Recently in Networking Category

Law firms big and small are using dynamic, interactive such as Facebook and Twitter to connect with the public.  Here is rundown of recent social networking tech news that your firm should be aware of.

• Facebook did some back-to-school shopping this week, grabbing up the 12-member company FriendFeed for $50 million.  And to further primp and preen for the new school year, it also starting testing out "Facebook Lite"--a streamlined, Twitter-like feed for microblogging. 

The United States Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by Hollywood and network television channels in the Cablevision remote storage DVR case, which ends the litigation and clears the air regarding Cablevision's service.  For now, at least.

The product that Cablevision offers to its customers allows them to perform normal DVR functions, like recording shows and pausing live TV, without pruchasing or renting an actual hardware device.

Instead, the content is recorded on Cablevision's servers while the user controls the actions of the DVR across the network.  The user makes all the decisions about what and when to record, but the actual recording occurs on Cablevision's hard drive instead of a hard drive inside a device in the subscriber's home.

People hoping for a test case for the Gnu Public License (GPL), a common type of license in open source software, will have to wait a little longer.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has settled its lawsuit against networking equipment giant Cisco, so the case won't go to court or establish any kind of legal precedent for the interpretation of the GPL.

I've always thought that the French have some pretty extreme views when it comes to intellectual property, and it looks like they're in no hurry to disprove me, even if it means going against the EU parliament. 

The French parliament just passed a bill that will cut off the internet service for users who are caught illegally downloading music three or more times.  The Senate approved the bill today after the lower chamber approved the bill on Tuesday.  The new law creates a government agency to monitor internet activity for illegal downloads and step in when it detects them.

It used to be the case that an airplane flight offered people some time to disconnect from phone calls, emails and all the other forms of communication that dominate modern life.

Those days are rapidly disappearing, however.

The Feds have dropped a proposal to classify the use of proxy servers as a sign of sophistication when determining the proper sentence for those convicted of a crime.  For the time being, anyway.

The idea is likely to resurface once refinements are made to protect innocent uses of proxy servers that aren't related to the crime underlying the sentence.