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Hot Off the Wire – Texan allegedly disables cars over Internet; Yahoo buys sports fantasy firm Citizen Sports; Viacom-YouTube secrets to be exposed in lawsuit

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A roundup of the latest high-tech news from The Associated Press:

• Texan accused of disabling 100 cars over Internet

DALLAS — A man fired from a Texas auto dealership used an Internet service to remotely disable ignitions and set off car horns of more than 100 vehicles sold at his old workplace, police said Wednesday.

Austin police arrested Omar Ramos-Lopez, 20, on Wednesday, charging him with felony breach of computer security.

Ramos-Lopez used a former colleague's password to deactivate starters and set off car horns, police said. Several car owners said they had to call tow trucks and were left stranded at work or home.

"He caused these customers, now victims, to miss work," Austin police spokeswoman Veneza Aguinaga said. "They didn't get paid. They had to get tow trucks. They didn't know what was going on with their vehicles."

The Texas Auto Center dealership in Austin installs GPS devices that can prevent cars from starting. The system is used to repossess cars when buyers are overdue on payments, said Jeremy Norton, a controller at the dealership where Ramos-Lopez worked. Car horns can be activated when repo agents go to collect vehicles and believe the owners are hiding them.

• Yahoo buying fantasy sports company Citizen Sports

SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo is buying a fantasy sports company co-founded by an MIT graduate whose card-counting skills helped him win millions of dollars in blackjack and spawned a film and a best-selling book.

Citizen Sports offers fantasy leagues for sports such as football, soccer and basketball that fans can manage online at social-networking sites and through mobile applications for Apple's iPhone and smart phones running Google Inc.'s Android operating software.

With Citizen Sports, Yahoo is looking to boost its social-networking offerings, an area the company has struggled in even though, according to comScore, it commands the largest U.S. Internet audience in news, sports and finance.

Yahoo did not release financial details of its purchase, which it expects to close by June.

Millions of people participate in fantasy leagues. Participants rack up points based on the performance of the sports players they pick to be on their make-believe teams.

Jeff Ma, whose antics in Las Vegas and Atlantic City inspired "Bringing Down the House" and, more recently, the movie "21," started Citizen Sports with business partner Mike Kerns in 2004.

Yahoo said Wednesday that Citizen Sports will be integrated with content from its sports news and information site, Yahoo Sports, and vice versa.

Citizen Sports, which is privately held, now has 39 million unique visitors in the U.S. each month.

• Viacom-YouTube secrets to be exposed in lawsuit

SAN FRANCISCO — A legal tussle pitting media conglomerate Viacom Inc. against online video leader YouTube is about to get dirtier as a federal judge prepares to release documents that will expose their secrets and other confidential information.

The information expected to be unsealed Thursday will include some of the evidence that Viacom and Google-owned YouTube have collected to prove their respective points, but have kept under wraps so far during their 3-year-old dispute over copyright law.

The sensitive material is emerging now because Viacom and YouTube are citing some of the documents as they try to persuade U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton in New York to decide the case without a trial. Stanton isn't likely to decide on a so-called summary judgment for several more months.

Each side will likely be pointing to things that the other might find embarrassing.

The evidence is expected to provide insights into the early strategies of YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen and how they responded to copyright complaints that quickly accumulated a few months after the Web site's 2005 debut. The documents also could reveal whether other media suitors tried to buy YouTube before Google acquired the site for $1.76 billion in 2006.

Viacom, the owner of Paramount Pictures and cable TV channels that include Comedy Central, sued YouTube in 2007 seeking more than $1 billion in damages.

Viacom alleges that YouTube built its early success by rampantly infringing on copyrights. YouTube maintains it follows the copyright laws governing the Internet.

One of the biggest disputes in the case is how YouTube monitored its site for copyright violations before Google bought it.
 

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