Rickrolling, the bait-and-switch meme that was started in early 2007, has long since gone out of fashion. While there are still Rickrollers among us, gone are the days where we suspect every link may lead us to that dashing redhead’s biggest hit. Hammering a nail in the coffin of Rickrolling, it today emerged that the original Rickroll’d video was yesterday pulled from YouTube for an extended period of time.

It seems the original Rickroll clip, which had amassed ten of millions of views, was removed from YouTube due to a copyright claim made by AVG Technologies. That’s right, the AVG that keeps your computer free of viruses, free of charge, apparently put a copyright claim in that resulted in YouTube making the video unavailable.

The video reappeared online after 24 hours, but there has yet to be any official statement from AVG or YouTube/Google on the matter. Perhaps it was all just one big misunderstanding or perhaps AVG was trying to play a practical joke on all the Rick Astley fans out there? We’ll update if we find anything out.

The world needs to come to an agreement over cyber weapons just like it has with nuclear and biological weapons. Just as there are international agreements over nuclear and biological weapons, there needs to be agreements over cyber weapons as well. That was the statement Kaspersky chairman and CEO Eugene Kaspersky made during his speech at CeBIT on Tuesday.

Kaspersky told CeBIT delegates that “cyber warfare and terrorism” is the number one internet threat facing the world today. He brought up the Stuxnet industrial virus as an example, a virtual weapon capable of damaging physical infrastructure, but “a thousand times cheaper” to develop than conventional weaponry.

But there’s an even deeper issue. Cyber weapons may contain their own unintended software bugs which could wreak even more damage than the cyber terrorist had intended. Consider them a focused bomb that takes out a whole city rather than just one building due to a design flaw. “Cyber weapons are the most dangerous innovation this century,” he said.

Currently countries like China, Japan, Russia, the UK and the USA are developing cyber weapons. It seemingly mirrors the arms race decades ago that saw countries stockpiling nuclear weapons just in case the other side struck first.

Democracy could also be dead within 20 years due to lax Internet security, he predicted. That’s because a new generation of voters likely won’t vote in a conventional physical polling booth, and they won’t vote online without some kind of biometric, cryptographic online identification verification system that’s 100-percent secure. That leaves democracy dead in the water.

Kaspersky said the Internet has already manipulated democracy thanks to social media. He pointed out two prime examples: the Arab Spring which began back in December 2010, and the Occupy Wall Street movement sparked by Anonymous. Social media manipulation is the second most challenging issue with regard to internet security, he said.

“If the wrong people have a good strategy (for social media manipulation) it will be dangerous for…global security,” he told CeBIT attendees.

In the future, governments will have two choices regarding the use of social media: allow social networks to remain free but dangerous to security, or be controlled Big Brother-style which would be safer for everyone.

On Tuesday, hackers associated with Anonymous released 1.7 GB of data previously belonging to the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). The announcement was made through AnonNews.org and the government payload itself listed as a torrent on The Pirate Bay.

“Within the booty you may find lots of shiny things such as internal emails, and the entire database dump,” the hactivist group states. “We are releasing data to spread information, to allow the people to be heard and to know the corruption in their government. We are releasing it to end the corruption that exists, and truly make those who are being oppressed free.”

The BJS is a federal government agency belonging to the U.S. Department of Justice that collects, analyzes and publishes data relating to crime within the United States — including hacker attacks. So far there are no reports of any incriminating evidence surfacing as a result.

The Anonymous announcement actually ends on a strange note. After the initial message, an unmasked “news reporter” states the following: “What’s next? What’s next is… all they can do is shut down the Internet itself. And we see, how that went for them, in Egypt. And we the people know, that when the government shuts down the Internet, that’s when it’s time to shut down the government.”

After that, the man puts on the Guy Fawkes mask, repeats the well-known Anonymous slogan, and then concludes his news broadcast with this: “And now, expect a whole lot more.”

Monday night the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics confirmed the data theft with the following statement: “The department is looking into the unauthorized access of a website server operated by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that contained data from their public website. The Bureau of Justice Statistics website has remained operational throughout this time. The department’s main website, justice.gov, was not affected.”

Will 2012 really be the “year of the storm?” That what The Pirate Bay predicted back in February, and it seems we’re heading in that direction.

As if celebrating, your 28th birthday and taking your multi-billion dollar company public didn’t make for a big enough week, Mark Zuckerberg capped the week off with another huge milestone: He got married.

On Friday, Mark Zuckerberg took his hugely popular social network, Facebook, public. He dutifully listed this event on his Facebook timeline. The following day, he surprised his subscribers with another big update. This time, it was that he had finally tied the knot with long-time girlfriend Priscilla Chan.

Zuckerberg and Chan have been together since 2003, a year before Mark started work on Facebook. According to the Associated Press, the couple married at their home in Palo Alto with guests believing they were attending a party to celebrate Chan’s graduation from medical school. Less than 100 guests were in attendance and food was provided by Palo Alto Sol and Fuki Sushi.

Chan, 27, grew up in Braintree, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard in 2007. She worked briefly as a grade-school teacher before attending University of California, San Francisco to get her graduate degree and become a pediatrician. She graduated from UCSF last week.

For many, buying shares of Facebook once its $16 billion Initial Public Offering went live on Friday seemed like a sure bet. After all, the social network pretends to be the very center of the Internet, commanding how we share information from one site to another. The company is a cash cow, making founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg one of America’s richest men.

Yet so far trading on Wall Street has not moved quite as hoped. Shares were offered at $38.00 when Zuckerberg rang the bell on Wall Street Friday morning, then briefly gained value before sinking down to $38.23 by the end of the day, a mere 0.6-percent gain overall.

On Sunday, Nasdaq chief Bob Greifeld said that a “millisecond systems blip” in Nasdaq’s system caused the opening trade of Facebook’s stock to be delayed by 20 minutes. Because of the delay, Nasdaq had to follow its own rules and liquidate shares, generating $10 million for the group. The money will be used to resolve disputes related to 30 million shares that may have been the subject of improper trades.

The glitch, according to Greifeld, was due to cancellations of trades which continued to interrupt the computer system’s attempt to complete the auction and produce an initial price for Facebook’s opening. The social network’s stock trading was the largest IPO auction “in the history of mankind,” with more than 580 million shares changing hands.

But on Monday the company’s stock — which has become the most active on the Nasdaq — was down around 4.5-percent in pre-market trading, dropping below $37. Shares then fall again around 8-percent to under $36 upon opening. Presently it’s residing at $33.55 per share, sitting below a high of $36.66 and a low of $33.00 — a 12.30-percent decline since its open trade on Friday.

There’s concern among investors and industry observers that shares were priced too high at its start, thus the current “soft” demand for a piece of Facebook. Other analysts such as Michael Pachter of Wedbush aren’t concerned, and believe shares will rise to around $44 per share within the next 12 months.

Facebook’s current sluggish performance on Wall Street is reportedly dragging down other social media stocks. Before the opening bell sounded on Monday morning, Zynga, LinkedIn, Renren and Yelp were all down.

SOURCE via Yahoo!News

A Facebook user is suing Facebook for violation of privacy issues. As a class-action suit, the amount the complainant believes Facebook should owe is $15 billion. It’s sometimes scary to think about just how much of your personal information Facebook holds. Too much, apparently, for a Facebook user who is suing the company in a class-action suit over violating its users’ privacy. Facebook is being accused of tracking data on its users even after users have logged out of the site.

“This is not just a damages action, but a groundbreaking digital-privacy rights case that could have wide and significant legal and business implications,” said David Straite, a partner at Stewarts Law, in an emailed statement to Bloomberg.

This lawsuit, filed on the 17^th in San Jose, California, includes 21 other lawsuits also accusing Facebook of invading user privacy. According to the filing, by the U.S. Wiretap Act every Facebook user is owed up to $10,000 for over $100 per count of violation. Between Facebook’s over 800 million users, that’s somewhere in the ballpark of $15 billion that Facebook would owe. Considering Facebook’s impressive IPO, it’s… probably not entirely out of the realm of possibility, but $15 billion is a hard figure to swallow.

SOURCE via VentureBeat

What does one do after generating billions from an initial public stock offering? Go shopping, of course. After falling short of expectations following its somewhat helter-skelter IPO debut, Facebook simply shook off the whole thing and acquired itself some good Karma. No, we’re not talking about that Karma. Instead, Facebook purchased the startup responsible for the Karma social gifting app. The move was apparently made to bolster Facebook’s mobile chops — an area the company considers ripe for opportunity. Just recently, Facebook also acquired mobile stalwart Instagram and the Lightbox team, for example. As for its newest purchase, Karma will be allowed to “continue to operate in full force” despite its recent status change, according to a blog post by co-founders Lee Linden and Ben Lewis. Details weren’t disclosed about how much the deal was worth but judging from celebratory nature of their post, it doesn’t look like Linden and Lewis will “Unlike” the agreement any time soon.

SOURCE via Karma

After refreshing the uploading tool (and throwing in some better editing functions), Flickr’s decided to work on its looks. Its latest design update will now show a high-resolution version directly from a picture’s main page. The size will also adjust itself to the resolution and size of your screen — that’s the fluid part of it — avoid any nasty upscaling business. Hit up your own Flickr gallery to see the new design in action and expect more changes in the near future — the developers are promising more to come.

SOURCE via Flickr

With the exception of tweaks for new features like HD video and closed captioning Netflix’s Silverlight-based web player has been largely unchanged for years, but today everything is being reworked. As detailed in a post on the company’s blog, PC and Mac users (no word on ChromeOS) the size of the player controls now scale to the window they’re in and replace words with icons. Other new features users will notice is the ability to preview additional episodes of TV series without stopping the stream, title information that pops up when the stream is paused and that full screen viewing now has the same options as the windows player. The finale tweak is that the back to browsing button that brings viewers back to their queue has shifted from the bottom right to the top left. Hit the blog for the full breakdown, or just expect a surprise tomorrow when you’re watching Drive in the comfort of your own home during leisure time.

SOURCE via Netflix

You can’t deny Mike Bloomberg’s often coming up with different ways to involve New Yorkers in tech-related bits. On this occasion, Mayor Bloomberg & Co. have introduced a novel way for citizens of The Big Apple — and others who plan on making the move — to find jobs in the technology sector. Dubbed “Made in New York Digital Map,” the service aims to make it easier for folks to see which tech companies are seeking engineers, designers, developers, etc. At the moment there’s more than 325 outfits looking for new hires, with over “thousands of jobs” being up for grabs. Mayor Bloomberg says this is only the beginning and he’s encouraging startups to set up shop here in the City, as he believes this “is the place to be if you’re a growing tech startup.” You can take a tour of the Digital Map now via the source link below.

SOURCE via The Next Web