Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

According to a report on Information Week, infamous “Spam King” Sanford Wallace, and his phishing partner Walter Rines were slammed with a whopping $225 million judgment by a U.S. District Court on Monday.

“MySpace has zero tolerance for those who attempt to act illegally on our site,” said Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer of MySpace, in an e-mailed statement. “The Federal District Court in Los Angeles awarded MySpace $223,777,500 under the federal CAN-SPAM Act and $1,500,000 under the California anti-phishing statute. User engagement is up 32 percent year over year while spam is significantly decreasing, proving efforts like this are working.”

In October of 2006 the pair began creating bogus MySpace accounts and hijacking over 300,000 others. They then used the compromised accounts to send tens of thousands of spam messages and bomb the comment section of thousands of MySpace pages with links to other spam sites. The popular social networking site sued in 2007. Wallace posted a response to the judgement on his website, claiming he had never been served and that “the check is in the mail.”

Since 1997 Wallace has been sued by many service providers including AOL, Earthlink, and CompuServe, and last year was fined $4 million by the FTC for deceptive advertising and distributing spyware.

Read [InformationWeek]

While rumors about buyouts, mergers and partnerships continue to swirl around them, the number one and number two social network websites are announcing new features and services. MySpace, the top social site, is taking the wraps off of “data availability,” which allows members to easily share public profile information and user-generated content with Yahoo!, Ebay, Flickr and Photobucket.
And Facebook, after hearing complaints from state attorneys general about the threat from child predators and cyberbullies on its website, has agreed to tighten up security to protect its under-18 users. The social network will work with a task force to make sure identities and ages of members can be verified while trying harder to keep inappropriate content - including alcohol and tobacco advertising - from underage eyes. 

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Twitter has already taken microblogging to the next level, and now it has just gone a little further with the launch of TwitterFone, a new speech-to-text service enabling Twitter users to update their accounts through mobile phone.

TwitterFone basically eliminates the need to access your mobile Web and type your so-called “tweets”. Just call it in, dictate your message and it will automatically transcribe and post your message to your Twitter account within 5 to 10 minutes.

Though I’m personally not a big fan of Twitter, it is indeed a popular and powerful tool among Internet marketing practitioners and social networking addicts who are always on the go. Integrating this technology enhances its relevance and ease of use for the members of its community.

But it can be useful even if you’re not an active Twitter user. If you think about it, TwitterFone can be a reliable reminder tool for busy people. Just dictate your errands or things to do while on the go and check it online when you get home. It could work well for someone like me who tends to forget so many things. Think about it.

Although free, this service is currently in beta by invitation only, and as of now its working only in US, UK, and Ireland.

Product [TwitterFone] Via [Pat Phelan]

If you have been trying to avoid MySpace but couldn’t just do it because you have accumulated too many contacts in your profile that you don’t want to lose, well soon, you just might ban MySpace from your online life for good. MySpace is set to launch a new feature, albeit an annoying one; MySpace Karaoke.

This could probably be the worst application ever to hit MySpace, not because it is technologically flawed, but because it is definitely a feature that many would find annoying, including yours truly. To be launched on Tuesday, MySpace Karaoke will, heaven forbid, allow users to belt out their favorite songs, record their renditions and stick them up on their MySpace profile, so that their MySpace contacts can rate their performance, no matter how awfully good or bad those performances are.

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MySpace has won its lawsuit against infamous spammer Sanford Wallace, dubbed the “Spam King”. MySpace was awarded a legal judgment after Wallace ignored numerous requests to turn over documents and ultimately failed to show up in court. The suit was filed last year, accusing Wallace of running a phishing scam to access MySpace profiles and then using them to spam thousands of other users in an effort to get them to visit his website. Wallace claimed that since he was not accepting mail or packages, he had missed all the notifications of his court dates. The court didn’t buy it.

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Saturday’s deadline passed with no deal for Microsoft and Yahoo. The two companies have been negotiating for sometime now after Microsoft expressed interest in acquiring it’s rival web portal. Now Microsoft is deciding whether to launch a hostile takeover via proxy fight or to simply drop the deal. Yahoo had no comment but Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell had this to say:

“Unless we make progress with Yahoo towards an agreement by this weekend, we will reconsider our alternatives. We will provide updates as appropriate next week, these alternatives clearly including taking an offer to the Yahoo shareholders, or to withdraw our proposal and focus on other opportunities, both organic and inorganic.”

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If you’re reading this blog, then it’s likely you already are a regular rider of the RSS train. But RSS isn’t something everyone in the general public knows about, as only an estimated 5-percent of web users subscribe to websites using RSS. Hence the idea for RSS Awareness Day, which takes place on May 1, 2008 (which happens to be nine days before the first National Train Day, to continue with the train theme). In observance of this day, you can blog about RSS to help get the word out about this technology. 

According to Wikipedia; RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and along with the orange RSS icon became widespread in 2005/2006. RSS is defined as “a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts.” Which when used with either programs such as NewsFire or NetNewsWire or web-based readers such as Google Reader or Bloglines subscribers can have all the content from their favorite blogs available in one location, making it easy to get all the news. 

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Facebook chat was initially confirmed late in March, which was proceeded with a limited roll-out that began in early April for users in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and New York. It seems the testing must have gone over well and that means good news for anyone who was itching to chat and feeling left out. The new chat feature is now available for all active Facebook accounts.

While the ability to chat with other Facebook users is great, it would be nice to see some integration in the future, whether it coming from Facebook building in support for other services or releasing an API that other services can then use to integrate Facebook chat. With such a popular service I am sure the community would be behind it.

Via [Inside Facebook]

T-Mobile is giving its users a treat by including JuiceCaster, a mobile social networking service, to twelve of their handsets. JuiceCaster lets users share pictures and videos with their social network friends through the use of mobile phones.

To be offered as an unlimited add-on service which will costs $2.99 per month, JuiceCaster 6.0 will start appearing on T-Mobile handsets starting in early May. Once T-Mobile users subscribe to the service, they can start sharing pictures and videos, update their social networking profiles, friend lists, comments, ratings and personal statuses using their mobile phones. JuiceCaster currently works with top online social networking sites which include MySpace, Facebook and Twitter among others.

I would have to agree with Nick Desai, CEO of Juice Wireless, Inc. when he said that users are becoming more dependent on their mobile phones today not only for communication purposes but to network as well.

“By enabling users to easily capture and post desired content to their online profiles and update their status with real-time videos, we provide unprecedented capabilities in the social communications arena.”

Now, who says that the mobile web is dead? It’s just starting to live and grow.

Via [SlashPhone]

Popular social networking site Facebook has introduced a new feature that will allow it’s users to share content from other sites via their Mini-Feed, which sends it to the News Feeds of their friends. Users can import stories, albums, and other content from such sites as Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, and del.icio.us. This latest feature is yet another way for users to share information with each other easily and quickly. All they have to do is click the “Import” link at the top of their Mini-Feed. The site promises it will be adding even more sites, including Digg, in the near future.

Read [Facebook Blog]