It wouldn’t be at all surprising if Facebook’s response to the bad vibes elicited its latest redesign were straight out of the 1970 comic war movie “Kelly’s Heroes.” To wit, we give you just one of the refrains from Donald Sutherland’s tanker/proto-hippie character, Oddball:

How happy can CEO Mark Zuckerberg be with the griping by users over the latest Facebook redesign?

Why don’t you knock it off with them negative waves…Why don’t you say something righteous and hopeful for a change?

Hopeful, positive comments from Facebook users have been awfully hard to come by in recent days since the powerhouse social-networking site pushed out a redesign that seems inspired, at least in part, by the up-and-coming Twitter service. To pick just one newly voiced opinion from the company’s “Vote on the new Facebook layout” app, which seems in keeping with consensus among the 624,665 comments there so far: “this one is really confusing… the home page look like every one is kinda takin to you!!!!! the previous one was really nice… would feel better if it was changed to the previous version…”

The negativity has continued into the weekend, fueled in part by a Valleywag item alleging that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent an e-mail to employees suggesting that it’s folly for a disruptive company to listen to its customers.

Read the rest at-Faceboks Redesign

When Google yesterday launched a system for accessing Gmail without a Net connection, they promised it would act almost exactly like regular Gmail. From my early testing, it seems like that claim isn’t entirely true — in some ways, offline Gmail actually works better than the online version.The main difference is speed. Regular Gmail is generally fairly quick, but you can still find yourself waiting at times for it to check in with Google’s servers. In offline mode or the very cool Flaky Connection Mode, everything — opening messages, searching for information, labeling missives — happens almost instantly, since all the data is local.

The tradeoff is that you don’t have access to all of your mail. For my account, the system synced up around 6500 messages, about two months worth of email. (It’s not clear whether Gmail limits the cache by the number of messages or the length of time since they were sent. I’ve got a question in to Google to find out.)

One mystery: Google’s offline settings reports that it will sync all my messages that have one of four labels. One of those labels is Starred, which makes sense. The other three categories seem to have been chosen at random. And I couldn’t find any way to change which labels get the full backup treatment.

You turn on offline capability through Gmail Labs. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to install Google Gears, the background system that enables offline capability in services like Google Documents and Zoho Mail. Once you okay Gmail using Gears, it’ll start downloading messages. On the EV-DO connection I use during my commute (the very definition of a flaky connection), Gmail synched about 150 messages a minute. Once I got on my home broadband connection, things went much faster.

The system gives you status updates as it’s pulling down messages, though I found some of the information to be wildly inaccurate. At one point, the status message told me that if I stopped synching now, I’d have access to messages back to January 10. In fact, Gmail had copied messages back to Nov. 28 of last year.

 Read the rest at.

Google gets competitive, taking Gmail users offline.

LONDON, Jan. 25 (UPI) — A virulent computer virus has infected more than 15 million computers around the world so far, British experts say.The Independent on Sunday reported that the worm — known as Downadup, Conficker or Kido — had contaminated 6 million PCs in the past three days alone.

The newspaper said more than 3,000 British organizations, including hospitals and the Ministry of Defense, have received the virus.

Officials in Britain, the United States, Russia, China and India say they are waiting to see what the virus’s effects will be, if anything.

The newspaper reported there is a possibility the virus has no function other than to demonstrate its originator’s skill, but some security experts think it unlikely a worm so sophisticated at this one would have no ulterior purpose.

Tom Gaffney, technical manager of F-Secure, says this could be to capture confidential information, such as online account details and passwords. He said it is likely the worm is a “rootkit,” which gives the virus designer administrative access to remote computers.

 Privacy advocates concerned about a strict new law in Georgia which removes sex offender’s online privacy.

The latest scuffle over online privacy is brewing up in Georgia.  An aggressive new law is set to take effect today which will force sex offenders to hand over their internet passwords, screen names, and e-mail addresses to the government for monitoring purposes.  Several other states also have efforts that track sex offender’s email and screen names.  However, Georgia, which has 16,000 registered offenders, will be the first state to demand the sex offenders’ passwords as well.

A similar law in Utah was already struck down by a federal judge, who ruled that it violated the privacy rights of an offender who challenged it.  However, that ruling was rather narrow as it applied to an offender tried on a military conviction who had never been in Utah’s court or prison system.

Critics of the Georgian law say that it not only violates the privacy rights of offenders, but it also places undue stress on the already tight-for-cash Georgian law enforcement.  Sara Totonchi of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights states, “There’s certainly a privacy concern.  This essentially will give law enforcement the ability to read E-Mail’s between family members, between employers.”

State Sen. Cecil Staton (R.) who wrote the bill argues that it is necessary to strip the rights of some citizens to protect the rights to life and liberty of others, particularly children.  He states that the benefits of the bill, which will allow law enforcement to detect stalking by predators sooner “outweighs a lot of the rights of these individuals.”

He states, “We limit where they can live, we make their information available on the Internet. To some degree, we do invade their privacy.  But the feeling is, they have forfeited, to some degree, some privacy rights.”

Read the rest at-http://www.dailytech.com/Sex+Offenders+in+Georgia+Stripped+of+Privacy+Must+Hand+Over+Passwords/article13832.htm

Internet search and advertising giant Yahoo! has been a household name almost from its inception in March of 1995. During the dot-com bubble, Yahoo! shares sold at a record $118.75 a share. Thirteen years later, Stanford alumni and Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang has lost his position as the CEO, over a thousand employees have been laid off, and the company missed its opportunity for a great exit. In order to survive and restore its position in the market, Yahoo! must now undertake drastic measures and survival tactics.Yahoo! has seen a deep corrosion of its core business over the past few years. To make matters worse, the boon in market share that Google has enjoyed seems to have been cut directly from Yahoo’s market share. MSN/Live, Ask, and AOL have seen small gains or remained fixed for the most part.

To remain a profitable business, Yahoo! needs to refocus on the search market. The primary revenue generator for both Yahoo! and Google is search and its highly coveted advertising space. The search market, in other words, is the lifeblood of the company’s business model. With its search market share dropping sharply, the company and its investors have every reason to be alarmed.

With Jerry Yang gone, the board of directors in upheaval, and employees demoralized after a round of layoffs, the company clearly lacks the bold leadership that it needs in this moment of crisis. Worse yet, the company seems to be everywhere at once, investing in a dizzying array of services that do little to enhance its search standing:

Read the rest at-http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/what_yahoo_must_do_to_survive.php

A Michigan-based networking company on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Google, Microsoft, and Apple, alleging that all three tech giants violated a patent it owns on the use of document-preview icons–or thumbnails–in operating systems.

In the suit (PDF), Cygnus Systems targets Google’s Chrome, Microsoft’s Vista and Internet Explorer 8, and Apple’s iPhone, Safari, and Mac OS X as patent infringers. Apple uses the patent-protected technology in its Finder and Cover Flow Mac OS X features, the lawsuit claims.

Cygnus describes the technology covered by the patent as “methods and systems for accessing one or more computer files via a graphical icon, wherein the graphical icon includes an image of a selected portion or portions of one or more computer files.”

E-mails seeking comment from Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Cygnus’ attorney were not immediately returned.

The case was filed in U.S. District Court in Arizona, where company owner Gregory Swartz lives, according to PCWorld.

Cygnus was granted the patent in March 2008, according to the lawsuit, although it first applied for it back in 2001 as a continuation to a 1998 application, according to Ars Technica, which appeared to report the case first.

Cygnus is seeking damages and a permanent injunction to prevent further alleged infringement. It has also indicated that it might go after other companies as defendants.

More Stories at-

http://gizmodo.com/5119074/tiny-company-sues-apple-microsoft-and-google-has-balls-the-size-of-texas

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=4242

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Warner Music Group ordered YouTube on Saturday to remove all music videos by its artists from the popular online video-sharing site after contract negotiations broke down.

The order could affect hundreds of thousands of videos clips, as it covers Warner Music’s recorded artists as well as the rights for songs published by its Warner/Chappell unit, which includes many artists not signed to Warner Music record labels.

The talks fell apart early on Saturday because Warner wants a bigger share of the huge revenue potential of YouTube’s massive visitor traffic. There were no reports on what Warner was seeking.

“We simply cannot accept terms that fail to appropriately and fairly compensate recording artists, songwriters, labels and publishers for the value they provide,” Warner said in a statement.

YouTube is hugely popular, with more than 100 million viewers in the United States alone in October, according to comScore, a Web audience measurement firm. Read the rest at- http://uk.reuters.com/article/industryNews/idUKTRE4BJ1EY20081220

Talks break down; Warner Music pulls videos from YouTube

Warner Music Content Disappears From YouTube

MySpace is getting back into the business of blocking third party widgets, it seems - today they’ve banned embedded music widgets from the fast growing Project Playlist. But unlike previous 2006 and 2007 blocks of iMeem, Photobucket and many others, this time MySpace is doing it under threat of litigation from the major labels.

We first got word from MySpace users that their Playlist widgets are simply vanishing from their MySpace profiles earlier today. When we contacted MySpace they confirmed the ban, noting that they have received infringement notices from “major music companies”:

MySpace is an open platform that welcomes all developers to build rich and legitimate applications for its global community. We take copyright issues very seriously and our goal is to help developers build a substantial business by creating an environment that respects rights holders and protects their content.MySpace has received notices of infringement about Project Playlist at different times from several of the major music companies currently suing Project Playlist. Per our policy of taking very seriously the requests of rights holders to block access to third party sites that are believed to be infringing, we have evaluated the requests of the major music companies and determined that it is in our best interest not to allow Project Playlist widgets on MySpace, and effective immediately, we will no longer be allowing these widgets within the MySpace platform. Any third party widgets (including any music widgets) are welcome on MySpace so long as they do not include infringing content?we encourage our users to utilize the many legitimate applications found on MySpace and across the Web. Read the rest at- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/19/AR2008121903102.html

More articles at-

Warner, EMI, Universal force MySpace (and Facebook?) to remove Project Playlist

The mixtape wars keep on: MySpace bans Project Playlist

MySpace Forced to Give Up Project Playlist Due to Copyright Infringement Issues