File hosting service Hotfile has sued Warner Bros. for abusing its anti-piracy tool. TorrentFreak reports that Warner Bros. apparently removed “hundreds of titles” from Hotfile, even if they did not hold the copyrights to them. The deleted files include game demos and open source software, the file host said.

Hotfile, which was sued for copyright infringement by five members of the MPAA earlier this year, alleges that Warner Bros. has violated the DMCA and lists intentional interference with a contractual or business relationship and negligence as second and third counts in its suit.

“The single file deleted by Warner that had been most frequently downloaded by Hotfile users—five times more frequently than any other file—was a freeware software title wrongfully deleted by Warner,” the suit states. “The software publisher that uploaded the file used Hotfile.com as a means for distribution of its open source software. Warner was not authorized by the software publisher to delete the file.”

Hotfile speculates that the takedowns had an economic motive as an agreement between Warner Bros. and Hotfile allows the movie studio to replace content that was taken down with a link to Warner Bros. content that can be purchased. The more content Warner removed, the more links it was able to place. Warner Bros has not commented on the new suit.

SOURCE via Torrentfreak

CNBC reports that Facebook plans to launch a music platform during its f8 conference in San Francisco on September 22. The news arrives by way of an unnamed source close to the matter, and follows previous rumors that the social network would indeed launch a music platform before the end of the year.

According to the report, sources within the music industry have confirmed that Facebook hasn’t approached record labels as a possible music retailer like iTunes or Amazon. Instead, it may open up its social platform to third-party music services including the just-launched (and Facebook-friendly) Spotify, as well as Pandora, MOG and many others. It’s quite possible that these will appear as internal apps while the music services themselves may integrate the typical “Like” feature into their desktop or web-based clients.

What’s interesting is that Facebook plans to reveal its music service around the time Apple plans to reveal its rumored 3G-capable iPod Touch, iPhone 5 and cloud-based iPhone 4. This will also be the time when Apple will officially release iOS 5, iTunes 11 and properly launch iCloud, the latter of which includes “iTunes in the Cloud” and “iTunes Match.”

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One of the biggest gripes that I hear from people about Facebook is how they hate being tagged in random photos. Sure, tagging random people from your friends list might be a great way to publicize that brand new set of lingerie from Taiwan, or those sexy new tank tops which you have for sale at an awesome price, but tagging a guy on a dress just doesn’t make sense.

That’s set to change though thanks to the recent changes in Facebook’s privacy policies which were implemented earlier today.

A big part of today’s changes come in the form of tag approvals, while the rest revolve around tweaks to profile visibility, and status and location update visibility.

In fact, the Facebook team must have felt that there were too many changes to simply list out, so they even set up a tutorial which walks you through all these changes. However, if you rather skim through them in an easy to understand pictorial format, Mashable has a great post on the changes too.

Randi Zuckerberg, the sister of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the site’s current marketing director, believes that anonymity on the Internet has to “go away.” She made this revelation during a recent panel discussion on social media and cyberbullying hosted by Marie Claire magazine.

“The use of real names online could help curb bullying and harassment on the web,” she told the audience. “I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away. People behave a lot better when they have their real names down. I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.”

“There’s so much more we can do,” she added. “We’re actively tying to work with partners like Common Sense Media and our safety advisory committee.”

Christopher Poole, founder of 4chan, disagrees with Zuckerberg’s observation. “Where there’s no risk of failure, experimentation flourishes,” he said. “On websites that require you to login via Facebook, the cost of failure is really high because you’re contributing as yourself. As a result, mistakes are attributed to who you are. I believe real names should only be required in scenarios where your actions can hurt others; in other cases, anonymity is just fine.”

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Is Facebook slowly eating your brain? Probably not, but it can have a negative impact on teens and young adults according to a recent study.

In a presentation entitled “Poke Me: How Social Networks Can Both Help and Harm Our Kids,” Larry D. Rosen, PhD, a professor of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, reported that teens who frequently use Facebook show narcissistic (self-love) tendencies. Even more, young adults who have a “strong Facebook presence” show signs of additional psychological disorders including antisocial behaviors, mania and aggressive tendencies.

“While nobody can deny that Facebook has altered the landscape of social interaction, particularly among young people, we are just now starting to see solid psychological research demonstrating both the positives and the negatives,” he said.

Rosen’s findings were presented during the 119th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association. In addition to the psychological disorders, his presentation revealed that Facebook can be distracting and can negatively impact learning. Studies have even shown that middle school, high school and college students achieved lower grades if they accessed Facebook at least once during a 15-minute study period.

“Daily overuse of media and technology has a negative effect on the health of all children, preteens and teenagers by making them more prone to anxiety, depression, and other psychological disorders, as well as by making them more susceptible to future health problems,” reads a press release from the American Psychological Association.

But as the saying goes, there are two sides to every coin: Facebook use may have its negative side effects, but there are also positive aspects in using the popular social website. According to Rosen, young adults who spend more time on Facebook are better at showing “virtual empathy” to their online friends. Social networking can even help introverted adolescents learn how to socialize without having to leave the screen.

For parents, he added that it’s a waste of time trying to monitor their kids’ social networking activities. In fact, communication is the “crux” of parenting: talk for one minute and listen for five.

“If you feel that you have to use some sort of computer program to surreptitiously monitor your child’s social networking, you are wasting your time. Your child will find a workaround in a matter of minutes,” he said. “You have to start talking about appropriate technology use early and often and build trust, so that when there is a problem, whether it is being bullied or seeing a disturbing image, your child will talk to you about it.”

Wednesday News Corp reported a 22-percent drop in fiscal fourth quarter earnings, part of which included a $254 million after-tax loss (or 10-cents a share) stemming from the sale of its fledgling social website, MySpace.

Back in June, News Corp sold MySpace to digital ad network Specific Media for $35 million (plus a 5-percent stake in Specific Media), but originally paid $580 million in 2005. Justin Timberlake also reportedly took an ownership stake of MySpace and will “play a major role in developing the creative direction and strategy for the company moving forward.”

“There’s a need for a place where fans can go to interact with their favorite entertainers, listen to music, watch videos, share and discover cool stuff and just connect,” Timberlake said back in June. “Myspace has the potential to be that place. Art is inspired by people and vice versa, so there’s a natural social component to entertainment. I’m excited to help revitalize Myspace by using its social media platform to bring artists and fans together in one community.”

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EFF has released the first final version of its HTTPS Everywhere Firefox extension, which forces the browser to use a secure HTTPS connection on sites that offer it.

According to the EFF, version 1.0 includes support for more than 1000 new sites as the software moves out of beta.

The plugin currently supports all major sites including popular destinations such as, Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Paypal, or the New York Time. It was created in collaboration with the Tor Project and is based on code provided by the NoScript Project.

The EFF said that HTTPS Everywhere was designed to deliver a simpler user experience than NoScript, but support complex rewriting rules that allow services like Google Search and Wikipedia to be redirected to HTTPS without breaking anything.

The HTTPS Extension is offered as free download.

One lightning strike was enough to take out a significant portion of Amazon’s EC2 and an unknown part of Microsoft’s cloud services in Europe.

Amazon said that the lightning hit a transformer near Dublin, Ireland just before 8 p.m. local time on Sunday and caused enough disruption to send its servers offline. Within two hours, the company provided first details about the service disruption and began restoring server instances again after three hours. The company told its users that it would need 24 to 48 hours to get all services back online.

While having servers offline is painful, some EC2 customers were told that the data on their servers may not be in perfect condition. Amazon said that some EC2 instances or EBS servers lost power before writes to their volumes were consistent, and left Amazon only with the option to give its customers a recovery snapshot. Before the instances are restored, the customers were asked to validate the status of their data.

Microsoft apparently was affected by the lightning incident as well and told its users via Twitter than certain cloud services of its Business Productivity Online Standard Suite were offline. Microsoft kept a lid on the information available to the public and provided details of the service disruption only to its customers.

Wednesday in a public announcement, “hactivist” group Anonymous promised to “destroy” Facebook once and for all on November 5, 2011. Why? Because the popular social website has allegedly been selling information to government agencies and providing back-door access for information security firms so that they can spy on people worldwide.

“Everything you do on Facebook stays on Facebook regardless of your ‘privacy’ settings, and deleting your account is impossible, even if you ‘delete’ your account, all your personal info stays on Facebook and can be recovered at any time,” the statement reads. “Changing the privacy settings to make your Facebook account more “private” is also a delusion. Facebook knows more about you than your family.”

“The riots are underway,” the message continues. “It is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It is a battle for choice and informed consent. It’s unfolding because people are being raped, tickled, molested, and confused into doing things where they don’t understand the consequences. Facebook keeps saying that it gives users choices, but that is completely false. It gives users the illusion of and hides the details away from them “for their own good” while they then make millions off of you. When a service is “free,” it really means they’re making money off of you and your information.”

Village Voice was actually one of the first to discover the Anonymous statement and brings up a very good point: killing Facebook for the sake of preserving privacy by a group of people who routinely steal private information sounds a bit odd. If anything, user data is bounced around like a beach ball and governments, corporations and even private citizens are virtual pawns in a game of “because we can and you can’t stop us.” As LulzSec previously pointed out, we’re mere peons to hackers, mere toys.

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Schmitz, who was known as Kimble during his hacking times and recently changed his last name to Dotcom, has been convicted for multiple crimes such as racketeering and insider trading in the early years of the past decade. He is now in the news again as the possible owner of Megaupload. The file sharing service has been targeted by Perfect 10, which has filed multiple and not very successful copyright infringements against sites which have been used to share its copyrighted erotic images.

However, it appears that Kim Dotcom, who seems to be the mind behind Megaupload as well as other “mega” sites, may actually be guilty of direct copyright infringement, according to a report and court filing Techdirt has published. The court found that Perfect 10 “has adequately alleged Megaupload has engaged in volitional conduct sufficient to hold it liable for direct infringement.” The document states that Megaupload not only provides a network designed to encourage copyright infringements, but its operators are being paid to upload popular and copyrighted data to Megaupload’s servers.

Kim Schmitz virtually disappeared after his conviction in Germany in 2003, and even closed his website kimble.org, which he used to advertise his business ideas, as well as his lifestyle with expensive cars and yachts. Schmitz recently surfaced as Dotcom in New Zealand where he apparently was welcomed as dropped money to sponsor local fireworks and as a resident who intends to buy a $10 million home. The 37-year-old Dotcom described himself as one of the ten wealthiest people in New Zealand and said that he intends to build a five-star resort that is attached to a 12-mile motor sport racetrack.

SOURCE via Tech Dirt