Stratton tells us he received a four-page letter via FedEx on April 2nd which came from Facebook’s lawyers, the Seattle-based firm Perkins Coie. Stratton, who’s actually the founder of Feed.Us, says he’s in “no way related to this Defaceable company,” but confirms he made a comment on the TechCrunch article about Defaceable’s software.

Yahoo attacked Facebook with 10 patents, so Menlo Park has attacked Sunnyvale right back with 10 of its own. Get the popcorn; this is the biggest real-company-versus-patent-troll battle yet.

Bottom line: If you’re looking for a $100, high-end smartphone, or are a Windows Phone fan who has been waiting for better hardware, the Lumia 900 is worth considering. But the phone had just too many drawbacks in my tests to best its chief competitors.

Last week, Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal asked both parties to give settlement talks another chance, with a decision required by April 9. Even though they had another week, it must have been clear that a settlement just isn't in the cards.

Foxconn executive Louis Woo said that he would actually like it if Apple demanded that the company double the pay of factory employees. Your move, Apple.

The director of the National Security Agency has warned that the hacking group Anonymous could have the ability within the next year or two to bring about a limited power outage through a cyberattack.

In other words, many companies are taking advantage of Internet Explorer’s poor cookie blocking implementation for their own purposes. Their excuse is that P3P is dead and IE’s cookie blocking would break their website, so they just work around the browser’s privacy controls.

"The Google code was spotted by Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer and independently confirmed by a technical adviser to the Journal, Ashkan Soltani, who found that ads on 22 of the top 100 websites installed the Google tracking code on a test computer, and ads on 23 sites installed it on an iPhone browser."

The owner of an online social network cannot be obliged to install a general filtering system, covering all its users, in order to prevent the unlawful use of musical and audio-visual work

Could this happen on Android is a fairly cut-and-dry question. The answer is no, as in, a snowball's chance. No, nien, nyet, non. Why it can't happen on Android still only hints at the bigger problem.

The device, which exists as a prototype and will eventually be sold as a branded item to consumers, is the company’s most significant venture into hardware. While the initial purpose of the device will be for streaming music, the eventual use could be much wider.

Google has never shown that it has any of the characteristics necessary to build, market, and sell consumer goods.

Google Inc. is developing a home-entertainment system that streams music wirelessly throughout the home and would be marketed under the company's own brand, according to people briefed on the company's plans.

"The parties acknowledge that FB desires to enable Zynga to build the Zynga Platform on top of the Facebook Platform, and the parties desire to, amongst other goals set forth herein, work together to increase the number of users of each party’s products and services.

The parties further acknowledge that Zynga is making a significant commitment to the Facebook Platform (i.e., using Facebook as the exclusive Social Platform on the Zynga Properties and granting FB certain title exclusivities to Zynga games on the Facebook Platform).

The first royalty payments from iMatch are in, and they got me excited – the total amount is over $10,000 for the first two months.

Online coupon distributor Groupon (GRPN), in its first report since going public, this afternoon reported Q4 revenue ahead of analysts’ expectations but reported a surprise net loss instead of the expected profit.

We care deeply about your privacy and about creating a trusted place for you to share life with your close friends and family. As we continue to expand and grow we will make some mistakes along the way. We commit to you that we will continue to be transparent and always serve you, our users, first.

First of all, yes, Chrome for Android is here. Second, it’s only compatible with Ice Cream Sandwich which is currently on — wait for it — 1% of Android devices. But in an attempt to add some silver-lining to the 1% joke, I will say that Chrome for Android is of a much higher class than the previous Android browser, the aptly-named and horribly icon’d: Browser.

Developer Arun Thampi was doing a bit of hacking around with Path 2, trying to get a version of it running on OS X as an experiment, when he discovered that the app actually uploads your entire address book when it is launched. This obviously raised concerns about what the app is doing with that information and, in fact, why it needs it at all.

"Over the next year, we will begin expanding the use of our mobile technology by transitioning from the BlackBerry (RIM) platform that we currently use to smartphone technology via the iPhone," the Houston, Texas-based firm told employees in an internal newsletter this month.

On Wednesday, February 8th, Wolfram Alpha will be adding a new, "Pro" option to its already existing services. Priced at a very reasonable $4.99 a month ($2.99 for students), the new services includes the ability to use images, files, and even your own data as inputs instead of simple text entry.

No, this isn't payback, or about a grudge. This is just word from someone who's seen what this industry is capable of doing. Good, and Bad. No, I was not under contract, I was full time, offered stock (common shares, not that options bullcrap). I sympathized with contractors on how they were treated, most of the time. No, I was not some IT mangler. I worked for one of their "game studios", basically the front lines where content made it to the masses.

Last year, Facebook was named as a defendant in 22 lawsuits accusing it of patent infringement, double the number from 2010, according to a Reuters analysis of court documents on legal database Westlaw, a Thomson Reuters unit.

Facebook is expected to file to raise US$5bn in a preliminary IPO prospectus on Wednesday morning, which while less than anticipated could be increased to ultimate investor demand, according to sources close to the deal.

The user feedback we have been getting has been almost the other side of the reaction we’ve seen in the blogosphere. The users who have seen this in the wild are liking it, and our initial data analysis is showing the same.

“He had his first exit when he was 9.”

Nokia Oyj (NOK1V)’s first phones running Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) software may have sold enough units last year to help rebuild investor confidence in the Finnish company, which lost $19 billion in market value in 2011.

The hacker discovered a way to log in as another user, impersonate that user, chat and send photos on their behalf.

The vulnerabilities are also present in Blendr, the straight version of the app, according to a security expert who said both apps had "no real security" and were "poorly designed".

The internet seems to ignore legislation until somebody tries to take something away from us... then we carefully defend that one thing and never counter-attack. Then the other side says, "OK, compromise," and gets half of what they want. That's not the way to win... that's the way to see a steady and continuous erosion of rights online.

The solution is to start lobbying for our own laws.

"I’m guessing Apple’s pitch to the textbook companies is something like this: 'Digital transformation of your industry is inevitable. Here’s our plan; we’d like you to come along for the ride. But if you choose not to, we won’t hesitate to leave you behind.'"

"These measures won't put an end to online piracy; to do so, you would need a 'Net so architected around control and authentication that it would hardly resemble the 'Net we have today. Can a plan on the lines proposed cause the jolly pirates running The Pirate Bay to scuttle their boat? Possibly not. Will it provide a simple way to take down specific live streams of sporting events in real time? No."

Sources said four other directors will also step down soon. As I wrote last week, in a post suggesting Yang might also go, the prime candidates to go appear to be: Chairman Roy Bostock, Arthur Kern, Vyomesh Joshi, and Gary Wilson.

Fighting online piracy is extremely important. We are investing a lot of time and money in that fight. Last year alone we acted on copyright takedown notices for more than 5 million webpages and invested more than $60 million in the fight against ads appearing on bad sites. And we think there is more that can be done here—like targeted and focused steps to cut off the money supply to foreign pirate sites. If you cut off the money flow, you cut the incentive to steal.