"Spam King" Edward Davidson, who recently disappeared from the Colorado minimum security facility where he was serving 21 months for tax evasion and e-mail fraud, was found dead yesterday from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Davidson ran a company called Power Promoters from 2002 to 2007 that, among other things, promoted penny stock companies by sending out thousands of spam e-mails with falsified headers. When he was indicted in June 2007, the IRS reported that Davidson had collected over $3.5 million without paying taxes.
A July 14 email from AOL Executive Vice President of Products and Marketing Kevin Conroy was uncovered by TechCrunch this week announcing the eventual termination of AOL Pictures, Xdrive, Bluestring, and MyMobile. Many in AOL's Blog network also report being put on hiatus as a result of budget overages.
News of AOL's recent budgeting efforts range from the equable and calculated to the panicked and slapdash. Kevin Conroy's internal email represents the logical approach being taken by AOL. At this point, Conroy says, "every product makes a direct impact on the bottom line."That is to say, AOL can no longer afford to carry the burden of products that don't "effectively contribute to the financial health of [the] company."
Game maker Hasbro, just weeks after the release of a properly licensed Scrabble Facebook beta, have filed suit against the creators of the unauthorized, and apparently too-popular Scrabulous, asking for removal of the game in addition to unspecified damages.
At the beginning of the year Facebook was contacted about Scrabulous by Hasbro, owner of the game's rights in the United States, asking that it be taken down.
Sony announced today that its Reader e-book will support the EPUB and Adobe PDF/A formats with the device's next firmware upgrade.
The PRS-505 (or Reader) currently has a selection of about 40,000 titles available from Sony's eBook Store. But next month, new models and those with upgraded firmware will be able to load IDPF/EPUB, and PDF/A files. The device previously supported BBeB (Marlin) Books, PDF, TXT, RTF and Microsoft Word files (converted with Sony's CONNECT software).
Security research and analysis firm Sophos has released its cybercrime report for the first half of 2008 and found Blogger, a property of Google, to be the prime distributer of malware today.
Where infected e-mail attachments used to be the vehicle of choice for delivering malware, Sophos notes that most attacks today come from infected Web sites. Last year, one in 332 e-mails contained a malicious attachment. Today, that number has dropped to one in every 2,500.
Since 2006, Finnish Cell phone producer Nokia and California chipmaker Qualcomm have been engaged in an intellectual property battle which began as a disagreement over patent licensing royalties. Just as the two companies were scheduled for a federal trial, they reached an amicable solution.
Yestderday, Nokia and Qualcomm announced that they had entered a 15-year agreement covering GSM, EDGE, CDMA, WCDMA, HSDPA, OFDM, WiMAX, LTE and "other technologies." This came at almost the same time as the announcement that a German court -- the third body, in addition to the UK High Court and The US International Trade Commission-- had ruled that Qualcomm's GSM patent suit against Nokia was invalid.
One Internet spammer was sentenced this week to nearly four years in prison, while another fled a correctional facility and is currently on the run.
Robert Soloway, who ran Newport Internet Marketing Corp and pled guilty to mail fraud, e-mail fraud, and tax evasion in May 2007 received his sentence yesterday: 3 years and 11 months in federal prison.
The record-breakingly long merger of XM and Sirius satellite radio now hangs upon the vote of one final FCC Commissioner.
After approval by shareholders in both companies, then a green light by the Department of Justice, the approval of five Federal Communications Commission commissioners is one of the major remaining hurdles the companies must endure before they can join.
Thirteen record labels have filed for a summary judgement to their two-year old case against peer-to-peer file swapping service LimeWire, seeking to bring a swift end to the drawn-out conflict.
In 2006, the Recording Industry Association of America sued LimeWire seeking $150,000 per occurrence of illicit music sharing, claiming the service participated in "inducement of copyright infringement, contributatory copyright infringement, and with respect to pre-1972 recordings, common law copyright infringement and state law unfair competition."
A patent infringement suit over some of Nintendo's game controllers will enter a Federal Court of Appeals following the $21 million verdict in favor of plaintiff Anascape.
In May, Texas-based Anascape won $21 million dollars from Nintendo in a patent infringement suit filed against the company for its game controller design. At the time, it was not disclosed which aspects were found to be in violation, but Nintendo said the Wiimote and nunchuck (part of its industry-leading Wii console) were safe.
New York Governor David Patterson yesterday approved a bill that will make ESRB video game ratings mandatory, require parental controls in consoles, and fund a study of the correlation between in-game and real-life acts of violence.
The state senate voted 61-1 in favor of the bill (A.11717 / S.6401-A) under the sponsorship of state senator Andrew Lanza (R).
Microsoft announced today that user-created games will be sold on Xbox Live through a new Community Games section starting this fall, with developers taking 70 percent of the revenue.
Almost two years ago, Microsoft first announced its plans to open Xbox 360 development to the public with the unveiling of its XP-compatible XNA Game Studio Express, and fully-featured XNA Game Studio.
The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) has announced a collaboration with General Motors and 34 North American power companies to speed the integration of electric cars into the grid.
By 2010, there are expected to be a handful of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) available on the United States market, and for them to be properly deployed, a blueprint for an electric fuel infrastructure must be laid out.
AOL's social news property Propeller, which began as a part of Netscape.com revamp headed by Internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, has been re-designed and re-launched under the same name.
Besides the nuclear-age design ethic upgrade, the service has scrapped its old ranking system entirely. Formerly, it worked like Digg and Yahoo Buzz, where a story's ranking was determined strictly by the number of votes it had.
Sony Ericsson today announced the upcoming availability of its newest Walkman-branded handsets, adding a new top and bottom to the now three-year-old line of phones.
The W302 will be the "most affordable Walkman phone to date," when it premieres in the fourth quarter of this year, according to Sony Ericsson. Offering a 2-megapixel camera, FM radio, and 512MB memory stick storage, the W302 is a quad-band GSM/EDGE/GPRS device -- the only model of this new crop that doesn't offer 3G connectivity.