At PAX
Posted in Gossip, Hot Stuff, News, TV
Tagged bennyhollywood, development, forgotten-sands, nemesis, preview-right, section-on-xbla, the-comparison, Web
Round 2 NCAA Bracket Update 2010: NCAA March Madness Results and Scores Today – The 2010 NCAA Tournament is just heating up. Saturday, The 2010 NCAA bracket update has a bunch of upsets. First, congratulations to the Moraga, California St. Mary’s Gaels, the underdog 10th seed upset the number 2 seed Villanova Wildcats 75 to 68, and with Cal playing Duke Sunday, gives the San Francisco Bay Area NCAA Tournament bragging rights – for at least a day. What another exciting day for NCAA Tournament action where we have 8 teams that are now headed for the Sweet 16 in hopes of bringing a National Championship to their respective colleges. The last 2 games to be played tonight featured Wildcats as winners. The Kansas State Wildcats beat BYU. Just minutes after the Kansas State win, The Kentucky Wildcats easily beat Wake Forest to advance to the Sweet 16. Then two other major upsets. The University of Washington Huskies, who are the co-Pac-10 Champions with the University of California, continue their surprising run, beating the New Mexico Lobos 82 to 64. All eyes were on this crucial match. Many were betting for the West Virginia. But as luck would have it at the end of the match Morgan State jetted out to a 10-0 lead over West Virginia. The result was not a big surprise. But it forced many teams to sit and take notice of the development. Instantly this was something for the 2-seed Mountaineers. Round 2 NCAA Bracket Update 2010: NCAA March Madness Results and Scores Today is a post from: Daily World Buzz Continue reading
2010 NCAA Basketball Bracket Latest Updates Scores and Results – Starting with 64 teams aiming to prove that they are the best college ballers, we are now down to the sweet sixteen. Sixteen slots up for grabs. In recent developments, there have been lots of surprising outcomes in the NCAA tournament. Lower seeded teams are building up the confidence after grabbing consecutive wins against top seeded teams. St. Mary’s showed an outstanding performance after defeating the 2nd seeded Villanova Wildcats with a score of 75-68 while the lower seeded Northern Iowa showed great team spirit and determination to pull off an upset against the number one seeded Kansas Jayhawks. Check back here for more 2010 NCAA Basketball Bracket latest updates scores and results. 2010 NCAA Basketball Bracket Latest Updates Scores and Results is a post from: Daily World Buzz Continue reading
Her management denies involvement, but some eagle-eyed fans beg to differ. By James Montgomery Unknown woman from Iamamiwhoami video Photo: iamamiwhoami Back in January, amid much speculation to the contrary, a rep for Christina Aguilera denied that her client had anything to do with the ongoing “Iamamiwhoami” viral campaign , telling MTV News: “It’s 100 percent not her … not sure why people think it is.” And yet, despite that denial (and a second one issued just last week), Aguilera’s name kept being mentioned in connection with the maddeningly complex campaign , even as mysterious packages were sent to MTV News and more and more Iamami videos were released. But on Sunday, with the debut of the seventh Iamami clip , all that speculation may finally be over. We might finally know the person responsible for the engrossing (and pretty gross) viral campaign: Jonna Lee , a singer/songwriter from Sweden. In a lengthy post on celebrity-obsessed LiveJournal community Oh No They Didn’t , a pair of keen-eyed readers noticed the similarities between Lee and the muck-smeared heroine of the Iamami video series — the nose, the teeth, the eyes — similarities no amount of masking tape (which our heroine covered herself in for the latest vid) could hide. Also strangely similar is an electric organ seen in the new video, which also makes an appearance in a “making of” clip for Lee’s latest album, and Lee’s backing musicians, who look very much like the guys featured in the newest Iamami video. And given all those similarities, it seemed like the mystery was finally solved. Only, perhaps it isn’t. Because Lee’s music only bears a passing resemblance to the ethereal, downright eerie electronic stuff being unveiled in the viral videos (her latest single, “Something So Quiet,” is perhaps the closest match). And, according to her management, she has nothing to do with Iamami. “If Jonna is involved in this, we have no knowledge of such,” Jamie Jaffe, who works for Lee’s North American management team, Philadelphonic, told MTV News in an e-mail Monday (March 15). “The only upcoming projects we are aware of are the development of her third album and her upcoming SXSW performances.” Then again, from the sound of things, Lee is working on a new album, and MTV News’ e-mails to her Swedish label, Razzia, seeking comment were not returned. So there’s still nothing official to report. But for the first time since the Iamami campaign began in December, we might actually be getting close to figuring this whole thing out. Do you think the Iamamiwhoami mystery has been solved? Let us know your theories below! Related Artists Jonna Lee
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‘Iamamiwhoami’: Is Swedish Singer Jonna Lee Behind Viral Campaign?
Posted in Music
Tagged bennyhollywood, client, development, from-the-sound, Hollywood, iamami, know-the-person, latest, management, Mtv, news article, theories, TMZ, Videos
The New York Times reported this morning that an off-the-books intelligence operation may be assassinating people in Pakistan with the help of a sketchy former spook—the same guy that the Times hired to save reporter David Rohde ‘s life. Dexter Filkins and Mark Mazzetti’s Page One story on a secret contractor-run intelligence program in Afghanistan and Pakistan offers a weird view into the intersection of the media business and the world of spycraft, not to mention the hazards of a newspaper like the Times hiring a private army led by an arguably crazy ex-spy. The story recounts the development of a “network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants” that operated under the cover of “a benign government information-gathering program,” and Mazzetti and Filkins refer darkly to the involvement a legendary former CIA operative named Duane “Dewey” Clarridge as evidence that something was fishy about the whole thing. They describe Clarridge as “a former top C.I.A. official who has been linked to a generation of C.I.A. adventures, including the Iran-Contra scandal,” which is a nicer way of saying Clarridge was involved in the illegal mining of Nicaraguan harbors and indicted in 1991 for lying to Congress about arms shipments to Iran (he was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush in 1992 ). Clarridge is a legendary old spook in intelligence circles, and the Times says the Defense Department official who ran the program “would occasionally brag to his superiors about having Mr. Clarridge’s services at his disposal.” As the story discloses, the Times once also had Clarridge’s services at its disposal. He was hired, through his employer American International Security Corporation, in 2008 to secure the release of kidnapped Times reporter David Rohde from his Taliban captors in Pakistan. When Rohde was first kidnapped, the Times and its insurer AIG sought out a security firm called Clayton Consultants to handle the case. Clayton’s strategy, and expertise from prior cases it had worked on, was to negotiate a ransom. But after negotiations stalled, Rohde’s family became anxious and insisted that the Times pursue a dual-track approach: Clayton would continue the ransom route, but the Times also hired AISC and Clarridge to prepare a paramilitary snatch-and-grab operation. A team assembled by Clarridge was at one point suited up and ready to assault a location where they believed Rohde was being held, according to New York magazine , but the operation was called off at the last minute. Rohde and his translator Tahir Ludin eventually escaped on their own in June of last year. But Clarridge soon began causing headaches for the Times . He freely talked to reporters off the record—ABC News’ Brian Ross is said to be in regular contact with him—and began spreading rumors that the story of Rohde’s escape was a sham. Ross and New York both reported that contractors hired by the Times had paid bribes to Rohde’s guards , contradicting the Times ‘ claims that it had paid no ransom and suggesting that Rohde’s escape was a planned operation. According to one contractor who worked on Rohde’s case, Clarridge was inflating his role in facilitating Rohde’s escape in an effort to justify AISC’s enormous fees. The contractor says Clarridge routinely supplied inaccurate intelligence about Rohde’s whereabouts—on the day Rohde escaped from a safehouse in Miram Shah, Waziristan, the source said, Clarridge was claiming that he was being held in an entirely different location. The rumor campaign against the Times culminated in a series of Twitter posts by independent warblogger Michael Yon, who caused a stir in November by writing that “ex-CIA officers helped pay off release for Rohde” to the tune of “millions” of dollars. Yon’s claims attracted a flurry of attention, and Rohde responded that he would “never have written a five-part series [detailing his captivity and escape] based on a lie.” In December, in response to inquiries from Gawker, Rohde wrote that “money was paid to individuals who claimed to know our whereabouts, but I do not believe that the guards who lived with us were bribed. As I have repeatedly said, our guards did not help us during our escape. In addition, no one has been able to name the guards who lived with us.” According to one Times insider, the paper suspected Clarridge was behind the rumors and confronted him, but took him at his word when he denied it. “There’s no ill will toward Clarridge,” the insider says. “Getting accurate information out of the tribal areas is extraordinarily difficult.” But another source familiar with Clarridge’s involvement in the Rohde episode says the Times was furious, and threatened in December to withhold payment from AISC, claiming that the leaks and rumors constituted a violation of the contract. AISC, the source says, was considering legal action against the paper. The tension seems to have defused, however. Reached at his home in California, Clarridge told Gawker that the Times and AISC “came to some sort of a negotiated settlement,” before declining to answer further questions for the record. A Times spokesman says “We have no billing dispute with AISC, and AISC has no billing dispute with us.” And the Times insider insists that the dispute was “about money and hours,” not any involvement Clarridge may have had with the bribery rumors. Clarridge, who is in his late 70s, is a strange man, and has a reputation among reporters who have spoken to him of making outrageous and contradictory statements. In September 2009, he sent a political screed via e-mail, obtained by Gawker, to a wide contact list under the subject heading “Senator McCarthy Was Right.” In it, he complained of the influence of “far left vermin (FLV) as they are known in the bug business” and hailed the imminent right-wing insurrection: “We won the Cold War; now we will win The War of the Authoritarians, which will be a civil war in the USA and such catastrophes are always exquisitely nasty.” The prospect of the Department of Defense hiring an indicted perjurer who advocates “civil war in the USA” to run an off-the-books intelligence operation is strange enough without adding in his prior ugly entanglement with the New York Times . The fact that it was the Times itself who blew the lid off his involvement makes the whole thing unbelievably incestuous. (The Times insider, for what it’s worth, says the story was not motivated by a vendetta against Clarridge: “He came up very late in the reporting, and once he did, we had to put him in there with a disclosure of his previous involvement with the Times.”) The program started with an idea from, of all people, former CNN executive and Sharon Stone-dater Eason Jordan . He proposed a DOD-funded web site, similar to his post-CNN project Iraq Slogger, that would cover Afghanistan and Pakistan. The DOD loved the idea and funded it to the tune of $22 million, but the money was diverted, the Times says, to the secret intelligence network by Michael Furlong, a DOD official and former Air Force officer with “extensive experience in psychological operations.” Jordan’s web site, Afpax, did get off the ground, but he says he only received two slight payments from the DOD funding the work. The rest of the money allocated for the project went somewhere else—presumably to the secret network. It wasn’t Jordan’s first run-in with psy-ops. While he was in charge of newsgathering for CNN, he invited active duty psy-ops operatives with the Army to intern in CNN’s Atlanta headquarters . “Psyops personnel, soldiers, and officers, have been working in CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta through our program ‘Training With Industry,'” an Army spokesperson admitted in 2000. The program was immediately discontinued once people figured out that it’s not such a good idea to invite professional liars to help deliver cable news and study how to better lie to news organizations. So he probably should have known better.
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The Spy Who Wronged Me: The New York Times’ Messy Entanglement With an Ex-Spook [Spooks]
Posted in Celebrities, Hot Stuff
Tagged afghanistan, california, cia, Cnn, congress, development, insider, jordan, Money, new-york-times, president, TMZ, translator, usa
Stupid lawsuits are filed every day, and Lindsay Lohan does stupid things every day. But is she really behind the E*Trade lawsuit that bears her name? According to a complaint filed in New York’s Nassau County Supreme Court on Monday, Lohan claims that the E*Trade advertisement that refers to a “milkaholic” named Lindsay appropriated her name and image without her consent, and she is seeking a whopping $100 million in damages and an injunction against further broadcast of the commercial. It’s a ludicrous claim, as former Gawker editor Joshua Stein, who happened to be reporting on the development of that very ad for Esquire and has produced documents showing that the “mikaholic” character was originally named “Deborah,” has demonstrated . But the strange thing about the suit is that the lead attorney on the case, Stephanie Ovadia, has done legal work for Michael Lohan in the past , and Michael has repeatedly posted fulsome praise of Ovadia’s legal skills to his Twitter feed as recently as January. Last we checked, Michael was still in the midst of his famous feud with Lindsay—just last week, father and daughter were lobbing tabloid insults at one another , with Lindsay saying she didn’t speak to Michael and calling him “nuts.” So why would she seek out her dad’s lawyer just a few days later to file a $100 million lawsuit? Sure, the high-end Hollywood lawyers that Lindsay has employed in the past wouldn’t be stupid enough to draw up the E*Trade complaint, but surely she could find a bottom-feeding attorney of her own to embarrass themselves for money and attention. And she could probably find one who is a member of the state bar in which the suit was filed. According to the web site of the New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division , which is responsible for admitting attorneys to the New York bar, no one going by the name “Stephanie Ovadia” is currently entitled to appear before New York courts (which may explain the presence of Ovadia’s co-counsel Anand Ahuja, who is admitted to the bar, on the complaint). According to press accounts posted on Ovadia’s web site , she has practiced law in New York in the past. But she certainly doesn’t seem like a go-to lawyer for a multimillion dollar case—unless you can sue people for $100 million over parking tickets. Ovadia didn’t return a phone call and e-mail asking how she got involved in the case and whether she’d ever spoken to Lindsay Lohan about it. And we don’t really know where to go to ask someone from Lindsay’s side about it, considering the fact that her long-time publicist is on a “hiatus.” Her mother Dina Lohan told the New York Post today that Lindsay was outraged by the ad, adding, in a telling use of the first person, “I’m just basically glad I took a stand.” And to to complete the circle, Radar Online quoted Michael Lohan just two days ago saying that he and his ex-wife had reconnected and were “crying to each other” on the phone after he took a heart-related trip to the hospital. A cynic might suspect that Lindsay’s money-grubbing parents recently started talking again and hatched a plan to attach their daughter’s name to a bullshit lawsuit filed by a provincial lawyer that one of them knows. But we can’t imagine what sort of parents would treat their daughter that way.
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Does Lindsay Lohan Even Know That She’s Suing E*Trade? [Lawsuits]
Posted in Celebrities, Hot Stuff
Tagged bennyhollywood, daughter, development, Lawsuits, lindsay, michael, past, phone, suit, supreme-court
You have another reason to be worried about your privacy on Facebook. A new investigation reveals the company’s founder hacked into the personal profiles and email of both his personal rivals and journalists. The origins of Facebook have been in dispute since the very week a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg launched the site as a Harvard sophomore on February 4, 2004. Then called “thefacebook.com,” the site was an instant hit. Now, six years later, the site has become one of the biggest web sites in the world, visited by 400 million people a month. The controversy surrounding Facebook began quickly. A week after he launched the site in 2004, Mark was accused by three Harvard seniors of having stolen the idea from them. This allegation soon bloomed into a full-fledged lawsuit, as a competing company founded by the Harvard seniors sued Mark and Facebook for theft and fraud, starting a legal odyssey that continues to this day. The primary dispute centered around whether Mark had entered into an “agreement” with the Harvard seniors, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and a classmate named Divya Narendra, to develop a similar web site for them — and then, instead, stalled their project while taking their idea and building his own. The litigation never went particularly well for the Winklevosses. In 2007, Massachusetts Judge Douglas P. Woodlock called their allegations “tissue thin.” Referring to the agreement that Mark had allegedly breached, Woodlock also wrote, “Dorm room chit-chat does not make a contract.” A year later, the end finally seemed in sight: a judge ruled against Facebook’s move to dismiss the case. Shortly thereafter, the parties agreed to settle. But then, a twist. After Facebook announced the settlement, but before the settlement was finalized, lawyers for the Winklevosses suggested that the hard drive from Mark Zuckerberg’s computer at Harvard might contain evidence of Mark’s fraud. Specifically, they suggested that the hard drive included some damning instant messages and emails. The judge in the case refused to look at the hard drive and instead deferred to another judge who went on to approve the settlement. But, naturally, the possibility that the hard drive contained additional evidence set inquiring minds wondering what those emails and IMs revealed. Specifically, it set inquiring minds wondering again whether Mark had, in fact, stolen the Winklevoss’s idea, screwed them over, and then ridden off into the sunset with Facebook. Unfortunately, since the contents of Mark’s hard drive had not been made public, no one had the answers. But now we have some. Over the past two years, we have interviewed more than a dozen sources familiar with aspects of this story — including people involved in the founding year of the company. We have also reviewed what we believe to be some relevant IMs and emails from the period. Much of this information has never before been made public. None of it has been confirmed or authenticated by Mark or the company. Based on the information we obtained, we have what we believe is a more complete picture of how Facebook was founded. This account follows. And what does this more complete story reveal? We’ll offer our own conclusions at the end. But first, here’s the story: “We can talk about that after I get all the basic functionality up tomorrow night.” In the fall of 2003, Harvard seniors Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra were on the lookout for a web developer who could bring to life an idea the three say Divya first had in 2002: a social network for Harvard students and alumni. The site was to be called HarvardConnections.com. The three had been paying Victor Gao, another Harvard student, to do coding for the site, but at the beginning of the fall term Victor begged off the project. Victor suggested his own replacement: Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard sophomore from Dobbs Ferry, New York. Back then, Mark was known at Harvard as the sophomore who had built Facemash, a “Hot Or Not” clone for Harvard. Facemash had already made Mark a bit of a celebrity on campus, for two reasons. The first is that Mark got in trouble for creating it. The way the site worked was that it pulled photos of Harvard students off of Harvard’s Web sites. It rearranged these photos so that when people visited Facemash.com they would see pictures of two Harvard students and be asked to vote on which was more attractive. The site also maintained a list of Harvard students, ranked by attractiveness. On Harvard’s politically correct campus, this upset people, and Mark was soon hauled in front of Harvard’s disciplinary board for students. According to a November 19, 2003 Harvard Crimson article , he was charged with breaching security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. Happily for Mark, the article reports that he wasn’t expelled. The second reason everyone at Harvard knew about Facemash and Mark Zuckerberg was that Facemash had been an instant hit. The same Harvard Crimson story reports that after two weeks, “the site had been visited by 450 people, who voted at least 22,000 times.” That means the average visitor voted 48 times. It was for this ability to build a wildly popular site that Victor Gao first recommended Mark to Cameron, Tyler, and Divya. Sold on Mark, the Harvard Connection trio reached out to him. Mark agreed to meet. They first met in the early evening on November 30 in the dining hall of Harvard College’s Kirkland House. Cameron, Tyler, and Divya brought up their idea for Harvard Connection, and described their plans to A) build the site for Harvard students only, by requiring new users to register with Harvard.edu email addresses, and B) expand Harvard Connection beyond Harvard to schools around the country. Mark reportedly showed enthusiastic interest in the project. Later that night, Mark wrote an email to the Winklevoss brothers and Divya: “I read over all the stuff you sent and it seems like it shouldn’t take too long to implement, so we can talk about that after I get all the basic functionality up tomorrow night.” The next day, on December 1, Mark sent another email to the HarvardConnections team. Part of it read, “I put together one of the two registration pages so I have everything working on my system now. I’ll keep you posted as I patch stuff up and it starts to become completely functional.” These two emails sounded like the words of someone who was eager to be a part of the team and working away on the project. A few days later, however, Mark’s emails to the HarvardConnection team started to change in tone. Specifically, they went from someone who seemed to be hard at work building the product to someone who was so busy with schoolwork that he had no time to do any coding at all. December 4: “Sorry I was unreachable tonight. I just got about three of your missed calls. I was working on a problem set.” December 10: “The week has been pretty busy thus far, so I haven’t gotten a chance to do much work on the site or even think about it really, so I think it’s probably best to postpone meeting until we have more to discuss. I’m also really busy tomorrow so I don’t think I’d be able to meet then anyway.” A week later: “Sorry I have not been reachable for the past few days. I’ve basically been in the lab the whole time working on a cs problem set which I”m still not finished with.” Finally, on January 8: Sorry it’s taken a while for me to get back to you. I’m completely swamped with work this week. I have three programming projects and a final paper due by Monday, as well as a couple of problem sets due Friday. I’ll be available to discuss the site again starting Tuesday. I”m still a little skeptical that we have enough functionality in the site to really draw the attention and gain the critical mass necessary to get a site like this to run…Anyhow, we’ll talk about it once I get everything else done. So what happened to change Mark’s tune about HarvardConnection? Was he so swamped with work that he was unable to finish the project? Or, as the HarvardConnection founders have alleged, was he stalling the development of HarvardConnection so that he could build a competing site and launch it first? Our investigation suggests the latter. As a part of the lawsuit against Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, the above emails from Mark have been public for years. What has never been revealed publicly is what Mark was telling his friends, parents, and closest confidants at the same time. Let’s start with a December 7th (IM) exchange Mark Zuckerberg had with his Harvard classmate and Facebook cofounder, Eduardo Saverin. “They made a mistake haha. They asked me to make it for them.” Former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel gets a lot of credit for being the first investor in Facebook, because he led the first formal Facebook round in September of 2004 with a $500,000 investment at a $5 million valuation. But the real “first investor” claim to fame should actually belong to a Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg’s named Eduardo Saverin. To picture Eduardo, what you need to know is that he was the kid at Harvard who would wear a suit to class. He liked to give people the impression that he was rich — and maybe somehow connected to the Brazilian mafia. At one point, in an IM exchange, Mark told a friend that Eduardo — “head of the investment society” — was rich because “apparently insider trading isn’t illegal in Brazil.” Eduardo Saverin wasn’t directly involved with Facebook for long: During the summer of 2004, when Mark moved to Palo Alto to work on Facebook full time, Eduardo took a high-paying internship at Lehman Brothers in New York. While Mark was still at Harvard, however, Eduardo appears to have bankrolled Facebook’s earliest capital expenses, thus becoming its initial investor. In January, however, Mark told a friend that “Eduardo is paying for my servers.” Eventually, Eduardo would agree to invest $15,000 in a company that would, in April 2004, be formed as Facebook LLC. For his money, Eduardo would get 30% of the company. Eduardo was also involved in Facebook’s earliest days, as a confidant of Mark Zuckerberg. In December, 2003, a week after Mark’s first meeting with the HarvardConnection team, when he was telling the Winklevosses that he was too busy with schoolwork to work on or even think about HarvardConnection.com, Mark was telling Eduardo a different story. On December 7, 2003, we believe Mark sent Eduardo the following IM: Check this site out: www.harvardconnection.com and then go to harvardconnection.com/datehome.php. Someone is already trying to make a dating site. But they made a mistake haha. They asked me to make it for them. So I’m like delaying it so it won’t be ready until after the facebook thing comes out. This IM suggests that, within a week of meeting with the Winklevosses for the first time, Mark had already decided to start his own, similar project—”the facebook thing.” It also suggests that he had developed a strategy for dealing with his would-be competition: Delay developing it. “I feel like the right thing to do is finish the facebook and wait until the last day before I’m supposed to have their thing ready and then be like look yours isn’t as good” A few weeks after the initial meeting with the HarvardConnection team, after Mark sent the IM to Eduardo Saverin talking about developing “the facebook thing” and delaying his development of HarvardConnection, Mark met with the HarvardConnection folks, Cameron, Tyler, and Divya, for a second time. This time, instead of meeting in the dining hall of Mark’s residential hall, Kirkland House, the four met in Mark’s dorm room. Divya is said to have arrived late. In Kirkland House, the dorm rooms aren’t laid out in cinder-block-cube style: Mark’s room had a narrow hallway connecting it to his neighbor’s. As Cameron and Tyler sat down on a couch in Mark’s room, Cameron spotted something in the hallway. On top of a bookshelf there was a white board. It was the kind Web developers and product managers everywhere use to map out their ideas. On it, Cameron read two words, “Harvard Connection.” He got up to go look at it. Immediately, Mark asked Cameron to stay out of the hallway. Eventually Divya arrived and the four of them talked about plans for Harvard Connection. One feature Mark brought up was designed to keep more popular and sought-after Harvard Connection users from being stalked and harassed by crowds of people. In this second meeting, Mark still appeared to be actively engaged in developing Harvard Connection. But he never showed the HarvardConnection folks any site prototypes or code. And they didn’t insist on seeing them. During the weeks in which Mark was juggling the two projects in tandem, he also had a series of IM exchanges with a friend named Adam D’Angelo (above). Adam and Mark went to boarding school together at Phillips Exeter Academy. There, the pair became friends and coding partners. Together they built a program called Synapse, a music player that supposedly learned the listener’s taste and then adapted to it. Then, in 2002 Mark went to Harvard and Adam went to Cal Tech. But the pair stayed in close touch, especially through AOL instant messenger. Eventually, Adam became Facebook’s CTO. Harvard Yard at WinterThrough the Harvard Connection-Facebook saga and its aftermath, Mark kept Adam apprised of his plans and thoughts. One purported IM exchange seems particularly relevant on the question of how Mark distinguished between the two projects—the “facebook thing” and “the dating site”—as well as how he was considering handling the latter: Zuck: So you know how I’m making that dating site Zuck: I wonder how similar that is to the Facebook thing Zuck: Because they’re probably going to be released around the same time Zuck: Unless I fuck the dating site people over and quit on them right before I told them I’d have it done. D’Angelo: haha Zuck: Like I don’t think people would sign up for the facebook thing if they knew it was for dating Zuck: and I think people are skeptical about joining dating things too. Zuck: But the guy doing the dating thing is going to promote it pretty well. Zuck: I wonder what the ideal solution is. Zuck: I think the Facebook thing by itself would draw many people, unless it were released at the same time as the dating thing. Zuck: In which case both things would cancel each other out and nothing would win. Any ideas? Like is there a good way to consolidate the two. D’Angelo: We could make it into a whole network like a friendster. haha. Stanford has something like that internally Zuck: Well I was thinking of doing that for the facebook. The only thing that’s different about theirs is that you like request dates with people or connections with the facebook you don’t do that via the system. D’Angelo: Yeah Zuck: I also hate the fact that I’m doing it for other people haha. Like I hate working under other people. I feel like the right thing to do is finish the facebook and wait until the last day before I’m supposed to have their thing ready and then be like “look yours isn’t as good as this so if you want to join mine you can…otherwise I can help you with yours later.” Or do you think that’s too dick? D’Angelo: I think you should just ditch them Zuck: The thing is they have a programmer who could finish their thing and they have money to pour into advertising and stuff. Oh wait I have money too. My friend who wants to sponsor this is head of the investment society. Apparently insider trading isn’t illegal in Brazil so he’s rich lol. D’Angelo: lol “I’m going to fuck them.” Eduardo Saverin and Adam D’Angelo were not the only people Mark discussed his Harvard Connection – Facebook situation with. We believe he also had many IM exchanges about it with relatives and a close female Harvard friend. In January 2004, Mark met with the Winklevoss brothers and Divya Narendra for what would be the last time. The meeting was on January 14, 2004, and it was held at the same place Mark met with the HarvardConnection team for the first time — in the dining hall of Mark’s residence, Kirkland House. By this point, Mark’s site, thefacebook.com, wasn’t complete, but he was working hard on it. He’d arranged for Eduardo Saverin to pay for his servers. He had already told Adam that “the right thing to do” was to not complete Harvard Connection and build TheFacebook.com instead. He had registered the domain name. He therefore had a choice to make: Tell Cameron, Tyler and Divya that he wanted out of their project, or string them along until he was ready to launch thefacebook.com. Mark sought advice on this decision from his confidants. One friend told him, in so many words, you know me. I don’t ever think anyone should do anything bad to anybody. Mark and this friend also had the following IM exchange about how Mark planned to resolve the competing projects: Friend: So have you decided what you’re going to do about the websites? Zuck: Yeah, I’m going to fuck them Zuck: Probably in the year Zuck: *ear And so, it appears, he did. (In a manner of speaking). On January 14, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg met with Cameron, Tyler, and Divya for the last time. During the meeting at Kirkland House, Mark expressed doubts about the viability of HarvardConnection.com. He said he was very busy with personal projects and school work and that he wouldn’t be able to work on the site for a while. He blamed others for the site’s delays. He did not say that he was working on his own project and that he was not planning to complete the HarvardConnection site. After the meeting, Mark had another IM exchange with the friend above. He told her, in effect, that he had wimped out. He hadn’t been able to break the news to Cameron and Tyler, in part, he said, because he was “intimidated” by them. He called them “poor bastards.” So then what happened? Three days earlier, on January 11, 2004, Mark had registered the domain THEFACEBOOK.COM. On February 4, he opened the site to Harvard students. On February 10, Cameron Winklevoss sent Mark a letter accusing him of breaching their agreement and stealing their idea. In late May, after going through two more developers, Cameron, Tyler and Divya launched HarvardConnection as ConnectU, a social network for 15 schools. On June 10, 2004, a commencement speaker mentioned the amazing popularity of Mark’s site, thefacebook.com. In the summer of 2004, Mark moved to Palo Alto to work on Facebook full time and soon received a $500,000 investment from Peter Thiel. In September 2004, HarvardConnection, now called ConnectU, sued Mark Zuckerberg and the now-incorporated “Facebook” for allegedly breaching their agreement and stealing their idea. In February 2008, Facebook and ConnectU agreed to settle the lawsuit. In June 2008, ConnectU appealed the settlement in California’s ninth district, accusing Facebook of trading its stock without disclosing material information. This appeal is on-going. The $65 million question When we described the specifics of this story to Facebook, the company had the following comment: “We’re not going to debate the disgruntled litigants and anonymous sources who seek to rewrite Facebook’s early history or embarrass Mark Zuckerberg with dated allegations. The unquestioned fact is that since leaving Harvard for Silicon Valley nearly six years ago, Mark has led Facebook’s growth from a college website to a global service playing an important role in the lives of over 400 million people.” On the latter point, we agree. What Mark Zuckerberg has accomplished with Facebook over the past six years has been nothing short of amazing. So, having revisited the founding of Facebook with additional information, what do we conclude? First, we have seen no evidence of any formal contract between Mark Zuckerberg and the Winklevosses in which Mark agreed to develop Harvard Connection. Second, any agreement the parties may have had—as well as most of the purported IMs and emails we have reviewed from the period—appear to have been at the level of, as Judge Ware described them, “dorm-room chit-chat.” (Albeit interesting and entertaining chit-chat.) Third, only a week after beginning development of Harvard Connection, which he referred to as “the dating site,” Mark had begun work on a separate project — “the facebook thing.” Mark appears to have considered the products as competing for the attention of the same users, but he also appears to have regarded them as different in some key ways. Fourth — and because of this foreseen competition — Mark does appear to have intentionally strung along the Harvard Connection folks with the goal of making his project, thefacebook.com, have a more successful launch. Bottom line, we haven’t seen anything that makes us think that, whatever Mark did to the Harvard Connection folks, it was worth more than the $65 million they received in the lawsuit settlement. In fact, this seems like a huge sum of money considering that the entire dispute took place over two months in 2004 and that, in the six years since, Mark has built Facebook into a massive global enterprise. That said, in the course of our investigation, we also uncovered two additional anecdotes about Mark’s behavior in Facebook’s early days that are more troubling. These episodes — an apparent hacking into the email accounts of Harvard Crimson editors using data obtained from Facebook logins, as well as a later hacking into ConnectU — are described in detail here. Related posts by Business Insider : • How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked The Harvard Crimson Using Data From TheFacebook.com • How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked Into Rival ConnectU In The Summer Of 2004 [ Image via deneyterrio’s Flickr ] Republished from www.businessinsider.com
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Mark Zuckerberg Will Personally Hack Your Facebook Account [Valleywag]
Posted in Celebrities, Hot Stuff
Tagged article, attention, business insider, dating, development, Facebook, investment, parties, personal, Pictures
Snooki has found love. With a personal trainer at Gold’s Gym in New Haven, Conn. Anybody out there the slightest bit surprised with this development? Didn’t think so. The “lucky” man is 21-year-old Emilio Masella, also known as Emilio Antonio . “We met on Facebook over a year ago,” Masella tells People . “We started talking online again before the show even started airing and started hanging out again.” A few days ago, Masella said he and Snooki, also known as Nicole Polizzi, began being “exclusive.” “We have a lot in common,” he says. “Our features, I think.” “It’s really weird but we do [look alike]. It’s cute though!” Just the word we would have chosen … Emilio Masella and Snooki: Made for each other. In their spare time, the couple goes to parties and clubs for her official appearances, but, “When she’s not working, we watch movies and relax so she can be normal for once. … We wanted to go see Dear John but we didn’t have time!” While he’s fine with the amount of attention his famous girlfriend gets, he admits that “after awhile, it does get annoying, but it’s all right – it’s kind of expected.” Despite all the fame and flashbulbs that surround Snooki, Masella says he likes her for who she is, not the “character” portrayed on the MTV show Jersey Shore . “Honestly, I think that what they show on the show, that’s not really her,” he says. “She’s actually really sweet and down-to-earth but the show makes her look like she’s a crazy party girl. It doesn’t show her other side.” “She really just speaks what on her mind. She tells it how it is, which is nice. She likes me for me. A lot of girls hit on me for how I look, but she got to know me.” Emilio Masella also says that while he’s just now begun calling her his “girlfriend,” he’s already met her parents and may even appear on Season 2 of Jersey Shore.
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Emilio Masella: Snooki Shagger, Juiced-Up Guido
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip
Tagged development, emilio-antonio, emilio-masella, Gossip, jersey-shore, known-as-nicole, masella, mind, Mtv, nicole-polizzi, snooki-polizzi, trainer-at-gold
Thank you, Mr.
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‘President Obama’s JFK moment’ by Buzz Aldrin
Posted in Celebrities, Hot Stuff
Tagged bennyhollywood, current, development, Hollywood, life, moon, Obama, plan, program, space, space-shuttle, space-station, technologies, working-on-mars
Days after Conan’s last ‘Tonight’ appearance, network picks up legal drama from his production company. By Joel Hanek Conan O’Brien Photo: Frederick M. Brown/ Getty Images Although Conan O’Brien delivered his last monologue for “The Tonight Show” last Friday, it appears that NBC and the late-night host aren’t done with each other just yet.
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Conan O’Brien-Produced Show Picked Up By NBC
Posted in Music
Tagged although-conan, development, earth-song, Getty Images, grammy, Hollywood, Mtv, network, night, Photos, through-the-end
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