Thursday, October 28, 2010

LimeWire Shut-Down By Court Injunction

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

LimeWire has been shut-down, stopped
its file sharing after a federal
judge signed an injunction to stop
LimeWire from further business.

The suit was filed by the Recording
Industry Association of America in
the U.S. District Court for the
Southern District of New York,
charged LimeWire with facilitating
"pervasive online infringement."
Also, it accused LimeWire of allowing
and actively encouraging users to
participate in music piracy.

"For the better part of the last decade,
LimeWire and Gorton have violated the
law," the RIAA explained. "The court has
now signed an injunction that will start
to unwind the massive piracy machine that
LimeWire and Gorton used to enrich
themselves immensely."

The lawsuit was filed against the company
in 2006 on behalf of the major record
labels by the Recording Industry
Association of America (RIAA).

LimeWire posted the following on its
web site:

"THIS IS AN OFFICIAL NOTICE THAT
LIMEWIRE IS UNDER A COURT-ORDERED
INJUNCTION TO STOP DISTRIBUTING AND
SUPPORTING ITS FILE-SHARING SOFTWARE.
DOWNLOADING OR SHARING COPYRIGHTED
CONTENT WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION IS
ILLEGAL."

Monday, October 25, 2010

Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange: Living In Fear

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange is
living in fear of being arrested,
and has been running since the release
of secret United States military documents
related to the Iraq war via his web site.

Assange checks into hotels with false names,
dyes his hair, sleeps on sofas/floors. He uses
cash instead of credit cards, often borrowed
from friends, a United States daily, which
interviewed him last week, pointed-out.

"They called me the James Bond of journalism...
it got me a lot of fans, and some of them ended
up causing me a bit of trouble," he shared, feared
that the UK may act against him if the United
States decides to prosecute. This course of
action is being looked at.

"When it comes to the point where you occasionally
look forward to being in prison on the basis that
you might be able to spend a day reading a book,
the realization dawns that perhaps the situation
has become a little more stressful than you would
like."

On Friday, his online whistle blower web site leaked
nearly 400,000 secret United States documents on the
Iraq war. They gave graphic accounts of torture,
killing of over 66,000 civilians and Iran's role in
the conflict.

Source: http://newsblaze.com/story/20101025063306writ.nb/topstory.html

Monday, October 18, 2010

Facebook Leaks Identifying Information

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

Many popular applications, apps, on the
social networking site Facebook Inc. have
been leaking identifying information like:
access to people's names, their friends'
names, to dozens of advertising and Internet
tracking companies, per a Wall Street Journal
investigation.

This wrinkle spreads to millions of Facebook
app users, even those whose profiles are on
Facebook's strictest privacy settings.

"A Facebook user ID may be inadvertently shared
by a user's Internet browser or by an application,"
Facebook's spokesman explained. ID knowledge "does
not permit access to anyone's private information
on Facebook." He added that Facebook would introduce
new technology to contain the problem identified
by the Journal.

"Apps" are software pieces that let Facebook's 500
million users play games/share common interests with
each other. The Journal discovered all of the 10 most
popular apps on Facebook were leaking users' IDs to
outside companies.

Most apps were no longer available to Facebook users
after the Journal told Facebook that apps were leaking
personal information. No reason was given for their
unavailability. Online defenders of tracking point to
the observation as beneficial.

No one knows, for sure, if developers of many of the
apps leaking Facebook ID numbers knew that their apps
were doing so. The apps were using a common Web standard,
known as a referrer, which passes on the address of the
last page viewed when a user clicks on a link. Facebook
as with other social networking sites, referrers can
expose a user's identity.

It's a ballooning concern of companies that store
detailed databases on people to track them online.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Wal-Mart's Cheaper Medicare Drug Plan

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

Humana Inc. is combining forces with
Wal-Mart Stores to offer a low cost
Medicare prescription drug plan,
nationwide.

Humana, based in Louisville, Ky., is one
of the largest U.S. health insurers and
second largest provider of privately run
Medicare health plans. It has the highest
exposure to Medicare among the major
national managed care businesses.

A typical Medicare prescription drug
beneficiary could save about $450 a year on
the lower premium, co-payments/cost- shares,
compared with average total costs for
Medicare drug benefit plans, the companies
pointed out. They referred to the U.S.
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
figures.

The plan will go into effect next year at a
monthly premium of $14.80, which is the
lowest premium for stand-alone Medicare
prescription drug plans being offered
nationally for 2011 per Humana.