 2013, the DOJ had served the Redmond, Wash.-based technology giant with a warrant for those emails. Microsoft appealed the court ruling arguing that under federal law, warrants issued in the U.S. cannot be enforced in other countries. The Second Circuit sided with Microsoft, concluding that “Congress did not intend the SCA’s warrant provisions to apply extraterritorially.”
The European Union has filed another round of antitrust charges against Google as the EU continues its efforts to try to rein in what it sees as unfair business tactics used by the search giant. The latest charges were announced on July 14 in a statement by Margrethe Vestager, EU antitrust chief.
The problem with the company’s behavior, said Vestager, is that Google, as the dominant search company in the world, allegedly uses its size and muscle to unfairly harm competitors while benefiting its own businesses.
In Europe, Google has a 90 percent market share in general Internet search services and about an 80 percent share in the placement of search advertising on third-party Websites.
Since Samsung rolled out its Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge flagship smartphones in March, the company has been noticeably mum about a successor to its larger Galaxy Note 7 phablet, which has been out since August 2015.
That’s now changed as Samsung has finally revealed plans to showcase the Galaxy Note 7 in what’s billed as the “Samsung Galaxy Unpacked” event in New York on Aug. 2.
The company announced the event on its Website and in an email to eWEEK. No specifications or other details about the next-generation Note 7 were included in the announcement.
For the fourth year in a row, researchers have reported more than 150 vulnerabilities in industrial control systems, according to an analysis conducted by Kaspersky Lab. In 2015, researchers found and reported 189 vulnerabilities, a slight increase from the 181 vulnerabilities found in 2014.
More than two-dozen of the flaws had publicly available exploits that would make it trivial to compromise the vulnerable systems. Many issues—such as hard-coded passwords—do not even require an exploit, Kaspersky stated in its report. The problems are “only the tip of the iceberg,” Gleb Gritsai, security expert at Kaspersky Lab, told eWEEK.