Facebook to adopt new rules despite vote shortfall Associated Press
Facebook will adopt new rules governing the social network even though a vote fell well short of a minimum threshold. The new documents specify, among other things, that users own their information, not Facebook. An earlier attempt to push changes led to user confusion and protests over who controls the personal information users share on the site. That has prompted Facebook to conduct a vote. More than 600,000 of Facebook’s 200 million regular users voted, with nearly three-quarters in favor of the changes. But Facebook had set a minimum threshold of a 30 percent voter turnout for the vote to be binding. That would have been about 60 million people, or about 100 times the actual turnout. The company says Facebook will consider lowering that threshold for future votes. [Also see New 'Keep Fa$ebook honest' user group.]

Denise Howell’s “TWiL” show #23, in which I participated, now available online Ray Beckerman
Episode #23 of Denise Howell’s internet show, “This Week in Law”, which was streamed live last Wednesday, is now available. This is the show in which I participated, along with Colette Vogele, Eric Goldman, Evan Brown, and Leo Laporte. “TWiL 23: P2P… You And Me http://twit.tv/twil23″

DVD software backups challenged in U.S. court Reuters
Hollywood movie companies told a federal judge on Friday that RealNetworks violated copyright law by selling software that allows people to make backups of their DVDs on a home computer. U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel convened the first-day arguments by the movie companies and the DVD Copy Control Association that “RealDVD” software should be banned. “In the end, this case will be about how RealNetworks tries to take money that is not theirs,” argued Bart Williams for the movie companies. At one point, he said some RealNetworks code came from Ukrainian hackers, but a company spokesman said none was in the product. If RealNetworks wins, it could establish a beachhead for software that transfers movies from DVDs to hard drives, opening the door for many companies to sell devices that can store and organize movies from DVDs.

Judge seals courtroom in MPAA DVD-copying case CNet News
A federal judge sealed a courtroom on Friday after attorneys for the Motion Picture Association of America and another Hollywood group claimed that confidential information might be disclosed during testimony about DVD-encryption technology. U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel kicked the public out of the courtroom at around 2:30 p.m. PDT, overruling objections from CNET News and RealNetworks, which also said it opposed the unusual request. An attorney for the DVD Copy Control Association, which is involved in a lawsuit here over DVD-backup software sold by RealNetworks, said details about the technology used to encrypt DVDs justified the request to give the public the boot during witness testimony–which, according to legal precedent, should be reserved only for rare cases.

G.E.’s Breakthrough Can Put 100 DVDs on a Disc NewYork Times
General Electric says it has achieved a breakthrough in digital storage technology that will allow standard-size discs to hold the equivalent of 100 DVDs that can be mass-produced at affordable prices. But optical storage experts and industry analysts who were told of the development said it held the promise of being a big step forward in digital storage with a wide range of potential uses in commercial, scientific and consumer markets. “This could be the next generation of low-cost storage,” said Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisioneering, a technology research firm.

The fight against botnets is largely ineffective Heise Online
Currently, the efforts of criminal prosecuting authorities and the IT industry to deal with botnet operators and other cyber-criminals are ineffective. That was the message delivered by Joe Stewart, Director of Malware Research for Secureworks, in “Demonetizing Botnets”, his presentation at the ongoing RSA Conference 2009. Stewart said countermeasures mostly concentrated on technical solutions, such as patching holes, switching off botnet command-and-control servers (C&C), installing spam filters and so forth. The worldwide IT security community in particular, he said, has focused more on defending against attacks than on identifying and prosecuting the attackers. Yet it was precisely these experts who should be passing the fullest possible information to prosecuting authorities about the people responsible for attacks. Stewart said the activities of researchers and of the authorities barely overlapped. In combination with a chronic shortage of money and staff, as well as frequently imperfect international cooperation, this accounted for the meagre success rate of prosecutions and the steadily rising number of new attacks. Stewart also complained that many countermeasures only afforded a brief respite, encouraging attackers to get back to work with more determination, following a short break.

Facebook surfing while sick costs Swiss woman job Reuters
A Swiss insurance worker lost her job after surfing popular social network site Facebook while off sick, her employer said on Friday. The woman said she could not work in front of a computer as she needed to lie in the dark but was then seen to be active on Facebook, which insurer Nationale Suisse said in a statement had destroyed its trust in the employee. “This abuse of trust, rather than the activity on Facebook, led to the ending of the work contract,” it said. The unnamed woman told the 20 Minuten daily she had been surfing Facebook in bed on her iPhone and accused her employer of spying on her and other employees by sending a mysterious friend request which allows access to personal online activity.

Game Developer Flirts With Pirates on BitTorrent Sites TorrentFreak
The developer of a new Windows-based first person shooter game is leaving comments on torrent sites via the actual torrent uploader in attempt to reach out to those thinking of downloading the game. ACE Team, the developer of Zeno Clash, acknowledges that people might like to `try before they buy` and says they will not try to stop piracy. There are many ways of trying to influence those who like to share files online. Mostly the influence comes from the likes of the MPAA, RIAA and IFPI, who universally like to `persuade` would-be file-sharers with the threat of legal action, actual legal action and propaganda. This approach doesn`t work.

FBI accuses Twitter user of massacre threats CNet News
An Oklahoma City man who allegedly threatened on Twitter to turn a tax protest into a massacre has been arrested on suspicion of making interstate threats in what is believed to be the first federal prosecution based on posts made to the micro-blogging site.

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April, 2009