On Wednesday Robert Soloway was charged with fraud in connection with electronic mail, aggravated identity theft plus another 33 various charges. Soloway is the first person to be charged under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and if he is found guilty on all counts he will face a fine of a cool US$250,000 and a maximum prison term of 65 years - ouch! Prosecutors also want to seize US$773,000 from him, it is rumoured that this is how much Soloway has made from his firm, Newport Internet Marketing.

Unfortunately we’ve all been here before with over US$10 million in damages being awarded to Robert Braver, an ISP owner, by an Oklahoma court in 2005 and a Washington court ruling in favour of good old Microsoft back in the same year for the tidy sum of US$7 million. However neither of these rulings forced Soloway into a corner and he has remained one of Spamhaus’ most wanted spammers ever since.

In fact he appears to have had a pretty good time of it so far as, according to the prosecutor, he lives in a ‘ritzy apartment’ and drives a Mercedes convertible. Nice work if you can get it.

Here’s an interesting email from Soloway regarding the Braver ruling showing his arrogance. Spamhaus also has a nice list of bits and pieces they have compiled on Soloway over the years.

Hopefully this time, Soloway will get what he deserves and our inboxes will be a little leaner from now on.

Source: CNN

Featured Tags email, robert-soloway, spam


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On Wednesday KOTV posted a report on its website that a lightening strike had caused a fire at an oil refinery in Oklahoma. The company that owned the oil refinery announced that there had been no fire and the report was wrong. KOTV removed the story from its site but meanwhile the price of crude oil had increased by 40 cents a barrel. Now admittedly that was a less than 1% increase but after the finger of bad journalism was pointed at engadget recently, you think that the mainstream media would get this kind of thing right.

As an aside, oil prices had dropped by US$2 the day before after expectations that a new president in Nigeria would stablise the supply from the country. The more cynical amongst us may think that a greedy oil baron had phoned in with the news of the fire to KOTV.

Source: I4U

Featured Tags internet, oil


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Never underestimate the power of the blogger. Engadget posted about an internal email at Apple stating that the iPhone and Leopard launches were to be delayed to October and next January respectively. Later Apple stated that the original email was a fake and the product launches are still on track.

Despite there only being twenty minutes between engadget’s post and the response, Apple’s share price fell by 2.2 percent. Needless to say Apple investor’s would have been none too pleased at the power of the blog.

However there’s an interesting follow up article at the Inquirer regarding a post at Information Week. The post suggests that engadget behaved irresponsibly and it was naive journalism to post about the email without checking with Apple first.

Lessons learned in Journalism 101, however, would have prevented the debacle.

The post at IW seems to be confusing journalism with blogging - sure there are many similarities but a blog tends to be an opinion rather than a ‘news items’. They try to blame engadget for the share price dip yet surely that was more due to the nervousness of the shareholders than anything else. Also this is not the first time a company’s share price has moved due to rumour or speculation - in fact the markets thrive on such movements.

No, as far as I’m concerned engadget did the right thing reporting information as they discovered it.

As an aside the Apple share price currently stands at $109.44 - over a dollar up from where it stood PRIOR to the fake email post. If I was a Apple investor (of the less nervous variety) I would be cracking open a cold one right now and saying ‘Go, go, engadget’.

Featured Tags apple, engadget, iphone


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Heavyweights Viacom and NBC have joined in to support Robert Tur’s lawsuit against Youtube.

In a friends-of-the-court brief filed Friday, Viacom and NBC Universal asked a U.S. District Court judge in Los Angeles to deny a motion filed by Google to dismiss Tur’s suit.

Tur filed a copyright infringement suit against Youtube last year prior to their acquisition by Google. Google have now filed a motion to dismiss his case as Youtube is protected under the safe harbour provision.

Viacom and NBC are concerned that the judge’s decision in Tur’s case will have an impact on their own lawsuit against Youtube. In their legal brief they try to emphasise differences between Tur’s case and their own.

(Viacom and NBC Universal) request that the court consider that its works are more popular, more commercial, and far more numerous than Tur’s,” wrote Frackman, of the law firm Mitchell, Silberberg & Knupp. “They comprise a significant portion of the infringing works contained on YouTube, viewed billions of times, and are among the most-viewed and highest-rated videos on YouTube.

Roughly translated they are saying ‘we have more copyrighted material than Tur and our copyrighted material is viewed more often and makes more money than his, so his case has no bearing on ours’

What double talk from Viacom and NBC, they’ll support Tur but if he loses then they are nothing to do with him. Personally I think they’re scared.

Source: ZDNet

Featured Tags copyright_infringement, nbc, viacom, youtube


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You would think Youtube would be hanging on to its money instead of dishing it out to contributors. Especially as they are now being sued by the English Premier League for hosting videos of soccer games. The lawsuit says

Defendants, which own and operate the Web site YouTube.com, have knowingly misappropriated and exploited this valuable property for their own gain without payment or license to the owners of the intellectual property

All pretty standard rhetoric but how long can Google handle these lawsuits against Youtube, they seem to be almost a weekly occurrence. The standard Youtube response is that they are not responsible for what is uploaded by the site’s users, but more of these lawsuits seem to be focusing on Youtube encouraging users to post copyrighted material.

Youtube do have a copyright notice slapped on their video upload page, but you do wonder if Google’s legal department’s patience is wearing a bit thin.

Anyway we checked out Youtube and searched for ‘English premier league’ and much to my disappointment we couldn’t find downloads of this weekend’s footy games, just highlights of recent games. Nothing even worth posting here.

Are the English Premier League on a fruitless crusade, or should Youtube be shut down forever, let us know your thoughts.

Source: BBC

Featured Tags english_premier_league, football, youtube


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No, neither of the merger names really work, but despite this Microsoft and Yahoo are again looking at a merger. According to the New York Post Microsoft had made an offer for Yahoo a few months ago which had been rejected but it looks as if Microsoft have made yet another more vigorous offer this week. Yahoo’s share price reacted appropriately to the rumors, ending Friday at around $31 an increase of 10% for the day. Yahoo’s price tag was a mere $50 billion at the end of trading.

Ever since Google purchased DoubleClick Microsoft has been under pressure to increase it’s own web advertising presence. Purchasing Yahoo would achieve that goal, although it would not make much difference to Google’s search domination. We’re certain that it would take more than a merger of the competition to worry the guys at the plex.

A lot of the media reports stated that the merger would not happen due to the diversity in the culture of the staff. We’ve never noticed that being a problem before with any mergers we’ve been a part of. There’s always a bigger partner whose culture slowly infiltrates the smaller.

With this merger it’s just a question of how much Microsoft want this, will they stump up the cash? And if Bill opens up his wallet Yahoo may not get to play much part in the joint role.

Would a MS-Yahoo merger be a good thing, could it spell the end of Google’s domination? Let us know your thoughts.

Featured Tags merger, microsoft, yahoo


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Well, Messenger in a Browser to be more precise. I’ve just been taking a look at Yahoo’s browser Messenger beta, so it’ll be live in 2012 or so. Removing applications from your desktop and system tray seems like a good idea to me and as you can add MS Live contacts too so you get to remove even more icons and applications from your PC. It also means you can IM while you are away with your laptop or from any PC anywhere.

On downside is that your addins like Yahoo Finance are not automatically displayed but there is a link to My Yahoo which you can modify to suit your information needs. Also there’s no new faetures so it’s not really a giant leap forward more a little bit of a tip toe into the future.

Source: Reuters

Featured Tags IM, messenger, yahoo


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