In a landmark judgment, MySpace has been awarded $230 million in its suit against the so-called Spam King, Sanford Wallace and his partner Walter Rines. The decision, handed down in Los Angeles federal court on Tuesday, is the largest award so far since the CAN-SPAM Act was introduced in 2003.

MySpace decided to sue when it discovered the duo had lured MySpace users into revealing their login information through phishing sites. After obtaining user IDs and passwords, the pair distributed messages to the users’ friends list with links to various Web sites involving gambling, pornography and ringtones.

According to court documents, Wallace and Rines distributed 735,925 messages during the scam and earned over $500,000 in the process. The spam campaign caused hundreds of complaints and a big headache for MySpace, especially since the spam indiscriminately sent pornography links to minors as well as adults.

The federal judge in the case fined the spam partners the maximum amount under the law. CAN-SPAM allows for fines of $100 per message and that number can be tripled for particularly abusive practices. The pair were fined $163.4 million under two parts of CAN-SPAM, Rines was singled out for an extra $63.4 million, $1.5 million was for violating California’s anti-phishing laws. Rines and Wallace were also ordered to pay another $4.7 million for incurred legal fees.

A Legacy of Spamming and Litigation

Sanford Wallace is a spamming legend. Over the years he has run various companies including Spambot.net, Cyber Promotions, and Seismic Entertainment Productions - all have faced litigation. In 2006, the Federal Trade Commission won a judgment against Wallace for $4 million for a spyware-related scam. Wallace also made news in 1996, when he was blacklisted and refused service by several Internet Service Providers including AOL and Compuserve.

Can One Spam-Busting Suit Make a Difference?

The judgement against Wallace may seem to be a historic case and a warning to other spam-based businesses out there. But will it really work? MySpace thinks so. In an interview with the Associated Press, MySpace’s security chief, Hemanshu Nigam, said, “Anybody who’s been thinking about engaging in spam are going to say ‘Wow, I better not go there’.”

That sentiment seems doubtful to me. According to The Register Wallace’s last known location was Las Vegas, but his current whereabouts are unknown; so collecting the money will be next to impossible. It may send a message, but it only works if you can actually punish the perpetrators.

CREDIT - PC World contributor Ian Paul

Apparently the RIAA is so busy suing consumers that they forgot to hire a decent programmer. With a simple SQL injection, all their propaganda has been successfully wiped from the site.

It started out on the social news website Reddit, where a link to a really slow SQL query was posted. While the Reddit users were trying to kill the RIAA server, someone allegedly decided to up the ante and wipe the site’s entire database.

The comments on Reddit are only speculation so far. Based on the username, which was apparently “webReadOnly”, it might not have been setup correctly, or someone could have found another way to delete the content form the site.

Another possibility is that the RIAA themselves removed the content temporarily. This would seem unlikely, as a better solution would be to take it entirely offline to fix the bigger problem. While they could fix a small vulnerability like this in a matter of seconds, the chances are it’s not an isolated problem.

As pointed out by Haywire, playing around with the urls a bit can return some funny results. It is pretty easy to make the RIAA link to The Pirate Bay for example.

For now it sure does look like all the content has been wiped from the RIAA homepage. Let’s hope they have backups, or not.

MySpace and Internet soft-phone provider Skype announced a partnership Tuesday that will make Skype’s voice engine part of the social networking site’s instant messaging service.

The deal will connect MySpace’s 8 million active MySpaceIM users to Skype’s 220 million registered users through a new messaging client.

“We’re announcing a global partnership that brings free, high-quality voice messaging to MySpace users, creating the world’s largest voice messaging community,” said Jin Kim, senior business development manager for Skype.

MySpaceIM with Skype, due to be released in early November, embeds the Skype voice engine into MySpace’s proprietary instant messaging client. It will provide MySpace users with free voice messaging across both the existing MySpace and Skype communities, as well as access to Skype’s premium services—calling to and from standard phone numbers, voice mail and forwarding of voice calls to a phone number when a user is offline.

MySpace, still the dominant force in the social networking market, claims more than 70 million unique active users. But the service is facing increasing pressure from competitors such as Facebook and other niche networking sites. The partnership with Skype may help pull more users into MySpace.

“It seems pretty clear what MySpace gets out of this deal—a competitive differentiator,” said John Delaney, principal analyst at Ovum. “MySpace is big and still fast-growing, but it has been feeling heat from the more rapid audience growth seen by rival Facebook in recent months. So MySpace needs to regain some of the initiative. We think that incorporating Skype into its profile pages could prove an effective way of doing that.”

It also creates a new revenue stream for both companies, according to Kim. While he would not discuss the financial details of the deal, “we will say that it is a revenue-share deal, so we’re both incentivized to sell premium services,” he said.

Skype and MySpace will sell credits for Skype’s services through a co-branded Web store, advertised both on MySpace.com and within the client itself.

The discussions between Skype and MySpace about ways to deliver voice messaging to MySpace’s user base “predate the acquisition of both companies,” Kim said. “It just took us a while to get to the point where both sides were ready.”

The partnership also extends MySpace into the Skype universe. Users can link their MySpace profile to their Skype account and pull content from their MySpace page into their Skype profile.

“If they don’t have a MySpace profile yet,” Kim said, “there will be a button that allows them to go set one up.”

Once connected, users can pull photos from their MySpace page into Skype to use as their avatar and provide links within their Skype profile to their MySpace page.

In addition to being able to initiate calls from within Skype or MySpaceIM with Skype to other users, MySpace.com profiles will include a link within the “Contacting” box to instant message or call the user that launches an IM or voice session. Users can also restrict incoming calls to users on their MySpace friends list and screen calls just as they can in the standard Skype client.

The deal comes at a time when the company clearly needs good news. Skype’s co-founder Niklas Zennström stepped down from his CEO post earlier this month, and Skype’s parent company, eBay, has been disappointed with the unit’s performance.

In its filing with the SEC, eBay wrote off $1.4 billion for the third quarter, due to final payouts to Skype shareholders and a $900 million “impairment” charge based on a re-evaluation of Skype’s actual worth.

While the partnership will probably lead to more users of Skype’s free services, it’s not clear that MySpace users will jump immediately on the premium services Skype hopes they’ll be buying in volume.

“We expect that there’s going to be a natural progression of usage for a user from free [to premium services], once they get comfortable with [the technology],” said Kim. He points out that services such as the voice mail feature would appeal to many MySpace users in the younger demographic. “I can leave a contact a voicemail at any time,” he said.

But some analysts are skeptical about the impact on Skype’s bottom line. “We’re reliably informed that Skype will not be getting a share of MySpace’s advertising revenues,” said Ovum’s Delaney. “Nor do we believe that this is likely to drive very much revenue from usage of the Skype Out service. It’s likely that the main benefit [is] brand exposure.”

Jeff Kagan, an independent telecom market analyst, isn’t sure there’s any real upside.

“Is the marketplace ready for that kind of service today? We’ll just have to watch and see. But I don’t get too excited about this yet.”

NEW YORK - A billion dollars just doesn’t go as far as it used to. For the first time, it takes more than $1 billion to earn a spot on Forbes magazine’s list of the 400 richest Americans. The minimum net worth for inclusion in this year’s rankings released Thursday was $1.3 billion, up $300 million from last year.

The new threshold meant 82 of America’s billionaires didn’t make the cut.

Collectively, the people who made the rankings released Thursday are worth $1.54 trillion, compared with $1.25 trillion last year.

The very top of the list was unchanged: Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates led the list for the 14th straight year, this time with a net worth estimated at $59 billion. He was followed by Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. in second place with an estimated $52 billion and casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, No. 3 with an estimated worth of $28 billion.

Larry Ellison of Oracle Corp. maintained his ranking at No. 4, with an estimated net worth of $26 billion.

But the list showed some notable changes.

Joining the top 10 of the country’s richest for the first time were Google Inc. founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who tied for fifth place. The 34-year-old moguls’ wealth has quadrupled since 2004 to an estimated $18.5 billion this year, while their company’s stock value has surged 500 percent.

And, lower down, almost half of the 45 newcomers made their millions in hedge funds and private equity investments. The youngest member of this year’s list was 33-year-old hedge fund manager John Arnold, who joined the ranks at No. 317 and a net worth of $1.5 billion.

“Wall Street really led the charge this year,” said Matthew Miller, editor of the Forbes list. “God only knows if they’ll be on it next year. It really just depends on what the market does.”

Surging oil prices also helped some members of the list. Oil baron brothers Charles and David Koch also broke into the top 10, sharing the No. 9 spot with estimated wealth of $17 billion. Their ascension bumped the Walton family, heirs to the Wal-Mart Stores Inc. fortune, from the top 10 for the first time since 1989.

The discount retailer, struggling with a slowing economy and higher gasoline prices as well as merchandising mishaps, has seen its sales lag behind rivals like Target Corp.

Climbing 19 rungs to No. 7 was casino tycoon Kirk Kerkorian, who doubled his net worth to an estimated $18 billion. The 90-year-old investor is a majority shareholder in MGM Mirage — operator of the MGM Grand, Bellagio and other casinos — which saw record profits at several of its Las Vegas hotel-casinos.

Rounding out the top 10 was Michael Dell of computer maker Dell Inc., who was No. 8 with an estimated $17.2 billion.

The magazine confirmed the worth of an individual’s holdings in public companies by using the Aug. 31 closing stock price, and estimated the value of private companies by evaluating comparable public firms in the industry. The list also takes into account philanthropic donations

Branded mini-applications — call them apps, badges, widgets, gadgets or whatchamacallits — aren’t anything new. They’re all over social networks, portals and even desktops. And they’re still going.

Google today announced Google Gadget Ads, non-traditional ad units with interactive, rich media capabilities.

The Gadget Ads can be Individual advertisers and agencies alike can develop the ads using Flash, HTML or both. They can incorporate real-time data feeds, images and video.

Advertisers will be able to choose between cost-per-click and cost-per-impression pricing models, as well as target their ads based on site context, domain, geography and demographics. And users can share and embed the gadgets on their blogs and portal homepages, though they won’t get any cash for carrying the corporate flag.

Google is willing to distribute the gadgets across its advertising network, which the company claims reaches 75 percent of unique Internet users.

Preliminary Google Gadget Ad beta participants included brand advertisers such as Pepsi-Cola North America’s Sierra Mist, Intel, Honda, Six Flags and Paramount Vantage.

Jupiter Research analyst Emily Riley told InternetNews.com to expect more brand name advertisers in the future. “This isn’t necessarily, but it’s certainly new for Google. They’re hoping to entice more brand advertisers.”.

Nothing new there, of course. According to a recent report from TNS Media Intelligence, Internet display advertising expenditures from January to June this year grew to $5.6 million, up 17.7 percent from the same period a year ago.

Google is after that growth. That’s why it bought ad-serving firm DoubleClick earlier this year and started offering video advertising last summer.

Google Gadget Ads is currently in an expanded beta with a select group of AdWords advertisers worldwide.

 George Hotz holds up the hacked iPhone he traded for a car.

 George Hotz, of Glen Rock, New Jersey, said he had reached the deal with CertiCell, a Louisville, Kentucky-based mobile phone repair company.

Hotz posted on his blog that he traded his modified iPhone for “a sweet Nissan 350Z and 3 8GB iPhones.”

**In Australia, a new Nissan 350Z sells for more than $60,000, while in the US an 8GB iPhone can be bought for $US599 ($730).

“This has been a great end to a great summer,” Hotz wrote.

The 17-year-old Hotz said he will be sending the three new iPhones to the three online collaborators who helped him divorce Apple Inc’s popular product from AT&T’s network. The job took 500 hours, or about 8 hours a day since the iPhone’s June 29 launch.

Hotz made the deal with Terry Daidone, co-founder of CertiCell, who also promised the teen a paid consulting job.

“We do not have any plans on the table right now to commercialize Mr. Hotz’ discovery,” Daidone said in a statement.

Thanks to Brandon (Dating Gold) For showing me this article

NEW YORK - A teenager in New Jersey has broken the lock that ties Apple’s iPhone to AT&T’s wireless network, freeing the most hyped cell phone ever for use on the networks of other carriers, including overseas ones.

George Hotz, 17, confirmed Friday that he had unlocked an iPhone and was using it on T-Mobile’s network, the only major U.S. carrier apart from AT&T that is compatible with the iPhone’s cellular technology.

While the possibility of switching from AT&T to T-Mobile may not be a major development for U.S. consumers, it opens up the iPhone for use on the networks of overseas carriers.

“That’s the big thing,” said Hotz, in a phone interview from his home in Glen Rock.

The phone, which combines an innovative touch-screen interface with the media-playing abilities of the iPod, is sold only in the U.S.

Calls to AT&T and Apple for comment were not immediately returned.

The hack, which Hotz posted Thursday to his blog, is complicated and requires skill with both soldering and software. It takes about two hours to perform. Since the details are public, it seems likely that a small industry may spring up to buy U.S. iPhones, unlock them and send them overseas.

“That’s exactly, like, what I don’t want,” Hotz said. “I don’t want people making money off this.”

He said he wished he could make the instructions simpler, so users could modify the phones themselves.

“But that’s the simplest I could make them,” Hotz said.

The modification leaves the iPhone’s many functions, including a built-in camera and the ability to access Wi-Fi networks, intact. The only thing that won’t work is the “visual voicemail” feature, which shows voice messages as if they were incoming e-mail.

Hotz collaborated online with four other people, two of them in Russia, to develop the unlocking process.

“Then there are two guys who I think are somewhere U.S.-side,” Hotz said. He knows them only by their online handles.

PlayboyU is stealing a page from Facebook — Facebook circa 2004, that is — and launching a college-only social network, restricted to people with “.edu” addresses. With help from Ning, it’s starting PlayboyU — but not, sadly enough, delivering the goods in the form of nude coed shots. No matter. The college-only restriction limits the potential audience. And why would college kids, when Facebook and MySpace exist, bother to sign up for this website? The association with a porn brand alone should be enough to scare most students off. One thing Playboy forgot: “.edu” addresses include professors and alumni, who might take an interest in students’ extracurricular activities on the site. We’re placing the site on immediate deathwatch.

Well Well, lets sum it up here, adult ad world is the relatively newcomer to the battleground of the giants , and look what those guys achieved, seems like they growing so fast, everyone and their momma seems to use them in the adult industry.

We all know Alexa represents not to much those days, but still it certainly speaks of the general trend and slowly aaw dominate the markets.

I remember they started up as a team of 4 and they did so much! , their new so called innovative ways did a lot of good for them, their banners have excellent ctr, and with new publishers joining daily, they’re quickly working their way to the top.

From IQ69 alone, I’d say a good 30-50% of webmasters use them, and why not? They make more money than others and you don’t have to worry about any conversions, just drive traffic and make money.

Of course not everything is good in da hood. We’ve hear many complaints including spyware on sites , commonly reported redirects , random crapware popping up on sites and so on…

Their banners are tricky, maybe even “misleading”, but I suppose you cant blame them. They need to make money in order for us to make money. We can hardly expect them to pay us out of the goodness of their hearts.

Although CPMs have been down lately, I’m sticking with them and really hope they improve and address the complaints people have about them. Most of all, we NEED more active rep’s on the board. They need to follow the threads and at least let us know they are fixing shit up.

I still think those guys achieved so much in so little time. So good work. just don’t stop here , fix it up and so much more people will use you.

San Francisco (InfoWorld) - Skype Ltd. announced late Friday that all users could now again log on to the voice-over-IP service, marking the end of an outage that affected millions and lasted more than 48 hours. At 7:00 p.m. Eastern, Villu Arak, the Skype spokesman who has been posting blackout updates, said: “The sign-on problems have been resolved. [However] Skype presence and chat may still take a few more hours to be fully operational.

According to user statistics gathered via an RSS feed provided by Skype, the number of users connected to the service climbed throughout Friday afternoon, from about 3 million at noon to more than 5.6 million shortly after 6:00 p.m. EDT, a sign that Skype was coming back to life.

Individual users, meanwhile, reported that they were able to reconnect to the service — in some cases for the first time in almost two days — and that their connections remained stable, even if the Skype client was often slow to respond.

Although Skype first confirmed the outage Thursday around 9 a.m. EDT, users writing on the company’s own message forums began reporting problems connecting to the service as early as Wednesday afternoon. The company, a division of online auctioneer eBay Inc., has not provided details of the blackout’s cause, saying only that it was due to a “deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software.”

Speculation that the outage was caused by a distributed denial-of-service attack or by some previously planned maintenance that Skype conducted late Tuesday have been regularly quashed by the company. “No… attack was related to the current sign-on issues in any way,” Arak wrote early Friday.

Users, while relieved that the VoIP and instant messaging service was again alive, continued to blast the Luxembourg-based company for disrupting their business and personal communications.

A user tagged as “free skypeout minutes,” who claimed to work for a Swedish company already heavily reliant on Skype’s for-a-fee services, got to the point. “All plans to incorporate Skype into more of our procedures are now on hold indefinitely.”