The Winklevoss brothers, Harvard contemporaries of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, have ended their legal battle with the social network.
They reached a $65m ($41m) settlement in 2008, after claiming that Mr Zuckerberg stole their idea.
The legal spat was immortalised in the film “The Social Network”.
In January they attempted to reopen the case, claiming that they should have received more shares.
They sought to undo the settlement of $20m in cash and $45m in stock – now worth more than $100m.
A US appeals court ruled in April that they could not back out of the deal.
The pair had threatened to go to US Supreme Court to overturn the decision but have now said they will not pursue it.
They offered no statement on what had prompted their decision to abandon the suit.
The twins originally argued that Mr Zuckerberg had stolen their idea after he was hired by them to code their ConnectU site in 2003.
Facebook has always rejected the claims but agreed to the 2008 settlement to end what it called “rancorous litigation”.
A gang that made more than $72m (£45m) peddling fake security software has been shut down in a series of raids.
Co-ordinated by the FBI, the raids were carried out in the US, UK and six other countries.
The money was made by selling software that claimed to find security risks on PCs and then asked for cash to fix the non-existent problems.
The raids seized 40 computers used to do fake scans and host webpages that tricked people into using the software.
Account closed
About one million people are thought to have installed the fake security software, also known as scareware, and handed over up to $129 for their copy.
Anyone who did not pay but had downloaded the code was bombarded with pop-ups warning them about the supposed security issues.
Raids conducted in Latvia as part of the attack on the gang allowed police to gain control of five bank accounts used to funnel cash to the group’s ringleaders.
Although no arrests are believed to have been made during the raids, the FBI said the computers seized would be analysed and its investigation would continue.
The raids on the gang were part of an international effort dubbed Operation Trident Tribunal.
In total, raids in 12 nations were carried out to thwart two separate gangs peddling scareware.
The second gang used booby-trapped adverts to trick victims.
Raids by Latvian police on this gang led to the arrest of Peteris Sahurovs and Marina Maslobojeva who are alleged to be its operators.
According to the FBI, the pair worked their scam by pretending to be an advertising agency that wanted to put ads on the website of the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper.
Once the ads started running, the pair are alleged to have changed them to install fake security software on victims’ machines that mimicked infection by a virus.
On payment of a fee the so-called infection was cured. Those that did not pay found their machine was unusable until they handed over cash.
This ruse is believed to have generated a return of about $2m.
“Scareware is just another tactic that cyber criminals are using to take money from citizens and businesses around the world,” said assistant director Gordon Snow of the FBI’s Cyber Division in a statement.
Hacker group LulzSec said it has taken two Brazilian government Web sites offline.
The sites Brasil.gov.br and Presidencia.gov.br were both unavailable as of the time this story was written, ZDNet UK can confirm.
“TANGO DOWN brasil.gov.br & presidencia.gov.br LulzSecBrazil”, LulzSecBrazil tweeted in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
The outage, which probably stemmed from a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, follows the arrest yesterday by the Metropolitan Police’s Central e-Crime Unit of a 19-year-old man who they suspect is involved with the group.
LulzSec has denied that the individual, who it names as Ryan Cleary, is part of the group.
“Ryan Cleary is not part of LulzSec; we house one of our many legitimate chatrooms on his IRC server, but that’s it,” the group tweeted last night.
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Google and the various websites it owns were used by more than a billion people for the first time in May.
The landmark figure, revealed in new data from ComScore, shows an 8.4 per rise year on year.
Microsoft remained the second most popular destination with 905 million unique visitors in May.
This was up approximately 15 per cent over the year, but Facebook rose by 30 per cent to 714 million unique users.
Yahoo, which was overtaken by Facebook in October, saw an 11 per cent yearly rise to 689 million users.
A “global measurement panel” of 2million users helps ComScore to compile its estimates, and the data is then refined with page-view data it receives from more than 90 of the 100 publishers of web content.
Google is one of the few publishers that does not contribute. The company declined to comment.
When ComScore first measured traffic, in 2006, Google had slightly fewer than 500million unique users per month, with Microsoft taking the top spot with 539 million.
The addition of users to Gmail and Google has also been helped by the company’s purchase of video site YouTube.
BMW has raised automatic crash notification to a new level.
The on-board BMW Assist telematics system already calls 911 after a crash, just as many other brands do.
But BMWs can also report to the 911 call center the likely severity of occupant injuries, and now BMW says it can transmit the injury information to a nearby hospital trauma center.
BMW’s enhanced automatic collision notification (enhanced ACN or EACN) uses a sophisticated set of algorithms to instantly read the car’s crash sensor data and make an informed estimate of how to respond to the accident – police car? ambulance? helicopter? – and what injuries to look for when the victims get to the hospital or trauma center.
That quick response has the potential to save thousands of lives.
You’re in luck if you have your car crash in Miami, in a BMW.
It’s where BMW and the University of Miami’s William Lehman Injury Research Center have a cooperative project to wring out enhanced ACN.
BMW has worked with the Lehman Center since 2001 and now they’re midway through a three-year project that began in October 2009 to gather data on crashes and the value of quick, appropriate response and treatment during the golden hour, or the first hour after the crash.
If you can get the victim stabilized and to a trauma center within an hour of a bad crash, the odds of survival and recovery are highest.
The most recent announcement, this week at the Enhanced Safety of Vehicles Conference in National Harbor, Md., extends BMW’s ability to transmit extensive crash information not just to the 911 system but also directly to hospital trauma centers, starting with Miami’s Ryder Trauma Center.
With the current automatic crash notification that’s on most telematics-equipped cars (meaning they have integrated on-board cellphones for data as well as voice, such as GM’s OnStar), here’s what happens in a crash: The car senses the severity of impact, the angle of impact, multiple impacts (crash and rollover), which airbags deployed, and whether the occupants are belted, says Peter Baur, manager of product analysis at BMW of North America.
But there’s no interpretation of the data beyond: airbags-went-bang-send-help-to-this-geographic-coordinate.
Police would respond (often just a patrol car), check out the crash, then call for an ambulance or occasionally a medical helicopter, then, says Baur, “EMS would drop off the trauma patient, but not necessarily describe what the accident looked like.” Meanwhile, in the most severe cases, the clock is running down on that golden hour.
With enhanced ACN, Baur says, “We collect the sensor data, massage it, evaluate it,” and then draw conclusions as to the likely severity of the accident, the odds of severe injury, even the chances of serious hidden injuries.
That enhanced ACN information is what BMW and sibling Rolls-Royce transmit via the BMW call center to the nation’s 6,100 public safety answering points (PSAPs, or 911 call centers) and now to Miami’s Ryder Trauma Center for a Miami-area accident.
Other automakers also have just as many sensors on their cars, incidentally — but they don’t yet analyze and make recommendations based on the crash data.
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