A Lineage II user, who played the game for over 20,000 hours, claims that the responsible of this “addiction” are the creators of this entertainment and decided to sue them.
Lineage II, as several other games, usually involves the gamers into the story making the plot very attractive. But sometimes seems that the story absorbs their players into some kind of addiction, this is what happened to this fellow who decided that this addiction has responsible and there must be some legal actions to execute.
After playing over 20,000 hours to this game, this person accused NCSoft (creators of Lineage) claiming the company was negligent for failing to “warn or instruct plaintiff and other players of Lineage II of its dangerous and defective characteristics, and of the safe and proper method of using the game.”
This “negligent” behavior of the company had the result of “unable to function independently in usual daily activities such as getting up, getting dressed, bathing or communicating with family and friends.” HA!
But that’s not all, the US District also said: “In light of plaintiff’s allegations, the court finds that plaintiff has stated a claim for both negligence and gross negligence”. This means that they are not dismissing the case so far. HAHA!
How many times did we wondered about “Thelma & Louise” ending? Thinking: “What if these girls could use a smartphone and Bing?”… None? Ok, me neither. But apparently Microsoft does.
If we think about one of the most dramatic endings in a movie, “Thelma & Louise” finale should be in the top 5. But fortunately Bing created a new ending, and while they were at it, they mentioned Google’s “inefficient” way to find places.
Take a look to this publicity from Microsoft’s Bing:
After I saw the car flying in the air, I thought this is a terrible way to use a movie reference; but after seeing the car didn’t get smashed I think the publicity is not horrible, just lame
Pornography has been, from several years now, the most profitable business in the Internet. The business handles billions of dollars every year; but do you want to know which the most popular sites are? And which are the most “pornographic” countries?
Take a look to this short infographic:
United States is the country with more hits in any of the porn sites.
Followed by the UK, Japan, Italy, Germany and Brazil.
The celebrity breaking all records with her porn videos: Paris Hilton, of course.
To be honest, I thought YouPorn was the most popular site around.
StatCounter published a chart representing the top 12 browser versions existing; which we can distribute among continents or even particular countries. In this data I’m pretty sure you can find some surprises, take a look.
Ok, there’s no surprise if I say Internet Explorer is ruling over the world (Microsoft already had a lot of problems regarding this); but what do you think about Internet Explorer 6 (developed in 2001) being the third most used browser? Or that Firefox 2.0 has more popularity than Opera 10?
Nielsen Wire created a complete report about the current smartphone share. Where we can find some discernible results like: iPhone is the most desired device, but with other not so much expected saying that Android is the OS with the most expansion.
Some of the most important remarks we can find in this report:
Smartphones represent 25% of the US mobile market
The prediction says that by the end of 2011, smartphones will overtake feature phones.
Android represents the OS with the highest growth in the market.
In the last 6 months, Android took 27% of the new smartphone users; iPhone “only” had 23%.
iPhone users are the most loyal: 89% say that the their next device will be an iPhone as well.
Dan Zarella is, as the blog says it, the social media scientist; and created a very interesting tool: “Most ReTweetable Words Finder” given a keyword, shows the most retweetable words.
The use is quite simple as well: enter a keyword and click analyze. The tool will return a list of words that were found to be related to that word and highly ReTweetable. It will also display the number of Tweets and ReTweets analyzed to generate the list. Here’s an example of “Microsoft” keyword:
We can find some words like “kinect”, “gaming”, “camera”, “ironruby” or even “fetish” (?).
The tool compares words found in ReTweets against non-ReTweet Tweets. Using the last 24hours, the tool analyzes up to 1500 Tweets and 1500 ReTweets per word.
It seems like a lot of gadget manufacturers are focusing on bringing out new models as fast as possible, without even building up stock in the meantime. The latest is Amazon and their Kindle product. The Amazon Kindle is expected to launch a third generation in September, which already seems to be on back-order.
The third generation Kindle was planned to be released on August 27th, with both a Wifi and 3G version. Currently, both WiFi and 3G versions of the new Kindle are now listed as “temporarily sold out” with new orders not likely to ship until September 4. If these pre-orders continue to come in in excess of Amazon’s manufacturing capacity, we may even see that date slip farther back.
Is this the right practice? Or should these gadget manufacturers be focusing on building up stock and then announcing pre-orders. Its of course very difficult to expect what demand a certain product is going to have, but this becomes a lot easier when it is the third generation of a specific product.
As you probably know, Facebook reached the amazing number of 500 million users, all time record for a social network. But how are those users distributed around the world? What is the general adoption for Facebook in the entire population? The answer, right here:
In this map we can evaluate the number of population of each country shown vs the number of Facebook users.
This is the report regarding most used security applications:
OESIS OK presents as a company for “Antivirus interoperability certification software testing”, that means they are continuously evaluating the antivirus market share and the possibilities behind it. Here are some of the quick facts about this report:
42% of antivirus and security tools installed are freeware. They say “It would appear that end users have as much faith in the ability of free antivirus applications to keep them secure as they do paid antivirus”.
Avast Free is the most popular application with 11.45%.
The list of free antivirus and applications completes with: Avira Antivir Personal (9.19%); AVG Free (8.6%) and fourth Microsoft Security Essentials with (7.48%).
Regarding paid applications: Avast with 5.54%; Kaspersky with 4.48%; Norton with 4.24% and finally ESET NOD32 with 3.84%
A PDF version of the complete report can be found here.
This is also the graph of the distribution of the market share regarding vendors:
The add-on is called (or was) Mozilla Sniffer, which it was uploaded on June 6th to the official add-on site from Mozilla. And it was downloaded by 1800 users and 334 had this add-on active. The behavior of this add-on apparently took all of the private browsing data from users (like user names and passwords), and send it to a remote site.
Since Mozilla blacklisted this add-on; all of those who had it working should see this feature disabled from their browsers.
Mozilla also makes a contradictory statement about this situation:
“Mozilla Sniffer was not developed by Mozilla, and it was not reviewed by Mozilla. The add-on was in an experimental state, and all users that installed it should have seen a warning indicating it is unreviewed. Unreviewed add-ons are scanned for known viruses, trojans, and other malware, but some types of malicious behavior can only be detected in a code review.”
But later in the same article:
“Having unreviewed add-ons exposed to the public, even with low visibility, has been previously identified as an attack vector for hackers. For this reason, we’re already working on implementing a new security model for addons.mozilla.org that will require all add-ons to be code-reviewed before they are discoverable in the site”.
Damn right you’ll be reviewing those add-ons! If you are publishing add-ons, features and options for your product within your site, you should be aware there’s a responsibility behind it.
Lineage II, as several other games, usually involves the gamers into the story making the plot very attractive. But sometimes seems that the story absorbs their players into some kind of addiction, this is what happened to this fellow who decided that this addiction has responsible and there must be some legal actions to execute.
Smartphones represent 25% of the US mobile market
The add-on is called (or was) Mozilla Sniffer, which it was uploaded on June 6th to the official add-on site from Mozilla. And it was downloaded by 1800 users and 334 had this add-on active. The behavior of this add-on apparently took all of the private browsing data from users (like user names and passwords), and send it to a remote site.
