Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on February 01, 2007 by CyberNet.

The RIAA sued a 16 year old New Yorker for piracy , and now he’s fighting back.  That’s the story in the a nutshell, but there’s so much more to it. Together with his lawyer, Robert Santangelo is defending himself and making a case against the RIAA saying among other things, that they “have engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to defraud the courts of the United States,” and further, that the companies “ostensibly competitors in the recording industry, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and public policy by bringing the piracy cases jointly and using the same agency “to make extortionate threats … to force defendants to pay.”

To add to the matter, this isn’t the first time the RIAA has gone after the Santangelo family.  In fact, Robert’s mom was the first to deal with the RIAA after she was sued back in 2005.  Just in December, her case was dropped after she refused to settle and went to court with it. Apparently the RIAA wasn’t done and came back to sue Robert and his 20 year old sister, Michelle.

Robert’s lawyer has raised 32 defenses and is demanding a jury trial saying that the boys reputation has been damaged, and he’s been distracted from school.  They’ve also said that the “average computer users were never warned that it was illegal; that the statute of limitations has passed; and that all the music claimed to have been downloaded was actually owned by his sister on store-bought CDs.” Robert was 11 at the time that he accused of pirating.

Obviously, that was just a lot of legal lingo, but I think what anyone can get out of all of this is that people aren’t afraid to fight back.  Certainly the RIAA is a big giant gorilla and could intimidate any accused pirate, but that’s not stopping people like Santangelo.

The RIAA is defending themselves by saying “The record industry has suffered enormously due to piracy. That includes thousands of layoffs. We must protect our rights. Nothing in a filing full of recycled charges that have gone nowhere in the past changes that fact.”

This ought to be an interesting story to follow… 

Source: 1010 Wins (Thanks Natmaster)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on March 01, 2007 by CyberNet.

Wired News recently did an experiment with Digg to prove a point, and it’s drawing quite a bit of attention. Annalee Newitz of Wired News set up a pointless blog filled with pictures of crowds of people. She says the intent was to be as random and boring as possible with no originality and no analysis. After the blog was all set, she submitted it to Digg.

From there, she preceded to go to a Digg-gaming service called User/Submitter to purchase votes for her article, hoping they would help her launch her pointless blog to the front page. There was a $20 fee for signing up, and $1 for each of the Diggs. Prior to her experiment, she interviewed Digg CEO Jay Adelson to discuss such groups:

“CEO Jay Adelson told me before I conducted this experiment that all the groups trying to manipulate Digg “have failed,” and that Digg “can tell when there are paid users.” Adelson added, “When we identify a (Digg user) who is part of a scam, we don’t remove their account so they don’t realize they’ve been identified. Then we let them continue voting, but their votes may count a lot less. Then the scam doesn’t work.”

Long story short, 10 hours after she paid for Diggs, she had 40 of them and ended up making it to the front page. Despite the fact that her blog was pointless and really had no relevance, people voted on it because others were – everybody was following the crowd. Eventually it did get buried, but the point was that Digg said they had this gaming problem figured out, but after that experiment, have they?

And just to add another twist to the whole story, Wired News as Tech Crunch reports, is owned by Condé Nast who owns Reddit which would be considered Digg’s competitor.  While I get the point that Annalee was trying to make, it was a really cheap shot at a competitor.

Does Digg have things that they need to work on and improve on? Absolutely! Clearly they haven’t found a fool-proof way to deal with gaming among many other issues. Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch goes as far as saying that Digg should sue Wired.

I don’t think creating negative news about a competitor is right, but I do think Digg needs to take a serious look at what they’re doing, and make several needed improvements.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on July 06, 2007 by CyberNet.

 If you’re tied up in a contract with Sprint and you’re just itching to get over to AT&T to purchase an iPhone, here’s how you do it: call customer service, a lot! Sprint doesn’t want to have to deal with the frequent customer service callers, so to solve the problem, they’re just getting rid of them.

On a letter dated June 29th, Sprint informed a handful of their customers that their service agreement would be terminated on July 30, 2007. They say:

Our records indicate that over the past year, we have received frequent calls from you regarding your billing or other general account information.  While we have worked to resolve your issues and questions to the best of our ability, the number of inquiries you have made to us during this time has led us to determine that we are unable to meet your current wireless needs.

Luckily, those who received these letters will not be required to pay an early termination fee, and credit was applied to their accounts so that their current balance is zero. They’ll also be able to port their phone number over to a new provider is they do so before the July 30th deadline.

I’m wondering how these customers are feeling right now. If they were having as many problems with Sprint as it sounds, they may be relieved that they no longer have to deal with them anymore! And if they were wanting to get out of their contract anyways, this is like a “get out of jail free” card.

Source: News.com

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on July 05, 2007 by CyberNet.

After two months in the making, the new design and features are finally here! Go ahead and take a look around, try out some of the new/improved features, and let us know what you think! But first, if things aren’t looking quite right, you need to clear your cache so that your browser will download our new style-sheets. Do this by holding down the shift key and clicking the reload button, or by pressing Ctrl+F5 (this shouldn’t be necessary, but just in case).

The first thing you’ll notice is that the site looks different! We were going for an updated look, and a brighter design. For the CyberNet “old-timers” who have been around for a while, you probably remember our very first design (pictured below) that was blue and orange. We’ve decided to go back to our roots and brought back the orange! You’ll also notice that we went back to the fixed width, and a wide one-column sidebar.

This was our first time creating our own theme from scratch, and boy, was it a lot of work! We sure learned a lot in the process though, and hopefully it is a look that you’ll enjoy.

Overview

• Article Bar
• Thumbnail View
• User Management Screen
• Thumbnail Galleries
• “Add This” Social Bookmarking
• Contact/Send us a tip
• Commenting
• Edit your comments
• Unread comment tracking
• Multiple levels of comment tracking
• CyberMarks
• All-Stars

NEW FEATURES

• Article Bar: In just a few clicks you can pull up articles from today, yesterday, and the last 7 days of CyberNotes.
  
• Thumbnail View: When performing searches, browsing categories, or going through our archives, you’ll receive a much more condensed view of the results.  This includes a small thumbnail of an image in the post, along with a summary.
• User Management Screen: This is for registered users only.  This will be the location to track unread comments, manage CyberMarks, change your options/profile, and get an overview of site statistics.

  

• Thumbnail Galleries: (JavaScript must be enabled) Thumbnails now use Highslide to dynamically retrieve and display full-size versions.  If you don’t have JavaScript enabled, you’ll still be able to click on the thumbnails and see the full-size version as you normally would. Use the left/right buttons on the keyboard, or the buttons on screen to navigate through multiple images on an article. This will also work for most prior postings as well.

  

• Add This: Have a favorite social bookmarking site? Use the icon pictured to the right to bookmark any of our articles with your favorite services like Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Digg, Furl, Reddit, and more…

IMPROVED FEATURES

• Contact/Send us a tip: When sending us a tip, you’ll now be able to enter in both your own site’s URL and the URL of the item you’re submitting.

  A new bookmarklet is available which will automatically fill in the article URL of the site that you’re on, and it will set the subject to the title of the site.  If you’re logged into our site, it will also fill in your name, your site, and your email address. Sending a tip has never been so easy.

  Just drag the CyberNet Tips bookmarklet into your bookmarks and then click it anytime you want to easily send us a tip.

• Commenting: The commenting system has been completely overhauled and customized! In case you come across a spam comment before we do, there is now a “report a comment” feature to report the item. This has proved to be very useful in our forum, and there is no doubt that it will be useful here as well!
• Edit Your Comments(registered users only): Just like before, you’ll have 15 minutes to edit your comments. Now you edit the comment on the same page as where you left the comment which makes using the quote feature a lot easier.
• Unread Comment Tracking (registered users only): This was available previously, but it is way more optimized now.  This was a bottleneck for registered users before that could cause the site to load slow.  We’ve spent many hours re-working the system so that it does as little work as possible.

  We had the comment tracking capabilities before, but the problem was that they were cookie based.  That meant that if you cleared your browser’s cookies or were using a different browser, you wouldn’t have access to comments you haven’t read on the site. No more! If you opt-in to our unread comments server on the management page, we’ll keep tabs on the comments you haven’t read! Enabling this feature can be done on the options screen located on the management page.

• Multiple Levels of Comment Tracking: There are several options for how you want to track your comments. You can either track all unread comments, or you can filter out posts to track only the ones that you’ve commented on.  You can also disable comments from being tracked on a specific post via the management page, or you can track only the articles that you choose to monitor via the “tracks” icon at the footer of each article. 

  If the “tracks” icon is grey, it means that the comments for that article are not being tracked.  If it is green, comments are being tracked.

• CyberMarks: CyberMarks is our bookmarking system that has been completely rewritten and optimized for performance.  It still uses AJAX, so bookmarking an article is never a hassle.

  Now you can bookmark and delete a CyberMark all on the article page via the “bookmark” icon. By default, the icon is blue which signifies that the article has NOT been bookmarked with the CyberMarks bookmarking system. If you decide to bookmark the article, just click the logo and it will change to green to signify that it has been bookmarked.

  On the management screen for your CyberMarks, you can sort them by the article title, bookmarked date, or article posting date.  You can also dynamically choose how many CyberMarks are displayed on the screen at one time.

  Search your CyberMarks! Performing a search looks at both the title and content of the posts you’ve bookmarked.  This makes it even easier to find your favorite posts on our site, and gives you a bookmark searching capability that you can’t get with any other site.

  Delete you CyberMarks! On the management screen, you can delete your CyberMarks. The process uses AJAX which makes the management process even faster.

  View the top five most CyberMarked articles in the sidebar.

• All-Stars: You’ll notice that we now have our active All-Stars listed in the footer on all CyberNet pages. All-Stars are readers who’ve frequently contributed to the site with commenting and/or submitting tips to the editors. We wanted to reward these frequent commenters, and this is the best way we know how! You can become an All-Star after you’ve accumulated 125 stars. You’ll receive one star for each comment, and you’ll receive between 1–5 stars for each tip you submit that we write about.

Wrapping it up

It may not seem like two months worth of work, but between writing for the site and developing at the same time, it’s been a long two months of working day and night, along with weekends to get this all done. Almost every single feature on our site has been developed by us at the request of one of you.

We look forward to your feedback. We’ve spent some time testing all of the features to make sure that they work, but you may come across a bug here or there. If you do, please be sure to let us know so we can get it fixed right away.

A big THANK YOU to those who looked over the very early mock-ups of this design to provide valuable feedback, and a big thank-you to EVERYBODY who contributes to this site as readers and commenters!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on February 17, 2006 by CyberNet.

There are a lot of technology companies that are emerging, and from the CNN list of the 100 fastest-growing companies it appears that information assurance is among the most popular company types. There are many companies labeled as ‘Software’ on the top 100 but if you look at the company names then you can see many are security related, such as Symantec and Websense.

Some of the other popular companies that appear on the list are eBay, Apple, Qualcomm, Nextel, Adobe, WebEx, McAfee, Western Digital, and Dell.

News Source: CNN Money

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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