Author: David Kravets

A hacker the US authorities have labeled as the leader of an overseas Internet hacking group—the Kosova Hacker's Security—pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to charges of providing material support to the US enemy. It was the first known prosecution of a hacker joining forces with a terror group in a bid to carry out terrorism, the government said.

The defendant, a Kosovo citizen named Ardit Ferizi, was arrested in Malaysia last year and was accused of stealing data on US military personnel by hacking US corporate computers and then providing that data to the Islamic State terror group.

"Ferizi admitted to stealing the personally identifiable information of over 1,000 U.S. servicemembers and federal employees, and providing it to ISIL with the understanding that they would incite terrorist attacks against those individuals," said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Carlin. "The case against Ferizi is the first of its kind, representing the nexus of the terror and cyber threats."

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has successfully convinced a federal judge to block the disclosure of where the bureau has attached surveillance cams on Seattle utility poles. The decision Monday stopping Seattle City Light from divulging the information was expected, as claims of national security tend to trump the public's right to know.

However, this privacy dispute highlights a powerful and clandestine tool the authorities are employing across the country to snoop on the public—sometimes with warrants, sometimes without. Just last month, for example, this powerful surveillance measure—which sometimes allows the authorities to control the camera's focus point remotely—helped crack a sex trafficking ring in suburban Chicago.

Meanwhile, in stopping the release of the Seattle surveillance cam location information—in a public records act case request brought by activist Phil Mocek—US District Judge Richard Jones agreed (PDF) with the FBI's contention that releasing the data would harm national security.

The Supreme Court on Monday made it easier for patent holders to win extra damages in infringement lawsuits. The justices upended a lower court's standard that made it difficult for prevailing patent holders to win so-called treble damages—which amount to actual monetary damages multiplied by three.

The unanimous opinion (PDF) by Chief Justice John Roberts said the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears all patent appeals, had set too rigid of a test under the Patent Act to determine whether a losing company's infringement was willful. Prevailing parties can get punitive damages if infringement is deemed willful.

The court noted that the law in question simply says that a judge "may increase the damages up to three times the amount found or assessed." The Supreme Court on Monday noted that, after nearly two centuries, the bar has been raised—making it more difficult to win treble damages. Those special damages have wrongly become "reserved for egregious cases of culpable behavior." The chief justice said that the "principal problem" with the test the courts have glommed onto is that "it requires a finding of objective recklessness in every case."

Who knew? Banking giant Citigroup has trademarked "THANKYOU" and is now suing technology giant AT&T for how it says thanks to its own loyal customers. This is "unlawful conduct" amounting to wanton trademark infringement, Citigroup claims in its federal lawsuit.

Here is a copy (PDF) of the trademark certificates and trademark applications connected to what Citigroup is calling its "THANKYOU Marks."

According to Citibank's lawsuit (PDF) lodged Friday in New York federal court:

There's a lady who's sure
All that glitters is gold
And she's buying a stairway to heaven

"Stairway to Heaven" intro.

Starting Tuesday, one of rock and roll's most iconic songs, "Stairway to Heaven," will be scrutinized by a federal jury tasked with deciding whether the 1971 Led Zeppelin song—which has generated some $500 million in revenue—infringes the 1968 instrumental song "Taurus" produced by the psychedelic band Spirit.

This isn't the first time Zep has been accused of infringement. In 2012, the band struck an out-of-court deal with singer-songwriter Jake Holmes regarding his 1967 song "Dazed and Confused." Zep's 1969 debut album has a track with the same name and similar lyrics.

Despite being filed in 2014, the "Stairway to Heaven" case is only now making it to trial because of a slew of pre-trial motions, including those by Led Zeppelin seeking to have it dismissed. The case is being brought by the trust of Randy Wolfe, aka Randy California, and it essentially declares that Zep's mind-numbing opening to "Stairway to Heaven"—an acoustic guitar arpeggiating chords in a descending pattern—is a complete ripoff of California's "Taurus" which he wrote for the band Spirit. Zeppelin toured with Spirit in 1968, and California's complaint alleges that Zep guitarist Jimmy Page had heard "Taurus" before the debut of "Stairway to Heaven, which appears on "Led Zeppelin IV." Billboard describes the album as "a cultural touchstone and one of the most popular releases in US history." "IV" has gone platinum 23 times.

A federal judge on Monday unsealed disturbing dashcam footage of a suburban Kansas City, Missouri police officer tasering a 17-year-old motorist who became brain damaged after what was billed as a routine traffic stop. That stop subsequently turned into an event of excessive force—resulting in a four-year prison sentence for Officer Timothy Runnels of the Independence Police Department.

The video shows Runnels tase and yank Bryce Masters out of the car and down on the street as Masters howls. The boy was filming the officer with his mobile phone, which the officer flings to the street. "Am I under arrest? Am I under arrest?" the teen is overheard saying before he is stunned and grabbed from the vehicle.

The officer drags the boy on the street like a sack of potatoes then drops him face first to the ground. During the brief 2014 incident, the boy, who was going to play Xbox with a friend, went into cardiac arrest and now suffers from brain damage. The traffic stop was based on a warrant from Kansas City, which turned out to be a mistake connected to the license plate on the vehicle the boy was driving. The officer claimed he also smelled marijuana and that the teen was being uncooperative.

A New York man who identifies himself as the "Red Light Robin Hood" pleaded not guilty Friday to a 17-count indictment accusing him of cutting the wires of more than a dozen red light cameras in Suffolk County. This modern-day digital do-gooder has no apologies and wants a jury trial.

Stephen Ruth, who remains free on bail, was arrested in April shortly after he told a CBS affiliate that he was the culprit and that he dismantled the cameras "in order to save lives." He said the county shortened the yellow light duration from 5 seconds to 3 seconds in a bid to make more money.

He's accused of 17 felonies and faces a maximum seven-year prison sentence if convicted on all the charges. He pleaded not guilty Friday in a local court and wants to go to trial for snipping the wires on as many as 16 red light cameras on intersections on Route 25 between Coram and Centereach.

A former senior finance manager for Oracle claims the software maker fired her for not inflating revenues in its cloud services division. In a whistleblower and wrongful termination lawsuit, Svetlana Blackburn also claims that Oracle ultimately inflated the numbers without her assistance.

"The data, she knew, would end up in SEC filings and be touted on earnings calls, used to paint a rosier picture than actually existed on the ground," Blackburn says in her nine-page lawsuit. (PDF)

The Silicon Valley software maker, having a market cap of roughly $165 billion, said it fired the woman for inadequate work.

Depending on one's life view, the character Qyburn in the HBO hit series Game of Thrones is evil, a genius, or an evil genius.

The former "maester" of the Citadel engaged in vivisecting people, and he holds the power to bring back the dead (or at least the moribund). Qyburn once famously brought back a poisoned and moribund Gregor Clegane, the character referred to as "The Mountain."  In short, he has mad, resurrection-like skills—and this fact didn't go unnoticed by a US federal appeals court on Thursday.

Qyburn's name, or at least a play off it, has officially entered the US law books. In a published concurring opinion by the nation's largest federal appeals court, two judges from the San Francsico-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the majority's opinion "comes very close to a qyburnian resurrection (PDF) of the Jiffy June standard."

A Texas pet-sitting business is seeking up to $1 million in damages from a couple who gave a one-star review on Yelp and criticized the company's treatment of their tiny blue tropical Betta fish "Gordy" while the family was away on vacation. The company, Prestigious Pets of Dallas, claims the review is a breach of a non-disparagement clause and defamation.

Paul Alan Levy, a Public Citizen lawyer who is defending the couple, summarized the company's revised suit (PDF) targeting the couple.

The new lawsuit, however, specifies one statement from the review in particular: that the company’s assigned pet-sitter had potentially caused serious harm to the couple’s fish by putting too much food in a fish-bowl while the couple were away on vacation for a few days. The complaint alleges that a charge of overfeeding a fish is libel per se because it amounts to the criminal offense of animal cruelty under Texas law (if giving too much food to a pet fish were really a crime, I expect there would be thousands of Texas second-graders facing jail time every year!)

Levy's defense, filed Thursday in a local Dallas court, is that the family's review was truthful and protected by the First Amendment.