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• Dotcom decries 'largest data massacre' after company deletes files
  

  WELLINGTON (Reuters) - The founder of the outlawed Megaupload file-sharing site denounced on Thursday "the largest data massacre in the history of the internet", after a European firm wiped out private photos, videos and documents stored on servers used by the site. Dutch firm LeaseWeb said it had in February erased 630 servers rented by Megaupload, about a year after U.S. authorities closed the site and charged its operators with facilitating online piracy, racketeering and money laundering. ...

  
  
  
  
• Imagen Awards nominate 'Chicago Fire,' 'Scandal,' 'Grey's Anatomy' for Latino Portrayals
  By Steve Pond LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - The television series "Chicago Fire," "Dallas" and "Scandal" and the feature films "Bless Me, Ultima" and "Tio Papi" are among the nominees for the 28th annual Imagen Awards, which honor portrayals of Latinos and Latino culture in TV and film. Among the actors nominated by the Imagen Foundation are Benjamin Bratt, Sonia Braga, Nestor Carbonell, Oscar Nunez, Jordana Brewster, Gina Torres for their work in television, and Eva Mendes, E.J. Bonilla and David Castro for feature film. ...
  
  
• Cyber threats and leaks spur increased security focus
  

  By Andrea Shalal-Esa PARIS (Reuters) - Increased cyber espionage by China and recent leaks by a contractor working at the National Security Agency have put a sharp focus on cyber security for aerospace and defense companies showing off their wares at this year's Paris Airshow. "We, like others, are constantly being bombarded by people who are trying to get into our systems," said Mark DeYoung, chief executive of U.S. rocket engine and ammunition maker Alliant Techsystems (ATK). ...

  
  
  
  
• China executes official for child rapes after online uproar
  BEIJING (Reuters) - Authorities in central China executed a former Communist Party official for raping 11 underage girls, state media said on Wednesday, following an online uproar about the latest case of abuse of power. Li Xingong, who was the party's deputy head in Yongcheng city in Henan province, was found guilty of assaulting the girls during police interrogations starting from the second half of 2011, the official Xinhua news agency reported. Li appealed against the guilty verdict, but was rejected by the Supreme Court, Xinhua said. ...
  
  
• IMF says to extend reach with online economics training
  

  By Stephanie Simon (Reuters) - The International Monetary Fund will make its training sessions on financial policy and debt sustainability available online this year to government officials worldwide, allowing it to reach a bigger audience at lower cost, it said on Wednesday. IMF financial workshops are meant to help governments address economic dilemmas and are currently held in eight training centers worldwide, meaning officials must travel and remain onsite for weeks, said Sharmini Coorey, director of the IMF's Institute for Capacity Development. ...

  
  
  
  
• Netflix to bring video streaming service to The Netherlands
  

  (Reuters) - Netflix Inc will launch its TV and movie streaming service in The Netherlands later this year, expanding its reach further into Europe, the company said on Tuesday. Netflix boasts 29.2 million streaming subscribers in the United States and 7.1 million in international markets, delivering movies and television shows to Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia and parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. The company generates profits in the United States and Canada, but has lost money as it expanded into foreign markets. Netflix projects a profit of up to $149 million from its U. ...

  
  
  
  
• Julia Stiles' YouTube Series 'Blue' Coming to Hulu in TV-Length Episodes
  By Tony Maglio LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Wigs - the top channel for scripted drama on YouTube - in conjunction with Fox Broadcasting is bringing some of its most popular online series to Hulu in TV-length episodes, beginning with the popular Julia Stiles-starring "Blue," Wigs announced Tuesday. The first two seasons of "Blue" launched on the streaming service Monday. Earlier this year, Fox entered into a multi-year programming, marketing and distribution partnership with Wigs, after Fox decided to extend the reach to Hulu as part of its multi-platform strategy. ...
  
  
• Microsoft says it freed millions of computers from criminal botnet
  

  By Jim Finkle BOSTON (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp said that an assault it led earlier this month on one of the world's biggest cyber crime rings has freed at least 2 million PCs infected with a virus believed to have been used to steal more than $500 million from bank accounts worldwide. "We definitely have liberated at least 2 million PCs globally. That is a conservative estimate," Richard Domingues Boscovich, assistant general counsel with Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, said in an interview on Tuesday. ...

  
  
  
  
• From the ashes of Webvan, Amazon builds a grocery business
  

  By Alistair Barr SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The online grocery start-up Webvan may have been the single most expensive flame-out of the dot-com era, blowing through more than $800 million in venture capital and IPO proceeds in just over three years before shutting its doors in 2001. Twelve years later, though, Webvan is rising from the dead - in the form of an online grocery business called AmazonFresh. Four key Amazon. ...

  
  
  
  
• Naked gymnast faces charges over San Francisco transit stop antics
  By Laila Kearney SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A trained gymnast whose naked acrobatics and harassment of passengers at a San Francisco public transit station were captured on video and circulated widely on the Internet is facing criminal charges over his antics, authorities said on Tuesday. Yeiner Alberto Perez Garizabalo, 24, was caught on video doing handstands and contortions on turnstiles and front flips off a concrete newsstand - all in the nude - at a Bay Area Rapid Transit District station on May 10. ...
  
  
• Exclusive: Facebook reaches 1 million active advertisers
  

  By Jennifer Saba (Reuters) - Facebook Inc said on Tuesday it now has 1 million active advertisers globally who used the platform in the last 28 days, a milestone for the company that is seeking to revive its revenue growth. A vast majority of those advertisers are small business owners who have flocked to the world's No. 1 social network. Facebook executives are hoping to net even more small advertisers since 16 million local businesses, ranging from jewelry sellers to clothing stores, set up free pages on the network. ...

  
  
  
  
• GE moves into 'Industrial Internet' service with Amazon
  (Reuters) - General Electric Co joined forces with Amazon Web Services on Tuesday to make a wide range of data on products, including jet engines and gas turbines, available online so they can be analyzed. GE said Amazon Inc is the first online "cloud" service on which it will start creating an "Industrial Internet" to tap a market that analysts say could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the decade. ...
  
  
• Spendthrift elite signals equity slide, behavioral experts warn
  

  By Atul Prakash LONDON (Reuters) - Record prices at art auctions in recent weeks and oversubscribed holidays by private jet are among signals that a stock market slump is approaching, if followers of behavioral finance are to be believed. They insist social mood governs human action, including investment on stock markets, and their theories are gaining ground as tools for financial analysis. ...

  
  
  
  
• Yahoo says it had as many as 13,000 data requests
  

  (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc said U.S. law enforcement agencies made between 12,000 and 13,000 requests for data in the last six months, the latest in a series of disclosures by technology companies since intelligence leaks showed the extent of government data gathering efforts. The company said the requests were made between December 1, 2012 and May 31 this year. "The most common of these requests concerned fraud, homicides, kidnappings, and other criminal investigations," Yahoo said in a statement posted on its Tumblr page. (http://yahoo.tumblr.com/) Others were made under the U.S. ...

  
  
  
  
• Nearly 250 apply for Boston bomb charity money
  

  By Richard Valdmanis BOSTON (Reuters) - Nearly 250 people have applied to receive money from a $51 million charity fund set up for victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, the fund's deputy administrator said on Monday. Twin explosions at the finish line of the world-renowned race on April 15 killed three people and injured 264 others, many of whom lost legs in the blasts. "We now have 247 applications, and I expect a few more to come in over the next couple of days," said Camille Biros. Applications had to be post-marked June 15 or earlier to be considered. ...

  
  
  
  
• Apple got up to 5,000 data requests in six months
  

  (Reuters) - Apple received over the last six months between 4,000 and 5,000 requests for customer data from U.S. law enforcement authorities relating to criminal investigations and national security matters, the company said on Monday. Microsoft and Facebook Inc published similar data last week after reaching a deal about disclosures with U.S. national security authorities. "We have asked the U.S. government for permission to report how many requests we receive related to national security and how we handle them. We have been authorized to share some of that data," Apple said. ...

  
  
  
  
• Web companies begin releasing surveillance information after U.S. deal
  

  By Joseph Menn and Gerry Shih SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook and Microsoft have struck agreements with the U.S. government to release limited information about the number of surveillance requests they receive, a modest victory for the companies as they struggle with the fallout from disclosures about a secret government data-collection program. Facebook on Friday became the first to release aggregate numbers of requests, saying in a blog post that it received between 9,000 and 10,000 U.S. requests for user data in the second half of 2012, covering 18,000 to 19,000 of its users' accounts. ...

  
  
  
  
• Facebook got 9,000-10,000 government data requests in second half 2012
  

  SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests for user data from various U.S. government entities in 2012's second half, involving 18,000 to 19,000 of its users' accounts, the world's largest social network said in a Friday blogpost. The company said it released the information after reaching a deal about disclosures with U.S. national security authorities. (Reporting by San Francisco newsroom; Editing by Doina Chiacu)

  
  
  
  
• Rulings push jury selection in Trayvon Martin case into second week
  

  By Barbara Liston SANFORD, Florida (Reuters) - A judge's decision to sequester jurors for the murder trial of a Florida neighborhood watchman who fatally shot an unarmed black teenager in 2012 will slow an already painstaking selection process to find impartial minds amid saturation media coverage. Jury selection in the racially charged case of teenager Trayvon Martin is headed into a second week as prosecutors and defense lawyers on Friday worked to cope with the judge's sequester order and another decision to expand the pool of potential jurors. ...

  
  
  
  
• "Tweet", "dad dancing" and "geekery" make Oxford Dictionary
  LONDON (Reuters) - "Tweet", "dad dancing" and "geekery" are three of more than 1,200 new or revised words in the latest version of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) released on Friday. The dictionary said in a quarterly update on its website that it had expanded its entries for "follow" (verb), "follower" (noun), and "tweet" (noun and verb) to include social media terms that have exploded in the past six years. According to the dictionary, "tweet" is now a posting on the social networking service Twitter as well as its more traditional meaning: a brief high-pitched sound. ...
  
  
• CBS News says reporter's computer was hacked
  

  WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A CBS News investigative reporter's computer was remotely accessed by an unauthorized party several times late last year, the news organization said on Friday, citing an analysis by an outside cyber security firm. The review found that Washington-based reporter Sharyl Attkisson's computer "was accessed by an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions late in 2012," CBS News spokeswoman Sonya McNair said in a statement. ...

  
  
  
  
• Defying shutdown, Greece's ERT runs bootleg news online
  

  By Renee Maltezou ATHENS (Reuters) - Plastered on a studio inside the headquarters of shuttered Greek state broadcaster ERT, a sign proclaims: "The revolution will not be televised." For roughly 600 ERT journalists who found themselves out of a job when the government abruptly switched off the signal on Tuesday, the move was nothing short of a coup. Some defied management orders to leave the building and are broadcasting a bootleg news channel over the Internet in a sit-in atmosphere with conscious parallels to the protests in Istanbul's Taksim Square in neighboring Turkey. ...

  
  
  
  
• Iranian Gmail users targeted in pre-election hacking campaign: Google
  

  By Gerry Shih SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of Gmail accounts belonging to Iranian users have been targeted in an extensive hacking campaign in the weeks leading up to the country's closely watched presidential elections on Friday, Google Inc said on Wednesday. The U.S. Internet company, which described the attacks as broad "email-based phishing" attempts seeking to trick unsuspecting Gmail users into giving up their user names and passwords, said they originated in Iran and appeared to be "politically motivated in connection with the Iranian presidential election on Friday. ...

  
  
  
  
• UK lawmakers' report criticizes Google's tax affairs
  

  By Tom Bergin LONDON (Reuters) - British lawmakers described Google's tax affairs as "contrived" in a report released on Thursday and called on the UK tax authority to vigorously investigate whether the company was acting within the law. The parliamentary investigation was prompted by a Reuters report, which showed the company employed staff in sales roles in London, even though it had told lawmakers in November its British staff were not selling to UK clients - an activity that could boost its tax bill substantially. ...

  
  
  
  
• U.S. charges eight for cybercrime targeting banks, government
  By Jonathan Stempel (Reuters) - Federal prosecutors in New Jersey on Wednesday unveiled criminal charges against eight people accused of trying to steal at least $15 million from U.S. customers in an international cybercrime scheme targeting accounts at 15 financial institutions and government agencies. U.S. ...