Ontario’s privacy commissioner, Anne Cavoukian, blasted Websense Inc.’s country manager for Canada, Fiazz Walji, for criticizing her report on an incident involving a lost USB stick with personal information on thousands of patients from Durham Region. Walji said the report was too focused on encryption; Cavoukian wondered aloud if Walji had even read the report.
SAP AG CEO Leo Apotheker announced his resignation, amid rumours the company would return to its old co-CEO structure and seek a technologist, rather than a salesman, to take the helm.
Users on an Ars Technica forum blamed an auto-update to Windows 7 for hanging PCs, though Microsoft Corp. said there was no evidence the software was the cause.
A class action suit was filed in California against Facebook Inc., alleging privacy setting changes made the previous November and December offered users less, not more, protection.
A draft of the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) being negotiated by the U.S., Europe and Canada, was leaked to reporters, detailing provisions that would make Internets service providers responsible for the content their subscribers transmit.
U.S. and European regulators approved the marriage of Microsoft’s and Yahoo Inc.’s search businesses, allowing the companies’ developers to begin adapting Microsoft’s Bing search technology to power Yahoo searches, in an effort to take a slice out of Google Inc.’s dominant position in the search advertising market.
Rumblings began about disbanding the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum, once blasted as “a dog’s breakfast” by Google’s technical program manager Sam Johnson. CCIF leader Reuven Cohen, also CEO of Toronto-based Enomaly Inc., admitted the Forum hadn’t made progress defining standards and ontology for the cloud computing industry, and that the forum “doesn’t seem to have a purpose anymore.”
And three Italian Google executives were convicted of violating privacy law over a posting on Google Video that showed the bullying of an autistic teenager, but were acquitted on charges of defamation.