Yesterday, after month long negotiations finally broke down between the hacker group and Symantec, Anonymous leaked the source code for Symantec’s PCAnywhere software. The source code was actually stolen in late December or early January of this year, after which Symantec apparently tried to handle the situation by paying the hacker group $50,000 to not leak the code.

Turns out the entire negotiations were just a setup by law enforcement officers, trying to lure the hackers in order to get their information. The entire email thread has been posted online for everyone to see by the Lords of Dharamaja, one of the hacker groups associated with Anonymous. Posting on his Twitter, one of the hackers, Yama Tough, wrote, “You won’t believe it but Symantec offered us money to keep quiet.”

According to Symantec spokesperson Cris Paden who told Forbes in an interview, “Symantec began to receive emails from the hackers a few days later, in which the group demanded money not to publish the portion of Symantec’s source code it hadn’t yet released.”

“When they came to us with what was for all intents and purposes extortion, we went to law enforcement,” says Paden. “From that point on, we turned over the investigation to them.” Eventually after the month long sting operation that didn’t go as intended, Anonymous finally released the source code yesterday on file sharing sites around the world. “We’re able to say with high confidence, any type of cyber attacks generated by this attack would have old characteristics and look like an attack from 2006 that can easily be stopped using current versions of our solutions,” says Paden as Symantec is still analyzing the leaked code. “Our customers are protected.”

The effectiveness of the sting operation by the unnamed law enforcement agencies isn’t clear yet, as the investigation of this leak against one of the world’s biggest security firm is still under way. “As to what happens next,” Paden says. “We’re not really sure.”

A team of researchers headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University made quite an interesting, albeit obvious, discovery. According to their findings, people are more likely to give into their cravings to check their emails and social networks than sleeping and sex, more so than consuming cigarettes and alcohol.

The experiment was carried out in Würtzburg, Germany, where 205 people between the age of 18 and 85 were given BlackBerry handsets to monitor their behavior “in the wild”. Each participant was pinged 7 times a day over the period of 14 hours for 7 days. Everybody was to reply back specifying whether they experienced the desire for something at that moment, or within the last 30 minutes, and what the desire was about. Additionally they were also asked on how strong their urges were, whether they were irresistible, and if they conflicted with other desires. There were 10,558 responses and 7,827 “desire episodes” reported.

The largest  ”self-control failure rates” were recorded with media (checking emails, Twitter and Facebook). “Resisting the desire to work was likewise prone to fail. In contrast, people were relatively successful at resisting sports inclinations, sexual urges, and spending impulses, which seems surprising given the salience in modern culture of disastrous failures to control sexual impulses and urges to spend money,” said Hofmann.

The report also makes note that desires for tobacco, alcohol and coffee were relatively low. ”With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs – long-term as well as monetary – and the opportunity may not always be the right one.”

Hofmann told the Guardian, ”Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not ‘cost much’ to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist.”

Web analytics company Statcounter revealed today that internet usage through mobile devices (excluding tablets) has nearly doubled to 8.5% in January of this year, compared with 4.3% last year (See Table A below).

“While global internet usage through mobiles is still under 10%, the pace of growth is remarkable,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter.

This comes as no surprise, as more and more people switch over to smartphones and continue to surf the web on the go. Surprisingly enough, the statistics reveal that Nokia was the most commonly used device globally when accessing content on the go, followed by Apple and RIM.

The statistics prove that ‘mobile-ready’ versions of websites are still very important, and ensuring that your content can be delivered on both a desktop and mobile experience is really a no-brainer.

So, at last, Facebook has filed for its IPO, Initial Public Offering, basically meaning it’s now going to be publicly traded, so you could own a part of Facebook eventually. First, let’s take a look at some of the numbers.

Facebook is seeking to raise $5 billion through this IPO, but it may end up raising a lot more than that, according to many pundits. The company made $1 billion in profit on revenues of $3.7 billion in 2011, quite a feat. 85% of that came from advertising, and about 12% from Zynga, the social-gaming company best known for FarmVille.

Facebook has 843 million monthly active users, and about half that active on a daily basis. Perhaps more astonishing, more than 250 million photos are uploaded to the site every single day

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, retains control over Facebook, with 28.4% of the stock, the percentage he holds right now, giving him a controlling interest with 56.9% of the votes. If, for example, Facebook would raise $10 billion with the IPO, Zuckerberg would then be worth almost $3 billion.

But he will go from a salary of $500,000 in 2011 to $1 in 2013, mimicking Steve Jobs, who famously took only $1 per year in salary after he returned to Apple in 1997.

Well, let’s not cry for Zuckerberg, okay?

The question then becomes, is this is the end of Facebook as we’ve come to know it or the beginning of something new?

My guess is, to borrow a phrase from Bachman Turner Overdrive, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Already at almost 850 million users, Facebook is on track to reach 1 billion users sometime this year, probably sooner rather than later. That makes Facebook rank up there with as many users as population in the largest countries in the world, a truly remarkable achievement. I for one, do not see any slow down in Facebook usage among my family or friends, and not even professionally do I see anything like the Facebook apocalypse that some have predicted.

Sure, some people closed down their Facebook accounts in protest to lack in privacy and security, and other issues, but that was a small minority apparently, that never got any traction in wider circles.

And it’s inevitable, I assume, that what is successful will be criticized, no matter what it does, and that’s true for Facebook, as well. Now that it will be a publicly traded company, even though Zuckerberg apparently retains the control, it will have to be more careful about its moves. Now it has not only the users to satisfy, but the shareholders as well, and both parties can be fickle and turn on you in a second.

Other than tying up more people to use its services, where will Facebook’s necessary future growth come from? Online gaming with Zynga seems to be doing well, and there’s plenty of room for expansion there, in number of users as well as in revenue.

Will Facebook tackle Google head-on and go into search? Hardly likely. But online music, video, and other digital media, that could be matched rather nicely with the increasing user base. It also has a lot left to do in terms of apps and mobile, so expect that to be on Facebook’s radar too, moving forward.

But whatever it is that Facebook will do next, after the IPO, you’d be foolish to count Zuckerberg and co. out just yet.

Photo by Robert Scoble.

Novelist Paulo Coelho has sold millions of books, including the all time bestseller “The Alchemist” that sold more than 65 million copies worldwide. It is a lesser known fact that he is also a frequent BitTorrent user and has admitted to pirating his own books.

The Brazilian born writer believes that file-sharing is a good thing which should be seen as a means of promotion for writers like himself. He went as far as to volunteer to support The Pirate Bay in a trial all the way in Sweden. Speaking to a popular BitTorrent site Coelho was convinced of the need to see P2P sharing as a helpful, useful tool.

“Since the dawn of time, human beings have felt the need to share – from food to art. Sharing is part of the human condition. A person who does not share is not only selfish, but bitter and alone,” Coelho said, explaining his decision to to share his books on P2P sharing sites.

Publishing his books freely on The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent sites has actually worked out really well for Coelho. He has sold tens of thousands of extra books because he shared them.

The Pirate Bays main page today shows the collaboration of the most famous BitTorrent site with one of the biggest names in literature of our times. Maybe those pesky anti-piracy lobbyists need a total, ground-up rethink of their ideas.

If you’re a fan of the TV show “The Office,” and like Valves evergreen Counter-Strike franchise, you need to see this video. The video shows how a fan of the show has mapped the fictional Dunder Mifflin Paper Products company in painstaking, bone-breaking detail. The cubicles, the chairs, even the lamps and office supplies are almost exactly like how you would see them placed in the show.

It seems that this project began a good two years ago and the mapper has since logged around 500 hours worth of mapping and amazingly he feels that the map is not yet complete. Since the map is not available for public download, its hard to judge how fun or playable  it will turn out to be.

Apparently, the mapper is now looking for an experienced enthusiast to now take over and take the project through to completion. If you have the necessary skills, do go over to his YouTube page and give him a shout.

January 18, 2012, will go down in history as a day when the Internet community managed to stop a piece of legislation from being enacted in the U.S. That seems to be the common view held after it seemed as SOPA was cancelled after the protests, which darkened and disabled websites around the world. Even right here on this site we could read, “SOPA is now officially dead.”

But is that really true?

As far as I can tell there is no guarantee that SOPA is dead, but chances are we won’t hear a lot about it for quite a while.

First, let’s just quickly look at what we’re talking about. SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, is a bill introduced to the U.S. Senate, and its equivalent in the House of Representatives is PIPA, or Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act. Although they are legislation in different parts of the Congress, they are really aimed at accomplishing the same thing, namely to curtail online piracy and copyright infringement.

My understanding is that this gives government as well as companies the right to go after the distribution mechanisms of illegal distributing copyrighted material, like websites and Internet access providers, instead of the end users. So far, it’s been the end users, the people who download movies with BitTorrent, which the music industry has gone after and sued. With SOPA and PIPA, that would all change.

To protest SOPA and PIPA, Reddit.com announced it would shut down its site on January 18. Many other sites followed, including Wikipedia, and sites around the world went silent on that day. The day before the protests, the author of the SOPA bill, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, said he expected the work on SOPA to continue in February: “To enact legislation that protects consumers, businesses and jobs from foreign thieves who steal America’s intellectual property, we will continue to bring together industry representatives and Members to find ways to combat online piracy.” He added, “Due to the Republican and Democratic retreats taking place over the next two weeks, markup of the Stop Online Piracy Act is expected to resume in February.”

As it turns out, the online protests on January 18 had a measurable effect. The day after, the number of opponents in the U.S. Congress to the bill, increased to 101 from having been only 31 previously. It would seem that politicians do listen to voters after all.

Then on January 20, Chairman Smith seemed to back down: “I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy. It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.” And he finished, “The House Judiciary Committee will postpone consideration of the legislation until there is wider agreement on a solution.”

So does this mean that the January 18 protests have completely won over the proponents of SOPA and PIPA? Some say that SOPA and PIPA won’t come back in any way shape or form this year because it’s an election year. Politicians have too much to do with the Presidential race, to gain or retain seats in Congress, as well as local elections, to bother to keep on fighting for SOPA and PIPA, especially after this very public protest.

But as far as I can tell there’s no guarantee that the legislation won’t come back later, perhaps in a different guise.

My guess is that SOPA and PIPA will come back to the top of the agenda in U.S. politics at some point. The commercial interests driving them are far too powerful and rich that they would just leave it well enough alone. However, it won’t be under the names SOPA and PIPA. Those names are now tainted, and most Americans, indeed scores of people around the world, associate the acronyms with greedy corporations trying to get the government to write and implement legislation that will merely punish ordinary people.

The battle may have been won, but the war is far from over.

Photo by Steve Snodgrass.

Billing yourself as a ‘multilingual social network’ might be a bit ambitious, but ambition is what fuels the team behind dudu.com. While the site is still in its infancy, its one goal is to create a site that allows users to connect with each other regardless of where they are or what language they speak. It’s a bold initiative that so far sees the site supporting three languages, with scope to add more as the site grows.

We sat down with Abdurakhman Zulumkhanov, Project Manager with DUDU communications, to find out more about the site and its plans for the future:

Can you tell us a bit more about how dudu started?
Dudu was founded in 2007 by Mr. Alibek Issaev, a Russian businessman who lived and worked in Dubai, UAE. The main concept behind the project was to create a platform for free communication between people of the world. With the invention of the Internet people had the ability to communicate over the distance, but there was still last barrier remaining for free communication – the language barrier. The project was in development for about 4 years and in 2011 it was first introduced to public in Alpha version, as a social network with a lot of great new functionality, but mainly – translatable content.

Dudu features a truly multilingual social network where users can chat with each other regardless of what language they are using – can you tell us a bit more about the kind of technology that powers this feature? Was it something developed completely in-house and does it produce accurate translations?
Machine translation research and development dates as far back as the middle of last century. There had been a number of various approaches that were developed to date. We based our work on previous researches and achievements and developed our own system in house. The system combines various approaches, but also features ability to self-improvement. The system has been in development for over 4 years now and was recently launched in Alpha mode. It still requires time to gather and process data and there is some tweaking to do, but we can say that we have reached impressive results that we are ready to share with the world. Another key thing is that the more users communicate on the network, the more posts and comments they provide, the better the system becomes. So every time someone logs in on the website they help us improve the system quality.

The site also recently won at the International Business Awards – what categories did you win and how did it feel for the team?
Dudu was the winner in “Best New Product or Service of the Year – Media and Entertainment” and “Best Software Programming/Design of the Year” at the 2011 International Business Awards, and honoree in “Most Innovative Company of the Year in the Middle East and Africa” and “Company of the Year – Media”. This was a very important event for the team, as it showed recognition of our hard work at a very early stage. It gave the team great incentive to keep up the good work and strive for new achievements.

Dudu also features a virtual currency and Bank system – what can you purchase with the virtual currency?
The virtual currency on dudu (called “Dullar”) can be used to buy and send virtual gifts to users within the website, to pay for upgrades and improvements in applications and games on the website, and will be also used for other functionality later on in the project.

What are ‘Worlds’?
World – is a user’s feeds page that displays entries and status updates by user’s friends, as well as news and entries from pages of interest the user is signed up for.

Are there specific geographical locations where you’re seeing a large number of user signups? Would you be looking to advertise the site heavily to the Middle East as a truly ‘Arabic-friendly’ site? Or do you have some other marketing strategies for the region?
We currently see people sign up from all over the world. Most of new users come from the Middle East, former CIS republics, and Asia. As we are based here, we would like our project to become a major point of access for communication in the Middle East (and later, of course, in the rest of the world as well).

You’ve currently got an iPhone application for the site – are you looking to expand to other markets such as Android or Blackberry etc?
Yes, the iPhone app is available for free at AppStore and we constantly roll out new updates to improve performance and functionality, majorly based on user feedback. We are also busy working on developing apps for other platforms and will introduce them in the nearest future.

Will you be offering at a later stage the ability for developers to plug in apps and games etc into the site?
Yes. In fact, we already have a quite universal API in place, through which developers of apps and games can integrate their products within the website.

What are your plans for the site in the next coming months?
There are currently three languages that are supported on the website – English, Russian and Arabic, so our further steps would be to add more languages, starting from the mostly spoken. We also plan to roll out a lot of unique, new functionality for social networking, which we believe would be a great addition to the existing functionality on the website.

Almost a month back, Megaupload announced a new form of music sharing, called Megabox, which would seemingly revolutionize the music industry.

For all intents and purposes, Megabox was to be just another online music sharing site where artists upload their own music for free or at a price, but where things differed significantly were in two key areas which would have benefited music artists immensely. Firstly, artists would have been receiving 90% of the earnings from their own music. “UMG knows that we are going to compete with them via our own music venture called Megabox.com, a site that will soon allow artists to sell their creations directly to consumers while allowing artists to keep 90 percent of earnings,” MegaUpload founder Kim ‘Dotcom’ Schmitz told Torrentfreak, as reported by Digital Music News.

Secondly, Megaupload would have actually paid artists for songs that were available for free, using Megakey. “We have a solution called the Megakey that will allow artists to earn income from users who download music for free,”  said Dotcom. “Yes that’s right, we will pay artists even for free downloads. The Megakey business model has been tested with over a million users and it works.” Megakey presumably used the ad money that Megabox would have received as more people watch a specific artists free video, and paid a portion of that ad money to the artists.

If the claims of Kim Dotcom were true, Megabox would indeed have been a game changer for the entire music industry, where the artists benefit the most from their work. Perhaps the existence of Megabox did indeed lead to the sudden closure of Megaupload, we’ll find out more in the coming days as the drama surrounding Megaupload unfolds.

According to Reuters, YouTube is getting 4 billion views daily, that’s just over 46,000 views every second. The video sharing website that started in 2005, and was bought out by Google in November 2006, has sure turned out to be a great deal. But then, there was never a doubt that YouTube would never hit it big time.

The current viewership is an almost 25% increase over last May, while the amount of uploaded videos has increased from 48 hours per minute, to 60 hours uploaded every minute worldwide.

Reuters hints at this immense success at YouTube’s expansion over various platforms, mainly smartphones and tablets, where custom applications allow people to watch YouTube easily, and anywhere. And with high production value videos and user generated content being easily uploadable from any such device, including many video games, the content on YouTube, and the number of people watching it just keeps on growing.