An AT&T iPhone user successfully sued the telecommunications firm for throttling his unlimited data plan.

A small claims court in California awarded Matt Spaccarelli $850 for throttling, which slows down data sent to or from a smartphone for the duration of a billing cycle to preserve network capacity.

AT&T has 17 million data plans that might be subject to throttling, according to this AP article about Spaccarelli's victory.

In other news, Android-powered smartphone owners face a new security flaw.

A cyber security researcher found that users who open links sent from malicious text messages might unwittingly allow their phones to be remotely commandeered. If that happens, a hacker could record calls or view texts, emails and location data.

Though the researcher only tested Android phones, he said iPhones are at risk, too.

The Los Angeles Times has more information here.

Are the cases of Butch Davis and Bonnie Yankaskas similar? Were the two UNC-Chapel Hill employees, each quite well-regarded in their respective fields, treated equally?

Should they have been?

News & Observer Executive Editor John Drescher raises these points in a recent column comparing the way UNC-Chapel Hill Holden Thorp dealt with two high profile cases.

One: Butch Davis and the UNC football situation. The other: Bonnie Yankaskas, the epidemiologist harshly sanctioned by the university because a cancer research database she oversaw was infiltrated by a hacker.

As Drescher points out, there were plenty of similarities between the two cases, and yet, the results were quite different.

Read on.

The UNC Chapel Hill med school mammography study victimized by a computer hacker did not need to get the consent of patients whose data was submitted to it due to a federal regulation related to studies of large populations.

Judging from the emails and phone calls I've received over the last week since writing this story, that explanation isn't sitting well with many of the more than 100,000 women whose social security numbers and other personal information was exposed when the hacking took place.

Some folks have asked about the federal regulation. Well, here you go: