Yahoo Wins Major Lawsuit

Yahoo has achieved a big victory against spammers, a legal victory that also includes a default judgment of $610 million.

In the lawsuit, filed in May 2008, Yahoo targeted a variety of individuals and companies, accusing them of trying to defraud people via a spam campaign that falsely informed email recipients that they had won prizes in a non-existent Yahoo-sponsored lottery.

Yahoo alleged that the defendants’ goal was to trick email recipients into providing them with personal and financial information that could be used to commit fraud by raiding victims’ bank accounts, using their credit cards and applying for loans on their behalf.

Judge Laura Taylor Swain from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that Yahoo’s allegations are “uncontroverted” and said the company is entitled to $27 million in statutory damages for trademark infringement and $583 million in statutory damages for violation of the CAN-SPAM Act.

It’s not clear whether Yahoo will be able to collect the money. A default judgment is rendered when defendants in a case fail to plead or defend an action, as happened in this case, in which the defendants never responded to Yahoo’s complaint.

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Nokia Drops Luxury Brand Vertu

Nokia’s Vertu mobile phones sell for thousands but the firm is looking to unload this relatively low volume part of its business as it tries to focus on producing Windows Phones. According to the Financial Times (FT), Nokia has appointed Goldman Sachs to oversee the sale of its UK subsidiary.

Vertu’s market value is not known but the firm makes between 300 to 400 millionin annual sales and, according to the FT, private equity groups have expressed interest. The brand is fairly well known as a maker of expensive mobile phones and it might attract high-end ‘designer’ brands that want to break into the mobile phone market.

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Nokia’s Lumina 800 Receives An Update

Nokia has started rolling out a software update to its Lumia 800 smartphone starting today.

The company has kept the promise it gave last month to upgrade the Lumia 800 to fix power efficiency problems. There is more than one patch in the update, which will also bring new features on top of the power fix.

Nokia said, “Starting today and rolling out over the next few weeks we will be releasing software updates to deliver exciting new features and performance enhancements including charging improvements to the award winning Lumia 800.”

“With the fastest growing app store and the highest positive user feedback, the Windows Phone experience on the Lumia 800 is setting the pace in the mobile community. Additional updates will come in early 2012.”

We’ve updated our Lumia 800 today but the notification mentioned only fixes for email and voicemail issues. We haven’t experienced any power problems with our particular handset since we’ve had it.

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at&t Vows To Continue Quest

AT&T Inc plans to forge ahead with its deal to acquire Deutsche Telekom’s U.S. wireless unit despite regulatory opposition, and it has the financial resources to close the acquisition quickly, a top executive said on Wednesday.

“We continue to move forward with our efforts to complete the T-Mobile transaction…and we will continue to pursue the sale,” AT&T Chief Financial Officer John Stephens said at the UBS media conference in New York.

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Android Hits 10 Billion

Google said it exceeded 10 billion total app downloads from the Android Market over this past weekend at a growth rate of 1 billion downloads per month.

By comparison, Apple’s App Store passed the 15 billion download mark in July, with more than 200 million iOS devices now being used globally.

Google estimates there are more than 200 million Android smartphones and tablets.

“We can’t wait to see where this accelerating growth takes us in 2012,” said Eric Chu, direct of the Android Developer Ecosystem in a blog post Tuesday.

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Yahoo Messenger Flaw Exposed

An unpatched Yahoo Messenger vulnerability that allows hackers to change people’s status messages and possibly perform other unauthorized functons can be exploited to spam malicious links to a large number of users.

The flaw was discovered in the wild by security researchers from antivirus vendor BitDefender while investigating a customer’s report about unusual Yahoo Messenger behavior.

The flaw appears to be located in the application’s file transfer API (application programming interface) and allows attackers to send malformed requests that result in the execution of commands without any interaction from victims.

“An attacker can write a script in less than 50 lines of code to malform the message sent via the YIM protocol to the attacker,” said Bogdan Botezatu, an e-threats analysis & communication specialist at BitDefender.

“Status changing appears to be only one of the things the attacker can abuse. We’re currently investigating what other things they may achieve,” he added.

Victims are unlikely to realize that their status messages have changed and if they use version 11.5 of Yahoo Messenger, which supports tabbed conversations, they might not even spot the rogue requests, Botezatu said.

This vulnerability can be leveraged by attackers to earn money through affiliate marketing schemes by driving traffic to certain websites or to spam malicious links that point to drive-by download pages.

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‘iPhone’ Most Searched Term On Internet

Apple’s iPhone edged past major news events, celebrities and pop stars as the most searched term on the Internet in 2011, according to Yahoo!

The digital media company said the smartphone proved more popular than reality television celebrity Kim Kardashian, pop star Katy Perry and singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, who placed in the top five.

American Casey Anthony, the woman acquitted of the murder of her young daughter after a highly publicized trial, was No. 2.

“This is the first time since 2002 that we have had a gadget at No.1, which is an iPhone.” Vera Chan, a Web trend analyst at Yahoo!, said in a conference call announcing the results of the review now in its 10th year.

“Even though the product has been around for four years it just became such a major news story,” she added.

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Does Yahoo Have a Buyer?

Blackstone Group and Bain Capital are putting together a bid for all of Yahoo Inc with Asian partners in a deal that could value the Internet company at about $25 billion, a source familiar with the discussions said on Wednesday.

The potential bid by the group, which would include China’s Alibaba Group and Japan’s Softbank Corp, has not yet been finalized, the source and two other people familiar with the matter said.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, whose primary interest is in buying back a 40 percent stake owned by Yahoo, is keeping its options open and said it has not decided whether to participate in a bid for all of Yahoo.

“Alibaba Group has not made a decision to be part of a whole company bid for Yahoo,” Alibaba Group spokesman, John Spelich, said in an emailed statement on Wednesday.

Yahoo’s shares, which closed at $15.71 on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, gained 6.4 percent to $16.72 in after-hours trading, valuing the company at more than $20 billion.

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RIM’s Playbook Gets Jailbroken

Three hackers say they have taken advantage of a vulnerability in Research In Motion’s PlayBook tablet to gain root access to the device, a claim that could damage the BlackBerry maker’s stellar reputation for security.

Root access means a user has permission to change any file or program on a device and can control hardware functions.

In a response to questions concerning the issue, RIM said it is investigating the claim, and if a “jailbreak” is confirmed will release a patch to plug the hole.

The three hackers – who identify themselves as xpvqs, neuralic and Chris Wade – plan to release their data within a week as a tool called DingleBerry.

Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems are frequently attacked by users who want to run programs that have not been authorized by the manufacturers, but breaches of RIM’s software are more rare.

The PlayBook runs on a different operating system than RIM’s current BlackBerry smartphones. However, the QNX system will be incorporated into its smartphones starting next year.

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at&t Partners With China Telecom

AT&T Inc and China Telecom have agreed to broaden the range of their partnership in China and the United States and will look into supporting each other in other regions.

AT&T said the agreement would expand its services for business customers in China and that the companies would consider jointly developing services, including video conferencing and managed hosting.

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