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Security News |
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Enterprise Security Today
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Tech News by Enterprise Security Today (http://www.enterprise-security-today.com).
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Facebook Hit with $15 Billion Privacy Class Action Suit
Facebook is now a publicly traded company -- and it's also under legal fire. Beyond Yahoo's patent litigation against the social media giant, Facebook is the subject of a class action suit over privacy concerns.
Facebook users on Friday filed an amended consolidated class action complaint in federal court in San Jose, Calif. The privacy suit involves alleged Facebook Internet tracking violations and seeks a minimum of $15 billion in damages.
"This is not just a damages action, but a groundbreaking digital-privacy rights case that could have wide and significant legal and business implications," said David Straite, a Stewarts Law partner. Stewarts Law, a London firm that set up U.S. offices in April, is representing the class action.
Tapping the Wiretap Act
The lawsuit argues federal statutory and California state causes of action related to the revelation in September 2011 that Facebook was improperly tracking the Internet use of its members even after they logged out of their accounts. The class action consolidates 21 related cases filed in more than a dozen states in 2011 and early 2012.
The plaintiffs' argument is based on the federal Wiretap Act, which provides statutory damages per user of $100 per day per violation, up to a maximum per user of $10,000. Even if Facebook's alleged actions constitute a single violation of the Wiretap Act per class member, that implies more than $15 billion in damages across the class. The complaint also asserts claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Stored Communications Act, various California statutes and California common law.
The amended suit comes on the day Facebook went public. Facebook hit its financial targets, raising $16 billion in its IPO. The stock climbed $4 a share to about $42 a share, a 10 percent boost, in the first few minutes of trading on Wall Street Friday morning....
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Cisco Tackles BYOD Challenge with 'Smart Solutions'
Cisco on Wednesday offered up findings from its "bring your own device" study and used the results as a jumping off point to announce new mobility solutions. But can Cisco carve out a niche in the nascent BYOD services space?
The Cisco IBSG Horizons Study surveyed 600 U.S. IT and business leaders to discover the benefits and complexities of allowing workers to use their own mobile devices on corporate networks. A whopping 95 percent of respondents say their organization allows employee-owned devices on the network.
The study also revealed that the average number of connected devices per knowledge worker is expected to reach 3.3 by 2014, up from an average of 2.8 in 2012. All in all, managers are balancing security and support concerns with the very real potential to reap significant cost and productivity benefits from the BYOD trend.
BYOD Meets Virtual Desktops
As Cisco sees it, BYOD is here to stay and managers are seeing the need for a more holistic approach -- an approach that is scalable and addresses mobility, security, virtualization and network policy management -- in order to keep management costs in line and realize savings.
According to Cisco IBSG, Cisco employees pay an average of $600 out-of-pocket for devices that will give them more control over their work experience. The benefits of BYOD vary based on an employee's role and work requirements. Cisco IBSG estimates that the annual benefits from BYOD range from $300 to $1,300 per employee.
While the BYOD trend gains momentum, desktop virtualization is on the rise. Sixty-eight percent of respondents agreed that a majority of knowledge worker roles are suitable for desktop virtualization and 50 percent noted that their organization is in the process of implementing a desktop virtualization strategy.
Cisco's 'Smart Solutions'
Cisco's answer to the opportunity and challenge is the Cisco Unified Workspace, which allows everything...
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LiveTime Reduces Government IT Resource Costs
Newport Beach, CA, May 15, 2012 -- The U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC), and the Department of Defense (DoD) have successfully deployed LiveTime's Service Manager to provide streamlined ITSM services that save time, and reduce costs of Government IT resources.
With a $14B budget and 142,000 employees, the DoC used disparate IT systems to manage all of its business processes, from Request Fulfillment through to Problem, Change and Release Management. The DoC wanted to standardize on a single centralized service management product and identified the need for a scalable cloud-based solution based on ITIL 3 best practices with seamless visibility between processes and integrated across all business units.
A very high level of security was also a minimal requirement for a majority of DoC implementations, so LiveTime's private cloud solution was selected for DoC's own data centers. The deployment provides DoC management with a single consolidated view of all processes and business effectiveness with unparalleled ease of use.
The DoD has also significantly reduced its overall IT budget after replacing more than six separate Remedy installations with LiveTime Service Manager in a matter of weeks. Vital to the deployment's success was the transmission of data from other proprietary Asset Management systems to a centralized CMDB of internal assets and services for managing military support operations around the globe.
The DoD leveraged LiveTime's extensive web services API to feed the integrated CMDB inside LiveTime Service Manager. The improved transparency allows the DoD to handle a significantly greater volume of requests, incidents and change than ever before, to provide a higher standard of IT Service Management.
LiveTime 7, which is expected to debut in Q2 2012, continues to drive open standards and increase user productivity by offering unrivaled ease of use for an ITIL 3 certified...
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