Social Networking Safety Tips

Social networking web sites such as Myspace, Facebook and many others are a popular and fun way to communicate with relatives and friends, and to renew old friendships. There’s a dark side of social networking that has been well documented by the media. Popular newsmagazine shows are full stories of young people stalked by people they met on social networking web sites. While most of the negative attention comes from the illicit relationships that started from social networks.  Many of the various scams that are still getting sent around by e-mail are now spreading through social networking web sites.

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Patent Trolling and the Tech Industry

For every new technology that sets the world on its ear, there is somebody out there who thinks they can cash in on a questionably relevant patent.  Beating successful technology companies with patent infringement lawsuits already has a pejorative term associated to it. Patent trolling the term used to refer to the milking successful companies by those claiming patent infringement.

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Sony MZ-NF610 MiniDisc Player

In my search for a portable music player with the features that I wanted, I was coming up short of getting what I wanted so I had to take a sort of leap backwards. I went onto e-bay and got a portable minidisk player/recorder. I wanted an AM/FM radio so that I could listen to my favorite news/talk station while on the bus ride to work and during lunch break I could listen to my tunes from my computer. I ended up getting a Sony Net MD Walkman MZ-NF 610. Net MD is Sony’s method of taking audio files from computers and loading them onto MiniDiscs.

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Shawn Fanning

When MP3 first became popular in the late 1990's finding songs as MP3 files was difficult at first.  Songs were available from underground web sites that were forced offline quickly by threat of lawsuit from the recording industry.  Shawn Fanning decided that to help make MP3's easier to find he created a search engine for MP3 files held on peoples' computers and to download directly from each other.  Initially Napster was a closed network for Fanning's close friends at Northeastern University where he was a student.  Eventually Napster was made public and it caught the attention big music and that's when the lawsuits came flying.  After close to two years of court room action Napster was shut down and was sold to Roxio which after a year or so Napster became a legitimate online music store.

Selling music online would have never have happened without the original Napster.  The recording industry was hell bent on keeping people buying CD's.  After the Napster genie was let out of the bottle there was no it was going back in.  Even before the end came to the original free Napster there were many other peer to peer networks sprouting up.  Although other peer to peer networks have gotten shut down many more come along to take it's place.  While peer to peer networks allow people to get music without paying the musicians and songwriters as they deserve, but does help curb the obscene profiteering by the recording companies.

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