In an update to our earlier story, it appears the Winklevoss twins will just not quit in their quest to make more money from Facebook.

Despite killing their Supreme Court appeal yesterday, the twins and partner Divya Narendra have launched a new motion today, one that asks the court to figure out whether Zuckerberg and Facebook "intentionally or inadvertently suppressed evidence" in the earlier (now settled case).

Original Story:

Seven years after they first filed suit against Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, it seems the legal drama between Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and the social networking giant is coming to an end.

The twins have dropped their appeal and settled the case, two months after a judge bluntly told them they must accept the deal.

Along with Harvard classmate, Divya Narendra, the twins filed suit against Facebook in 2004 alleging that the concept for Facebook was stolen from them and their early work on HarvardConnection.

In 2008, Facebook agreed to settle, giving the trio a deal worth $65 million ($45 million in stock), with the majority in Facebook stock. At the time, the group was given $45 million in stock with Facebook valued at $15 billion. The twins filed suit again last year claiming Facebook had internally given itself a $3.7 billion valuation, and so the group was conned out of many more shares in the company.

The federal Judge, Alex Kozinski, killed the appeal in April:

At some point, litigation must come to an end. That point has now been reached. The Winklevosses are not the first parties bested by a competitor who then seek to gain through litigation what they were unable to achieve in the marketplace. They made a deal that appears quite favorable in light of recent market activity.

Regardless, with Facebook now valued at $100 billion the Winklevoss/Narendra shares in Facebook are worth just over $300 million, an appreciation of 660 percent in just three years.

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Rockstar Games has announced today that they have shipped 4 million units worldwide to date, with the game being a top-seller in the UK and US for multiple weeks consecutively.

Additionally, the game will be released for PC this fall at retail and digitally.

Says Sam Houser, founder of Rockstar Games:

L.A. Noire is a new type of game that makes players see through a detective's eyes in 1940s Los Angeles. L.A. Noire is a new type of game that makes players see through a detective's eyes in 1940s Los Angeles. Its unique blend of story, action and crime solving will be perfect to play on PC.

The company also confirms that the game will "feature customization, including keyboard remapping and gamepad functionality to both optimize and customize the performance and user experience."

Furthermore, the PC version will have 3D support, graphical improvements and increased fidelity.

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U.S. Feds work with international law enforcement agencies to disrupt two FAKEAV peddlers.

Two Latvian individuals have been indicted, and more than 40 computers, servers and back accounts have been seized as part of Operation Trident Tribunal, which targets peddlers of fake anti-virus scams. It is estimated that the gangs involved caused more than $74 million in total losses to more than one million computer users.

Scareware works by alerting users to fake threats allegedly residing on their computers with terrifying scan results, then offers to clean up the non-existent malware if the user will pay a fee for a full version of the software, using a credit card. There are many ways scareware can show up on a victims' PC, such as being tricked into installing it from a fake alert on a webpage, or it may be downloaded and executed by an existing malware on the computer.

The first of the international criminal groups disrupted by Operation Trident Tribunal infected hundreds of thousands of computers with scareware and sold more than $72 million of the fake antivirus product over a period of three years. An estimated 960,000 users were victimized by the scheme, some paying up to $129. Latvian authorties seized at least five bank accounts that were alleged to have been used to funnel profits to the scam's leadership.

A second scam targeted by law enforcement relied on malicious advertisements (malvertisements) to deliver the scamware. An indictment unsealed in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis charges the two operators of this scareware scheme with two counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and computer fraud. The two (Peteris Sahurovs, 22, and Marina Maslobojeva, 23) were arrested by Latvian authorities in Rezekne.

They had created a fake advertising agency and claimed to represent a hotel chain. After convincing the Minneapolis Star Tribune's news website, startribune.com, to carry the advertisements for the fake hotel chains, they changed the advertisements to malicious variants, leading to infection of many readers' computers.

The scam allegedly led to at least $2 million in losses. If convicted, the defendants face penalties of up to 20 years in prison and fines of up to $250,000 on the wire fraud and conspiracy charges, and up to 10 years in prison and fines of up to $250,000 on the computer fraud charge.

"Today's operation targets cybercrime rings that stole millions of dollars from unsuspecting computer users," said Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Criminal Division.

"These criminal enterprises infected the computers of innocent victims with malicious scareware, and then duped them into purchasing fake anti-virus software. Cyber crime is profitable, and can prey upon American consumers and companies from nearly any corner of the globe. We will continue to be aggressive and innovative in our approach to combating this international threat. At the same time, computer users must be vigilant in educating themselves about cyber security and taking the appropriate steps to prevent dangerous and costly intrusions."

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Yesterday we reported that PopCap denied earlier reports that it was being sold for $1 billion to an unnamed buyer, but TechCrunch has posted another report today claiming the deal is still very much on.

Citing multiple sources, the report claims Electronic Arts (EA) is the buyer, with the deal in late-stage negotiations.

At $1 billion, the deal will be a huge hail mary for EA, which has a tiny market value of just $7 billion.

PopCap, the company behind blockbuster games like Plants vs. Zombies and Bejeweled, made over $100 million in revenue last year and is a top social/mobile gaming outfit with around 4.3 million active daily gamers.

EA lacks a strong "casual game" catalog, and the PopCap acquisition is expected to help with that.

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Man pleads guilty to copyright infringement after being nabbed in raids against software piracy ring.

James Clayton Baxter of Wichita Falls, Texas, was the seventh man arrested in a software piracy ring that allegedly racked up $3 million in illegal sales from $15 million worth of pirated software goods. Baxter operated five websites that sold illegitimate products from Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft, Symantec and others.

The websites he used included Amerisoftware.com, SoftwareCB.com, Costfriendlysoftware.net, TechKappa.com, and CigTechnologies.com. He faces up to five years in prison for his crimes, and a fine of up to $250,000.

"BSA appreciates the vigorous copyright enforcement efforts of the Justice Department and ICE," said Business Software Alliance Vice President of Anti-Piracy and General Counsel Jodie Kelley.

"What is happening to Mr. Baxter as well as the rest of the Wichita Falls piracy ring should serve as a warning to other software pirates: Breaking the law has real consequences."

The BSA assisted law enforcement in the investigation, performing evidence analyses and sharing information from its member companies.

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Consumer groups attack proposals to block websites that offer illegal video streams.

The Open Rights Group (ORG) revealed earlier this week that a secret proposal had been presented to UK communications minister Ed Vaizey by rights holders. Consumer Focus, the official consumer watchdog, attended a meeting on June 15 where the paper was presented.

The Open Rights Group (ORG) were not invited to attend, nor were any similar groups.

"It is unacceptable for trade groups and government to conduct policy in this way. Censorship proposals must be made and discussed in public," said Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group.

"Many of us will oppose any censorship that impacts directly and widely on free expression. Governments would be wise to assess the strength of our arguments, rather than waiting for trade bodies to find their narrow, commercial arguments unravel once their proposals reach the light of day."

The proposals, which were presented by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the Publishers Association, the Football Association / Premier League and Motion Picture Alliance. The paper was titled, "Addressing websites that are substantially focused on infringement."

The plan would be to block websites that offer streaming copyrighted material for free, such as any of the hoards of websites that show football games live (or well, almost live.) The Digital Economy Act (DEA) allows for web blocking to be introduced, though secondary legislation would be required.

Consumer Focus commented that blocking wesites that offer football streams for free is a "disproportionate" response to the problem, arguing instead that a first step would be to assess whether the obvious consumer demand for streaming sports is being met by legal options.

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Acer constructs 177 TFLOP supercomputer, ranks 42nd on latest TOP500 list.

After being awarded the contract in November 2010, Acer constructed the supercomputer for the National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC) in Taiwan. The 177 TFLOPS ALPS (Advanced Large Parallel System) supercomputer, nicknamed Windrider, utilizes the latest AMD Opteron 6000 Series processors. It features a total of 8 compute clusters, 1 large memory cluster and 25,000 compute cores.

As the leading research institute in Taiwan for high-performance computer (HPC), the NCHC works with enterprise and academic institutes to take part in joint research. The new system, the fastest of its kind in Taiwan, will be used for research in science and engineering, disaster simulations, alternative energy, biotechnology, chemistry and more.

NCHC's director, Kuo-Ning Chiang
"The decision to build this machine was made out of necessity. NCHC provides supercomputing resources to Taiwan's many research groups and universities, and our previous machine with only 20 TFLOPS had a long waiting list for running computing jobs. The new system by Acer not only satisfies the current demand, but gives us a lot of room to grow."



Acer VP of global server business development, Gianluca Degliesposti
"Acer's strong portfolio of High Performance and Technical Computing systems, integrated with industry leading technology partners, allowed us to deploy a custom HPC infrastructure able to support a wide range of applications to meet the needs of a diverse user community."



In order to meet a broad set of HPC needs, the system's architecture is flexible to grow or shrink depending on the computing demand, and since all requests are off loaded from clients located all over Taiwan and the surrounding Asia region, the system advances the concept of HPC in the cloud.

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Viacom has sued Cablevision today over its mobile streaming content, alleging it is unauthorized.

In April, Cablevision launched its "Optimum App," giving subscribers a chance to stream TV programs via their iPad.

Viacom claims the app violates the two company's current agreement to distribute Viacom programing only on cable TV systems.

The media company is demanding a halt on the streaming and $2 million in damages for each trademark violation.

Cablevision says the Optimum App "falls within our existing cable television licensing agreements with programmers, including Viacom," and will fight the charges.

The cable operator has 3.7 million customers in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

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Hulu has announced today that they have expanded their Hulu Plus premium service to a number of Android devices.

The app is available now for the Nexus One, Nexus S, HTC Inspire 4G, Motorola Droid II, Motorola Droid X, and the Motorola Atrix.

More devices will be added as the year progresses, says Benzinga.

Hulu Plus costs $8 per month and gives access to full back catalogs of popular shows.

The service is available via many devices including gaming consoles.

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Nvidia and VIA follow AMD out of BAPCo consortium.

The Business Applications Performance Corporation (BAPCo) is a non-profit consortium tasked with developing performance benchmarks for computer systems based on widely used software applications and operating systems. BAPCo has been developing the SYSmark 2012 benchmark intended to be used by businesses and governments to make spending decisions.

On Tuesday (June 21), AMD publicly announced that it has left the BAPCo consortium, and said it cannot endorse the SYSmark 2012 benchmark. AMD's Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Nigel Dessau, had questioned some aspects of the benchmark in a blog post last year titled "Have you Paid the 'SYSmark Tax'?", in which he estimated that government and educational institutions had needlessly spent over $7 billion during the preceding five years as a result of the SYSmark benchmark.

According to Dessau, BAPCo's response to the blog was a threat to expel AMD from the consortium. Nowadays most of us use applications that run HTML 5, use Javascript and other elements that benefit greatly from GPU acceleration. Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft Office, Windows Movie Maker and Adobe Flash are examples of applications given by AMD that benefit from GPU acceleration and are widely used.

The benchmarks then should be relevant to the applications that are used by people depending on the benchmark scores. AMD's major complaint is that SYSMark is comprised of unrepresentative workloads, ignoring the importance of heterogeneous computing in today's environment. It also accuses SYSmark of generating misleading results that lead to poor purchasing decisions.

While AMD clearly had issues with the SYSmark 2012 development, it stuck around to attempt to change it to a more open, transparent and processor-neutral benchmark, and did get some benchmarks introduced that it said properly represented what people do in a day, "instead of 35,000 line spreadsheets."

However, there still comes the issue of the weighting given to the real-world benchmarks, as the weighting is what really determines the score. Here is where AMD decided SYSmark 2012 was not properly representing the modern enviroment, saying it continues to distort workload performance and offers less transparency to users.

Nigel Dessau summed up the problems with the SYSmark 2012 benchmark with three main points...

• While SM2012 is marketed as rating performance using 18 applications and 390 measurements, the reality is that only 7 applications and less than 10 percent of the total measurements dominate the overall score. So a small class of operations across the entire benchmark influences the overall score.
• In fact, a relatively large proportion of the SM2012 score is based on system performance rated during optical character recognition (OCR) and file compression activities − things an average user will rarely if ever do.
• And SM2012 doesn't represent the evolution of computer processing and how that evolution is influencing average users' experience. SM2012 focuses only on the serial processing performance of the CPU, and virtually ignores the parallel processing performance of the GPU. In particular, SM2012 scores do not take into account GPU-accelerated applications that are widely used in today's business environments.

AMD's decision to quit BAPCo was followed since by Nvidia and VIA. AMD is now considering other options, including the creation of a new consortium to establish a truly open benchmark that would measure overall system performance.

While the core of AMD's complaint does imply bias toward Intel, Dessau says that this is not the core reason for AMD's breaking from the BAPCo consortium, again, giving three reasons...

• It's about fairness. Fairness to consumers and business users, to governments and other organizations that make purchasing decisions based on benchmarks, and, in the case of SYSmark, needlessly overspend because of it.
• It's about relevance. Because do you want to buy a system based on an outdated approach to measuring performance? Don't you want your system's performance measured against relevant measures like HTML5 or GPU acceleration? And shouldn't a benchmark that measures PC performance be relevant to other devices that are likely in your life (if you're reading this blog I think it's safe to presume you use an array of devices – I do). Benchmarks should measure the way people engage with their devices today – not stick to a formula more appropriate for the last millennium.
• And it's about openness. Because you, and IT purchasing managers, should know what a benchmark represents and what the score really means to how the device will be used. That's being set free.

BAPCo responded to AMD's public flogging by saying that all BAPCo members were given one vote on any proposals made by member companies, and that AMD voted in favor of SYSmark 2012 development milestones 80 percent of the time. It also said that AMD was supported in all of the SYSmark 2012 proposals put forth.

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J.K. Rowling, the billionaire author behind 'Harry Potter' has confirmed that the global blockbuster series is finally coming in e-book form.

The news comes with the launch of the "Pottermore," the interactive site built around the series.

Says the author (via NYT):

I wanted to give something back to the fans that have followed Harry so devotedly over the years, and to bring the stories to a new digital generation.

Because Rowling has all digital rights to the series, she has waited years to release the e-books and will now bypass traditional retailers and sell them directly from Pottermore.com. Scholastic will keep its revenue share of the series.

There was no word on pricing, but the books will go on sale in October.

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Seven years after they first filed suit against Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, it seems the legal drama between Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and the social networking giant is coming to an end.

The twins have dropped their appeal and settled the case, two months after a judge bluntly told them they must accept the deal.

Along with Harvard classmate, Divya Narendra, the twins filed suit against Facebook in 2004 alleging that the concept for Facebook was stolen from them and their early work on HarvardConnection.

In 2008, Facebook agreed to settle, giving the trio a deal worth $65 million ($45 million in stock), with the majority in Facebook stock. At the time, the group was given $45 million in stock with Facebook valued at $15 billion. The twins filed suit again last year claiming Facebook had internally given itself a $3.7 billion valuation, and so the group was conned out of many more shares in the company.

The federal Judge, Alex Kozinski, killed the appeal in April:

At some point, litigation must come to an end. That point has now been reached. The Winklevosses are not the first parties bested by a competitor who then seek to gain through litigation what they were unable to achieve in the marketplace. They made a deal that appears quite favorable in light of recent market activity.

Regardless, with Facebook now valued at $100 billion the Winklevoss/Narendra shares in Facebook are worth just over $300 million, an appreciation of 660 percent in just three years.

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Facebook has just named Netflix CEO Reed Hastings to its Board of Directors, opening up a flood of speculation as to whether the two companies will join up in the future on content.

Says Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg of the move:

Reed is an entrepreneur and technologist who has led Netflix to transform the way people watch movies and TV. He has built a culture of continuous rapid innovation, something we share and work hard to build every day.

Adds Hastings:

Facebook is propelling a fundamental change in how people connect with each other and share all kinds of content. I'm looking forward to working with Mark and the rest of the board to help Facebook take advantage of all the opportunities ahead.

Facebook has 600 million users worldwide and Netflix is the top Internet subscription service in the world, with 23 million users in Canada and the U.S.

Other notable members of Facebook's Board are Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, Jim Breyer, Donald Graham and Peter Thiel.

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Following an investigation into their search business, the FTC is set to subpoena Google, in a move that has sent Google's share price tumbling even further.

Google has fallen another 11 points after having a rough month to $476 per share following the news.

Competitors have accused Google of favoring its own Google-backed service in search results.

Complaints have come from smaller companies like Yelp, and from much bigger companies like Expedia and Microsoft, who each claim Google's behavior "starves" them of traffic, says the WSJ.

The search giant is already under investigation by European regulators for the same anti-trust behavior.

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Jack Tretton, President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA), addresses PlayStation 4 (PS4) in Forbes interview.

There has already been hints that Sony is working on the development of the next generation PlayStation home console, generally referred to as the PS4. The PlayStation 3 (PS3) has been on the market since 2006, and Sony promised a ten year life-cycle for the system at the time.

The PS3 has had a mixed experience on the market so far, with early supply and cost problems, increased competition from Nintendo and Microsoft for home consoles and other notable problems such as the PSN breach. Still, Tretton thinks that the PS3 is just getting started and has warned not to get your hopes up if you are looking for a PS4 anytime soon.

"PlayStation 3 is really just hitting its stride. And technologically, I don't think it's possible to provide any advancement beyond what we have. What we've seen from the competition is trying to add features that already exist in PlayStation 3," Tretton said. "We invested heavily in that, we rolled a very heavy rock up a steep hill, through the launch period. But now I think that all pays off, and we've got a long run way behind it. So, I wouldn't look for any discussion of a next generation PlayStation for quite some time."

Tretton comments that there was nothing in Nintendo's E3 announcement of a new console that made Sony think, "Oh, we'd better get working on rolling out a new PlayStation here pretty soon."

You can read the rest of the interview, where he discusses Vita, competition from Android and iOS, E3 and more at Forbes.com.

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