After reaching a $65 million settlement with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg back in 2008, ConnectU founders Tyler and Cameron Winkelvoss are now appealing the settlement.

The twins agreed to a settlement in 2008 that got them $20 million in cash and $45 million in stock, valued at $36 per share. Now, the pair are alleging that they were misled about the real value of Facebook stock in 2008, and have brought the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

A skeptical three judge panel began considering today whether the Winkelvoss twins have a case. They scrutinized the argument put forward by the twins through attorney Jerome Falk. "The (ConnectU) founders are pretty smart people themselves, the twins also have a father from Wharton School who is very bright," Judge John Wallace said.

"If you have all these people to advise you, isn't it difficult to say this is one of those things where you were taken advantage of?"

Wallace was pointing out that the settlement was reached by teams of lawyers and a top mediator. The Winkelvoss brothers had valued the Facebook stock based on a news report that Microsoft had bought a small piece of the social networking site in a deal that valued the stock at around $36, and the company at $15 billion.

Falk argued that Facebook violated US securities laws by not disclosing that it had valued the stock at closer to $9 for stock options issued to employees. "This case is about whether sophisticated parties surrounded by a platoon of world-class lawyers can cancel a deal that is binding," Facebook attorney Joshua Rosenkranz countered.

"No one was misled here," he said. "The ConnectU founders struck a deal that made them very rich and is making them richer by the day. No one made them sign it."

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Microsoft has offered a temporary "Fix It" workaround for a bug in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 that is being exploited on some websites.

The vulnerability involves the way the browser handles cascading style sheets (CSS), triggered by recursive CSS pages where the style sheets include their own address. The flaw was confirmed by Microsoft in December, and it has updated its advisory to include a workaround due to reports of attacks that target the vulnerability.

The workaround comes in the form of a "Fix It" solution from Microsoft. To be effective, the browser needs to have all the existing security updates installed. The fix basically forces Internet Explorer to avoid importing a CSS style sheet if it has the same URL as the CSS style sheet from which it is being loaded.

Using the Fix It solution will cause a slight performance hit, adding about 150 milliseconds to the browser's start-up time, so it should be removed after Microsoft releases a proper security update for the flaw.

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After originally pledging to support both H.264 and WebM content, Google has decided it will ditch the H.264 video codec from Chrome and go with its WebM format instead.

H.264 video is widely used, currently being the de facto industry standard for encoding digital video. It is used with Blu-ray disc and is supported by a wide variety of consumer electronics devices. However, H.264 technology is patented and adopters pay royalties to the MPEG-LA group.

Google acquired On2 Technologies in 2009 to gain access to the VP8 codec. It opened op the VP8 codec and created a new royalty-free media format called WebM. WebM gained support in the Firefox, Opera and Chrome browsers, but Apple and Microsoft declined to officially support WebM (although WebM support can technically be added to Internet Explorer).

The growing split on the Internet between H.264 and now it's growing royalty-free competitor WebM is likely to cause problems for content producers looking to use HTML5 to display video content on the Internet.

It is unclear how Google's removal of H.264 from Chrome will affect Google's other web services, particularly YouTube.

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After announcing a CDMA iPhone 4 available on its network in February, word also came from Verizon about an iPad that will use its CDMA network.

Verizon Communications CFO Francis Shammo revealed the upcoming iPad to Bloomberg, which will feature built in CDMA features. Verizon already offers Apple's iPad in bundles with its MiFi 2200 Mobile Hotspot device, which does not come cheap.

Shammo did not reveal anything else about the iPad. He didn't indicate whether it will be the same iPad with just CDMA support added (like the iPhone announced Tuesday) or if it will be a new rumored next generation iPad.

The revelation comes as more bad news to AT&T, who up until Tuesday was officially the only provider offering the iPhone. AT&T also sells an iPad that uses its 3G network.

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Intel is now considering it's Light Peak interconnect technology, made to connect PCs to devices like displays and external storage, is ready for implementation.

Light Peak was announced in 2009 by Intel and was originally presented as a fiber optic solution to connecting devices to PCs. However, Intel also tested Light Peak using copper and said the results surpassed all of their expectations.

"The copper came out very good, surprisingly better than what we thought," David Perlmutter, executive vice president and general manager of Intel's Architecture Group, said. "Optical is always a new technology which is more expensive."

Intel had said it expected devices using Light Peak technology to begin shipping in late 2010 or early 2011, and Perlmutter said that it depends on device makers for now. The company said the technology, using fiber optics, would deliver bandwidths starting at 10Gbps over distances of up to 100 meters.

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Japanese chip maker Renesas, which merged with electronics maker NEC in 2010, has announced it will be integrating 16MP cameras in future handsets.

The CE150 image-processing system chip "will make it possible to produce 16MP phone cameras for the first time, up from the maximum 13MP that are currently available," explains Crunch.

Users will also be able to use the cameras to shoot 1080p Full HD video.

Renesas showed off a phone camera processor capable of such a feat in December 2008.

The company will begin mass-producing in March, with up to 1 million units being produced each month.

Sample units are available to handset makers for $48, now.

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The Motorola Xoom tablet has won the Cnet CES 2011 Best in Show award today, beating out a plethora of other tablets, smartphones, HDTVs and more.

Motorola's powerful tablet will ship with a 10.1-inch display, 1280x800 resolution, a Nvidia Tegra 2 1GHz dual-core processor, 1GB DDR2 RAM, 32GB onboard memory (expendable via SD), a 5MP dual-LED flash standard camera and a 2MP front-side camera for video conferencing.

Furthermore, the tablet has a micro USB 2.0 port, HDMI-pout, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR and run on the tablet-optimized Android 3.0 Honeycomb.

Battery life has been rated at 10 hours (peak) for video playback.

Motorola has allegedly already ordered 800,000 units of the device for the Q1 2011.

The 3G-supporting device will launch in February or March while the LTE 4G model will launch in the Q2.

No word, yet, on pricing

Video via Cnet:

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Penthouse has announced this week it will be launching the first 3D porn channel, set for launch in the Q2.

The new channel will feature adult programming natively shot in HD and 3D.

Says the infamous adult programming company:

We started shooting in 3D this past summer, and have significantly invested to perfect 3D production quality. Consumer excitement for 3D content is high, and Penthouse is the one studio that can rely on its broad expertise to deliver 3D in a manner unmatched by any other branded entertainment company.

The Penthouse HD channel is available in 15 countries.

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Nintendo has denied that it is planning to phase out its DSi handheld console in anticipation of the release of the Nintendo 3DS over the coming weeks.

Kotaku.com had translated a report from Japan that suggested Nintendo would stop making and selling new units of its DSi handheld, although it would keep manufacturing and marketing the larger-screen DSi XL model alongside the new 3DS.

"We plan to still manufacture and supply DSi consoles in a range of colours in the UK in 2011," Nintendo said in a statement to the media. "On an on-going basis, continuing supply is based on retail and consumer demand."

The Nintendo 3DS handheld console will launch in Japan on February 26th and will follow in North America and Europe in March. Nintendo is to ship 1.5 million units of the device to Japan to avoid supply shortages that were experienced with older iterations of the console.

The 3DS will sell for ¥25,000 in Japan.

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Social entertainment website MySpace.com is dropping almost half of its staff in an ongoing transformation of its services.

Once the King of social networking, MySpace lost out to the phenomenal growth of Facebook over the past few years. News Corporation gave MySpace a limited time frame to turn around its loss-making services. The result was a relaunch as a "social entertainment" site aimed at "Generation Y", which would be users aged 35 and younger.

The "restructuring" affects about 500 employees, representing 47 percent of the company. "These changes were purely driven by issues related to our legacy business, and in no way reflect the performance of the new product," Chief Executive Mike Jones said.

News Corp has repeatedly indicated that it is open to selling the relaunched MySpace service to any interested parties, but reports just last week suggested that there are no ongoing talks.

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Indonesia has welcomed a planned filter for pornographic content on BlackBerry handsets in the country.

Canadian Research in Motion (RIM) said it will start filtering web content on Indonesian users handsets in response to a threat from the government to block it from the market.

"We've heard about RIM saying it will filter the Internet.... That's good news to us and we highly appreciate that," communications ministry spokesman Gatot Dewa Broto said. Communications and Information Technology Minister Tifatul Sembiring told reporters on Monday that if RIM failed to comply with an order by January 21, they would revoke its permit.

There are an estimated 2 million BlackBerry users in Indonesia. RIM does not filter content on BlackBerry devices in any other market in the world. "We need them to give us the word that they will comply and the actual filtering is just a matter of time," Broto told AFP.

"We can't say what our next step will be until we meet them. We have yet to see the details of the filtering, what will be filtered, how it's going to be filtered."

Communications Minister Sembiring attempted to turn the situation into an issue of Indonesian sovereignty. "All other operators have complied with the laws and regulations of Indonesia.. should RIM be given an exception?" he said in one message posted on Twitter.

"Must we always bow to foreigners? Are we being arrogant if we remind foreigners to respect the laws in Indonesia?"

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Activision Blizzard has announced that its eagerly awaited World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm sold 4.7 million copies in December.

The title was dubbed the "fastest-selling PC game of all time," after selling 3.3 million copies in its first 24 hours. While it didn't keep the blistering momentum of the first 24 hours, it still sold 4.7 million copies in its first month of availability.

"We created thousands of new quests, introduced new lands to explore, and extensively revamped the game world for 'World of Warcraft: Cataclysm,' making it our biggest and most ambitious expansion yet," said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment, in a statement.

The company didn't mention any changes to the number of subscribers, but it had announced back in October that the WoW subscriber base had grown from 11 million to 12 million since October 2008.

Activision's success story of the year is Call of Duty: Black Ops, which sold 8.4 million units in its first month. Last month it was announced that the title had generated $1 billion in sales.

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Anti-fraud firm MarkMonitor has said that file locker and easy file-sharing sites like RapidShare, Megaupload and Megavideo, receiving enormous amounts of traffic due to piracy.

The firm monitored traffic levels to illegal files on 43 file sharing sites and found that it amounted to about 53 billion visits per year. RapidShare, Megaupload and Megavideo alone received more than 21 billion visits to illegal content stored on their servers.

"The numbers are staggering," said Charlie Abrahams, vice president of MarkMonitor. The study was carried out following requests made by the US Chamber of Commerce. The figures put file locker services right up there with file sharing networks.

"These upload sites index their files. It is very easy and convenient," Mark Mulligan, an analyst at research firm Forrester, said. "Upload sites, alongside instant messaging and blogs, are now on a par with peer-to-peer sites when it comes to piracy."

Copyright holders have attempted to address the problem by taking on RapidShare in several countries. RapidShare scored a victory in Germany this week when the Higher Regional Court of Dusseldorf ruled that it does not have to install filters demanded by rights' holders, and found that the Swiss company was already taking reasonable measures against piracy.

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Ericsson, the world's largest mobile network equipment manufacturer, has said mobile broadband subscriptions will hit 1 billion in 2011.

The new milestone would come only months after mobile broadband subscriptions hit 500 million in 2010. Ericsson estimates the figure will double before the end of the year, with the Asia Pacific region accounting for most of the growth, hitting 400 million subscriptions.

Both North America and Europe will account for about 200 million each. Mobile broadband adoption has accelerated with strong growth of smartphones, connected laptops and tablets, supported by the introduction of high-performance networks.

Smartphones' users are increasingly using applications and internet services on the go. Global mobile data traffic continues to grow rapidly, with Ericsson announcing in August 2010 that it had tripled in just one year.

Users' consumption of the internet and other media is changing as a result of the introduction of fast networks and the availability of various types of devices, including smartphones. According to TeliaSonera's survey of its LTE users, about 23 percent of them now watch more online TV, and in excess of 46 percent surf the web more frequently when away from home.

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Microsoft has confirmed that it is investigating online reports from its users of "phantom" data usage over mobile networks.

Several net forums have been buzzing with complaints and questions about what could be using so much data in the background on Windows Phone 7 devices. Some are complaining that their handsets are using up between 30MB and 50MB per day, eating into their data allowance with the provider.

"I received an e-mail from AT&T saying that I was close to my 2GB data limit which truly shocked me as I feel I do not use data that much," a phone owner called Julie said on the Supersite for Windows forum. "I went and looked at my AT&T account online and noticed that my phone was sending huge chunks of data seemingly in patterns."

Some have speculated the problem could be the software sending excessive feedback to Microsoft about the software's performance, or that handsets might be opting to use a 3G connection instead of an available Wi-Fi connection to handle certain tasks.

"We are investigating this issue to determine the root cause and will update with information and guidance as it becomes available," a Microsoft spokesperson said.

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