by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
EarthLink email customers experienced outages over much of the weekend, according to numerous online complaints.
Starting Friday, Twitter users began to post updates about service outages. Alex Mendez tweeted “33:40 minutes on the cellphone dealing with TW / earthlink. UGH,” and Diane Fischler wrote, “Not getting email messages again. Woke up to about 60 left over from yesterday’s Earthlink outage, now seems to be down again. Who else?”
by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
The use of peer-to-peer networks for sharing files has come under fire during recent months, including the dismantling of Swedish BitTorrent site Pirate Bay, but it turns out even members of Congress need to be kept in check over their file-sharing practices.
by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Cybercriminals are capitalizing on swine-flu fears by pitching sales of fake Tamiflu, security firm Sophos said.
Networks of fraudsters use spam and malware to direct Web traffic to phony pharmaceutical sites, wrote Graham Cluley, a technology consultant for Sophos.
by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
A new fashion-rental service has been getting buzz this week, but it follows other designer sites that have adopted the Netflix model to their ventures.
Rent the Runway, which started Monday, marks another entry into the growing market of online luxury rental services.
by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
The Council of the European Union has approved new legislation that would require Web users to consent to Internet cookies.
Cookies, small programs that can be used to track Web movements, have come under fire as consumer groups, including the Federal Trade Commission, have sought to regulate companies that engage in targeted behavioral advertising.
by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
As news of the Fort Hood shooting rampage spread last week, media outlets and readers both put Twitter and its new lists feature to the test.
Just as the service was instrumental in providing updates during the summer’s election protests in Iran, Twitter feeds from Texas-based news sources such as the Austin-American Statesman and the Killeen Daily Herald provided a stream of local updates.
by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Jack Dorsey, the chairman and co-founder of the popular microblogging service Twitter, shared far more than his site’s 140-character message limit when he offered himself up to a public psychoanalysis.
As part of an exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City, Mr. Dorsey subjected himself to a Jungian analyst.
by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s latest effort to call out what it considers violations of copyright and trademark law comes in the form of a mock-awards page, complete with “honorees,” called the Takedown Hall of Shame.
The tech-advocacy group highlights a handful of cases it calls “the most egregious examples of takedown abuse,” usually involving businesses or organizations that cry foul–or issue takedown notices–even when their copyrighted materials are used in accordance with fair-use laws.
by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
The success of private-sale sites like Gilt Groupe, which holds daily members-only sales of off-season luxury items, have led to imitators hoping to emulate the success of a business model that’s catching on with recession-strapped consumers.
Private-sale sites let shoppers experience the cachet of owning luxury items without paying full price.
by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
This Is Why You’re Fat, a Web site for food gone awry, is holding a photo competition in which contestants visit New York street vendors and shoot themselves with coronaries-on-plates.
It’s not a contest for the faint of heart. For a site whose tag line is “Where dreams become heart attacks,” each food truck will create an appropriate contest dish, like chocolate cupcakes with bacon shavings.
by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Studies have already shown that chatting on a cellphone while driving is just as dangerous as driving drunk.
While several U.S. states have enacted hands-free cellphone laws for drivers, New York’s Taxi and Limousine Commission is going a step further by proposing harsher rules for cab drivers who violate the commission’s decade-old rule against all cellphone use. The current regulations include cabbies who talk while wearing a hands-free headset, but the TLC says it’s tired of the ban being violated.
by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Grammy judges will be listening to the upcoming award nominees online, thanks to a partnership with Yangaroo, a Canadian media-distribution start-up.
The company’s technology encrypts music files with a watermark and lets record labels share them securely with radio stations and other destinations. The watermark allows Yangaroo to identify each person who has downloaded a track, so if a song is leaked, it can trace its origin.
by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Looking for obnoxious chauvinism? There’s an app for that.
Pepsi’s Amp energy drink issued an apology for its new iPhone app, called Before You Score, which drew outrage from some female consumers who deemed the application sexist.
by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
A new celebrity site has launched a campaign to get Tracy Morgan, a star of NBC’s “30 Rock,” on Twitter.
The site, OMGICU, encourages visitors to send their celebrity sightings, and Mr. Morgan is its most-seen subject. Its founder, Hugh Dornbush, on Tuesday created a second site, Twacy.org, to convince the comedian to get to tweeting.
by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
When it comes to social-networking sites, women are more plugged in than men, according to data analysis by Brian Solis, president of Silicon Valley public-relations firm Future Works.
Mr. Solis used Google Ad Planner to determine the gender breakdown of users signed up for the most popular social-networking sites and found that in most cases, women outnumbered men. “The point of interest that’s worth review and discussion is that in social media, women rule,” he wrote.
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