N.Y. appeals court temporarily suspends shutdown of daily fantasy sports

A New York State appeals court judge on Friday temporarily suspended an order that would have required daily fantasy sports companies FanDuel and DraftKings to stop operating in the state. The short-term stay, issued in an emergency appeal filed by the companies on Friday, allows the companies to do business in New York until at least Jan.

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More than a million OPM hack victims still not notified

By Dustin Volz WASHINGTON (Reuters) – More than a million victims of a massive hack of U.S. government computer files have still not been officially notified that their data was compromised and that they are eligible for free credit-monitoring protection, officials said on Friday.

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Social media companies step up battle against militant propaganda

By Joseph Menn SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook, Google and Twitter are stepping up efforts to combat online propaganda and recruiting by Islamic militants, but the Internet companies are doing it quietly to avoid the perception that they are helping the authorities police the Web. On Friday, Facebook Inc said it took down a profile that the company believed belonged to San Bernardino shooter Tashfeen Malik, who with her husband is accused of killing 14 people in a mass shooting that the FBI is investigating as an “act of terrorism.” Just a day earlier, the French prime minister and European Commission officials met separately with Facebook, Google, Twitter Inc and other companies to demand faster action on what the commission called “online terrorism incitement and hate speech.” The Internet companies described their policies as straightforward: they ban certain types of content in accordance with their own terms of service, and require court orders to remove or block anything beyond that.

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EU member states agree higher fines for firms for privacy violations

By Julia Fioretti BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Businesses operating in the European Union could be fined up to 4 percent of their annual global turnover for breaching data protection rules under a proposal agreed on Wednesday. The EU is negotiating a data protection law to replace a patchwork of national laws dating back to 1995, aiming to set clearer limits on how companies can use EU citizens’ private data and beef up regulators’ enforcement powers. Under the current system, not all national regulators have the power to levy fines, and when they do the amounts are often paltry compared with the revenues of some of the companies affected, particularly big U.S.

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Exclusive: Silicon Valley IPO market boom winding down

Last year, many tech IPOs enjoyed soaring valuations in their Wall Street debut, raining cash on the companies and their investors and boosting concerns about another Silicon Valley bubble. Now, the party is winding down, according to data analyzed by Reuters: Five of the 12 U.S.-based tech companies that went public this year, or 42 percent, priced their shares at a valuation below or nearly the same as their private market value, compared to 24 percent of the 29 that went public in 2014. “People are no longer out of their minds with valuations and expectations,” said Adam Marcus, managing partner at OpenView Venture Partners in Boston

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UAE’s Etihad Airways signs $700 million IT deal with IBM

Abu Dhabi's Etihad Airways has signed a 10-year $700 million deal with IBM for a range of information technology services and infrastructure, the companies said on Tuesday. The state-owned airline with equity stakes in Alitalia [CAITLA.UL] and Air Berlin among others chose IBM to move its IT infrastructure to cloud-based platforms to serve its clients better, a statement said.

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Facebook to launch satellite to expand Internet access in Africa

(Reuters) – Facebook Inc said it would launch a satellite in partnership with France's Eutelsat Communications to bring Internet access to large parts of sub-Saharan Africa. The satellite, part of Facebook's Internet.org platform to expand internet access mainly via mobile phones, is under construction and will be launched in 2016, the companies said on Monday.

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