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(credit: Scott Beale)

A US District Judge in San Francisco dismissed a lawsuit against Twitter that claimed the social networking platform had provided “material support” to terrorists from ISIS. An American woman whose husband was working as a contractor in Jordan filed the suit after her husband and several others were shot and killed by a terrorist who allegedly was inspired by extremist propaganda disseminated on Twitter.

The lawsuit, Fields v. Twitter, claimed that Twitter violated the Anti-Terrorism Act by providing Twitter accounts to the terrorist group. The plaintiffs did not allege that any specific tweets instigated the terrorist to kill the US contractors, nor did they allege that ISIS recruited or trained the terrorist over Twitter. The plaintiffs did, however, say that the terrorist in question had been inspired by an execution publicized by ISIS, which crowd-sourced the method of execution on Twitter. The plaintiffs also accused Twitter of failing to “detect and prevent” violent, terroristic tweets on its platform.

Twitter argued that is protected from liability as a publisher of content by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Microsoft has inadvertently demonstrated the intrinsic security problem of including a universal backdoor in its software after it accidentally leaked its so-called "golden key"—which allows users to unlock any device that's supposedly protected by Secure Boot, such as phones and tablets.

The key basically allows anyone to bypass the provisions Microsoft has put in place ostensibly to prevent malicious versions of Windows from being installed, on any device running Windows 8.1 and upwards with Secure Boot enabled.

And while this means that enterprising users will be able to install any operating system—Linux, for instance—on their Windows tablet, it also allows bad actors with physical access to a machine to install bootkits and rootkits at deep levels. Worse, according to the security researchers who found the keys, this is a decision Microsoft may be unable to reverse.

Seagate has unveiled the world's largest SSD: a 60-terabyte monster. Pricing isn't available, but the company says the drive will provide "the lowest cost per gigabyte for flash" memory today.

The 60TB SSD was unveiled at the Flash Memory Summit in California—the same location that Samsung chose to reveal its 15.36TB SSD last year, which at the time was the world's largest hard drive.

The two drives aren't directly comparable, though, as the Samsung unit is a standard-size 2.5-inch SSD and the new Seagate drive uses the 3.5-inch hard drive form factor. Despite that, Seagate still claims that its drive has "twice the density" of Samsung's. I don't think the maths quite work out, considering a 3.5-inch drive has a far greater volume than a 2.5-inch drive, but Seagate is probably referring to the density of the memory chips themselves. Moore's law is still alive and kicking for NAND, apparently.

(credit: Library of Congress)

The Federal Trade Commission has sued online retailer 1-800 Contacts, saying the company illegally restrained competitors from buying search advertisements. It's a dramatic move that could mold the shape of online trademark law for years to come.

In the administrative complaint (PDF) filed Monday, FTC lawyers say that 1-800 Contacts reached deals with at least 14 competing contact lens sellers, in which they agreed to limit their advertising on search engines like Google and Bing. In the FTC's view, those agreements constituted unfair competition, because they limited truthful advertising and restrained price competition.

The 14 competitors aren't named in the FTC's lawsuit, but some of them are likely to be companies that Utah-based 1-800 Contacts sued in court. In 2008, 1-800 Contacts filed a lawsuit (PDF) LensFast.com, saying their keyword advertising violated trademark law; in 2010, ContactLensKing.com got sued (PDF) on similar grounds.