nonprofiteer writes “The FTC has dropped its investigation of a new company that runs social media background checks and ongoing Internet/social media monitoring of employees, determining its compliant with the Fair Credit Reporting Act. So make sure your gun photos are private and that you’re not part of any ‘Legalize marijuana’ Facebook groups.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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There’s no pill that magically cures narcissism, but there is an easy fix for gray hair. And the folks at Go Away Gray want to give Favre a lot of money to lose the salt and pepper look.

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Looks like the world of social gaming is starting to reveal some of its (somewhat) surprising grisly underbelly.

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Cali Thalen writes “A private server company, Scapegaming (aka Alyson Reeves), was ordered to pay Blizzard Entertainment over $88 million in damages after losing a lawsuit that was concluded last week. Scapegaming was operating unauthorized World of Warcraft servers and using a micropayment system to collect money from the servers’ user base, which according to the lawsuit amounted to just over $3 million. $85 million of that settlement was for statutory (more…)

EvilAlphonso notes news of a “Texas” IP holding company suing 36 actual companies for violating its claimed patent on spam filtering. Techdirt deconstructs the patent itself, No. 6,018,761, which seems to amount to little more than a database lookup. It was filed in 1996 and issued in 2000 (despite the lawyers’ press release claiming that it “was awarded… nearly 15 years ago”). Among the companies being sued are 3Com, Apple, Google, AOL, Yahoo, (more…)

isometric writes with this excerpt from Gamasutra:
“IA Labs is accusing Nintendo of infringing on two separate IA Labs patents through technology used in the Nintendo Wii, Wii Fit, Wii Fit Plus, the Wii Balance Board, Wii Remote, Wii Wheel, Wii MotionPlus, Wii Nunchuck and Wii Zapper. … The patents in question are ‘Computer interactive isometric exercise system and method for operatively interconnecting the exercise system to a computer system for (more…)

v1x writes “I have had an account with my current web hosting company for a few years, with 3 domains being hosted there (using Linux/PHP/MySQL). Recently, all three of these websites stopped functioning, and upon checking the site, all my directory structures were intact, whereas all of the files were gone. Upon contacting their technical support, I was given the run-around, and later informed by one of their administrators that none of the files (more…)

The first trailer to showcase Bad Company 2′s single-player mode. The video offers a glimpse of the story, as well as plenty of combat action including RPGs, gun fights, soldiers diving out of aircraft and more.

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TechReviewAl writes “A company called 80legs has come up with an interesting new web business model: customized, on-demand web spidering. The company sells access to its spidering system, charging $2 for every million pages crawled, plus a fee of three cents per hour of processing used. The idea is to offer Web startups a way to build their own web indexes without requiring huge server farms. ‘Many startups struggle to find the funding needed to build (more…)