Richings is structured into specialist practice groups in order to provide first-class expertise in cost consulting, civil and commercial litigation cases.

They have represented and worked with some of the biggest companies in the South East and have developed a reputation for client care and value for money.

Each member of their team has an individual focus which is unusual for a solicitors firm. Therefore, they can offer advice and assistance on all types of cost disputes. They can also provide immediate advice and assistance where urgent action is necessary.

If you require an expert solicitors firm in the South East to assist and guide you through complex commercial or civil litigation then JW Richings is a firm you should contact at www.jwrichings.com

Days after Google unveiled Friend Connect, which lets the sites of musicians, political campaigns and others incorporate profile data from several social networks, Facebook began to block the program.

Although Google was taking advantage of the same tools that Facebook made available free to other outside developers, Facebook said Google was violating Facebook’s restrictions on data sharing. The two sides remain in a stalemate.

Google, whose Orkut social network has tens of millions of users in Brazil, tried to reach further into social networking with the November unveiling of a consortium called OpenSocial, which lets developers write applications for use on multiple social networks. News Corp.’s MySpace has joined, but Facebook hasn’t.

This month, Google unveiled Friend Connect, which promises to pool profile data from Facebook, Google Talk, Orkut, LinkedIn, Plaxo and hi5, though not MySpace. The profile information gets incorporated into other sites _ a political campaign, for instance, can build communities of supporters by tapping existing networks _ with Google serving as the intermediary.

Facebook quickly objected, citing privacy concerns. Normally dealing with other companies one on one, Facebook can block a service it feels violates its rules. With Google as the intermediary, Facebook lost that leverage, so it decided to block Friend Connect entirely.

In a blog posting, Facebook developer Charlie Cheever said Google’s Friend Connect “redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect.”

Google responded, acknowledging it passes along data. But it said sharing is limited to links for profile photos of users and friends who have expressly consented to sharing with that particular site. The user’s name and numeric ID on Facebook are replaced with Google’s own identifiers, Google said in a company blog post.

Google also said it purges Facebook data from its systems every 30 minutes, more frequently than the 24 hours required by Facebook.

Facebook has run into privacy challenges before, most recently when it unveiled a marketing tool called “Beacon” that tracked purchases Facebook members made on other Web sites and sent alerts to their Facebook friends about the transactions.

But Rachel Happe, research manager at IDC, said the dispute is ultimately about control rather than privacy. She said Google’s Friend Connect “starts to eat into other people’s value proposition, which is why you saw Facebook object to it.”

Datatec News Room

Man Pleads Guilty in E-Mail Spam Case
03/15/2008 A man once described as one of the world’s top e-mail spammers pleaded guilty Friday to federal charges of mail fraud, wire fraud, and failure to file a tax return.
Robert Alan Soloway, 29, was dubbed “the spam king” by prosecutors who said he used networks of compromised computers to send out millions upon millions of junk e-mails since 2003.

He was arrested last summer and charged in a 40-count indictment. He agreed to plead guilty to the three charges and the rest were dropped, including e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and numerous other counts of mail and wire fraud.

Prosecutors said Soloway made hundreds of thousands of dollars from his spamming business, Newport Internet Marketing Corp. When he’s sentenced in June, U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman will determine how much restitution he must pay.

The government already seized at least four of his bank accounts, and Soloway has agreed to take a polygraph test as to his remaining assets.

He could face up to 20 years in prison.

Nearly 2,000 people involved in Internet pornography activities also were penalized.
Aparently 33 people were arrested in connection with a Web site that allowed customers, mainly in Taiwan, to view live sex shows filmed at 12 separate locations in the southern Chinese city of Zhuhai.

China’s online population has soared to 210 million people and could surpass the United States this year to become the world’s biggest, the official China Internet Network Information Center said earlier this month.

The government regularly censors and restricts access to content it considers subversive or politically sensitive, and Chinese Web sites often hire their own censors to eliminate certain content.

Wow.. we all think it must suck to be Chinese in China.
Even our female staff.
Not that we condone pornography of course.
Datatec

“How great it is to launch a partnership with a company with as large an influence as MySpace on such an important topic,” Jane Friedman, President and CEO of HarperCollins, said Wednesday in a statement.

“MySpace has entire online communities, such as the Impact Channel and OurPlanet, dedicated solely to environmental and social causes,” Tom Anderson, co-founder and president of MySpace, said in a statement. “The first MySpace book is just one more way we are working to engage the MySpace community in environmental issues and encourage people to take action.”

The paperback original, to be called “MySpace/Our Planet: Change is Possible,” will be written by freelance journalist Jeca Taudte and include a foreword by Anderson. According to Brenda Bowen, vice president and publisher of the Bowen Press, a HarperCollins imprint, “MySpace/Our Planet” will be about 160 pages and cost about $12.95. A first printing of 200,000 is planned.

Cool we thinks

To find and remove copyrighted music, YouTube already uses separate filtering tools developed by Los Gatos-based Audible Magic Corp.

YouTube’s previous lack of copyright protections for video content prompted Viacom Inc. to sue it for $1 billion for showing thousands of clips that the New York-based company owned.

As YouTube’s traffic soared, movie and TV studios became increasingly frustrated with the rampant piracy fueling its popularity, though YouTube said it has followed copyright laws by removing protected video upon request.

Studios’ exasperation with YouTube escalated as other popular Web sites introduced filtering technology in recent months to prevent copyrighted material from being uploaded.

YouTube’s critics have argued that the site turned a blind eye to flagrant piracy so it could show more appealing material to build its audience and pump up its value. Google prized San Bruno-based YouTube so much it paid $1.76 billion to buy the site 11 months ago.

YouTube has been working with Google engineers ever since to develop the tools needed to flag copyrighted video, said David King, a YouTube product manager.

Datatec Office Comment:
YouTube Google etc, will allways be battling between freedom of data and censorship.
Neither can have afford to have their sites taken off the air due to unsavoury information being displayed.
But they would also like to uphold the freedom of the net.
Guess capatilism wins out again. (Thank God !)

OUR CommentsCan you believe this, our office has been waiting in anticipation to play this latest “shoot em up” So I hope the one we get at the weekend works fine.

We’ll let you know
Datatec gamers

“We want to assure our customers and partners that they can continue to rely on SCO products, support and services for their critical business operations,” Darl McBride, president and chief executive, said in a statement Friday.

McBride has blamed competition from Linux for operating losses and the ongoing slide in company revenues. The company said its operating loss in the quarter ending April 30 was $1.1 million. A year earlier, it lost $3.9 million.

In August, U.S. District Court Dale Kimball ruled that Novell Inc., not SCO, owns the copyrights covering the Unix operating system. SCO licenses the Unix software for corporate servers.

The case could leave SCO with a bigger liability: Kimball said SCO may owe Novell software royalties.

Icahn’s stake was worth $426.5 million based on the stock price before the filing. After the filing, BEA shares rose 49 cents, or nearly 4 percent, to close at $13.25 Friday.

BEA’s stock has declined steadily over the past year. Before Icahn’s filing, the stock price was down 24 percent since its 52-week high last October, a drop that wiped out about $1.5 billion in shareholder wealth.

In the filing, Icahn blamed consolidation in the technology industry for hurting the business of independent software companies like BEA.

He said BEA’s stock is undervalued and a sale would help drive up the price if BEA were bolstered by the resources of a larger company that could boost sales while stripping out duplicate costs.

Icahn said he intends to meet with BEA’s management to discuss possibly selling the company and might seek to nominate people to the board of directors.