Social networking site Facebook has finally decided to take legal actions against its many knockoff sites, and the popular German knockoff StudiVZ was the first to be sued. StudiVZ was started shortly after Facebook’s launch and it was later acquired by the Holtzbrinck publishing group for a reported $112 million in 2006.
I’ve been waiting for this to happen since a long time, because the German site really looks and feels almost exactly like Facebook. It’s a perfect duplicate, which is why I really don’t understand why Facebook hasn’t sued them earlier. Well, now they did it. Looking forward to seeing how much StudiVZ will have to pay to Facebook for damages and to what extent it will have to be changed now.
FBI director Robert Mueller spoke at the National Press Club today. What follows is the overly important question he was asked by a present journalist:
Large swathes of Asia, the Middle East and north Africa had their high-technology services crippled Thursday following a widespread Internet failure which brought many businesses to a standstill and left others struggling to cope.
HEMA is a Dutch department store that opened its first store in Amsterdam in November 1926. Today they have more than 150 stores in several countries. The company was sold to the British investment company Lion Capital in June last year.
Visit HEMA’s product page. You cannot order anything, you can’t even click on anything. But wait a few seconds to see what happens.
NBC today offered a new option for people who want to watch TV shows online: free downloads with commercials. Many users still prefer downloading to streaming, because the quality is better and you can watch the video whenever you want.
Technology and society: Is the outbreak of cancer videos, bulimia blogs and other forms of “user generated” medical information a healthy trend?
Millions are now logging on to contribute information about topics stretching from avian-flu pandemics to the extraction of wisdom teeth or the use of acupuncture to overcome infertility. You could call it user-generated health care, or Health 2.0.
By the way, I know a guy who made millions sending emails to hundreds of thousands of people a day. His “company” sold everything from software to cards to other merchandise. They got him and he had to pay $X million USD to a large software corporation and went bankrupt in the end. But they’re making tons of money, these spam kings.
Japanese scientists are researching technologies that they hope will replace the Internet at some point in the future.
TOKYO - Japan plans to start research on new networking technology that could one day replace the Internet amid its growing quality and security problems, according to the nation’s communications ministry.
U.S. and European researchers already have started similar efforts to rebuild the underlying architecture of the Internet.
Yoshihiro Onishi, assistant director at the Japanese communications ministry, said Japan must follow suit to stay competitive. Post-Internet network technology is expected to become imperative by 2020, he said.
While I don’t think the Internet will ever be replaced as a whole, I agree that there is plenty of room left for improvements, e.g. the creation of networking technology that consumes less energy, technology that prevents spamming and inter-planetary networking technologies.
