The White House announced  that it will employ a new strategy to target trade secret theft. The announcement comes on the heels of computer security firm Mandiant’s report that a Chinese Military unit hacked at least 115 American companies and put their confidential and proprietary information at risk. Recently, both Apple, Inc. and Facebook have publicly admitted to being victims of cyber attacks.

  Coverage of the issue, including a link to to the full report, can be found at Brooklyn Law School’s Trade Secrets Institute’s website – TSI.brooklaw.edu.

  The Trade Secrets Institute website is managed by TSI Fellow and resident Blipician Robert Levine.

Facebook, SeatGeek, and Backspaces presented Wednesday at NYC Mobile Apps Meetup at Huge in DUMBO. Huge is a large, open, concrete-y space with a big kitchen and comfy lounge area. It has a built-in incubator, Huge Labs, which is currently incubating Togather, Honey, and Orion.

Chris Ackermann of Facebook gave a detailed and technical talk, aimed primarily at the developer crowed, about using Facebook to drive app installs, developing apps to jive with Facebook, and the Facebook app center. Ackerman also touched on sponsored stories and “promoting” posts to boost app downloads. The presentation provided a welcome and interesting look inside of Facebook.

Eric Waller, CTO of SeatGeek, discussed the development of the company and its mobile app, which recently launched in December. SeatGeek is an aggregator for sports, concert, and theater tickets. So far the app is only available for iPhone, but Eric knows an Android guy and just got himself an iPad, so look for SeatGeek on more platforms later this year.

Adrian Sanders, co-founder of Backspaces, gave the final presentation. Backspaces is a storytelling app that allows users to create a story using pictures, text, and map locations (no video). it was my personal favorite of the night. The team is three co-founders working out of a single-bedroom apartment. Sanders explained that the original idea was to develop an app that would chronicle a walk around the city, showing the route the user walked. But when one of the first stories shared was about making a salad, the team adapted.

During January's CopyNight NYC meeting, members came together at Vig Bar to honor the memory of Aaron Swartz, the young technologist behind RSS, Reddit and Demand Progress. Ealier this month, Swartz took his own life. The event discussed Swartz's prosecution and potential 35-year sentence he faced after hacking into the JSTOR databases via the MIT servers. Phil Weiss, a former BLIPician and current Associate at Fridman Law Group, led the discussion.

The night began with a detailed discussion of the actual charges brought against Swartz under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Afterwards, members discussed the merits and weaknesses of prosecutorial discretion and the overreaching nature of the CFAA. The event concluded with the discussion of the proposed "Aaron's Law" which would narrow the applicability of the CFAA.