Antigua went to the WTO after the US moved to stop American citizens using gambling services, including web-based betting shops and casinos, run from the Caribbean country. Antigua claims that action deprived it of billions of dollars in revenue.

The WTO agreed with Antigua and dismissed a US appeal against its ruling. However, because the US took no action to lift the controls on cross-border gambling Antigua filed an application to recoup its lost cash by other means.

After the video of the Mega launch party was taken down by music rights group GEMA overnight, Dotcom says the German outfit will be hearing from his lawyers.

“Incredible: The GEMA in Germany took down our #Mega launch press conference video from Youtube for copyright claims,” Dotcom announced this morning.

“I filed a counter-claim with Youtube and the video is back online. GEMA can expect mail from our legal team. Copyright madness,” Dotcom concludes.

On par with the memorable Flame malware, Kaspersky and a number of Cyber Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) discovered the malware -- known as Rocra or Red October -- which mostly targets institutions based in Eastern Europe, former USSR members and countries in Central Asia.

Red October does not simply focus on standard machines, but is also able to infect and steal data from mobile devices, hijacking information from external storage drives, accessing FTP servers and thieving information from email databases.

What about all the people—and there are many of them—not using the regular, official, Messenger client for Windows?

Third-party clients such as Pidgin, Adium, Digsby, and Trillian use one or the other of these protocols to allow chat with Messenger users.

On March 15th, the Windows Messenger client will be blacklisted and unable to connect to the network, informing users that they must install the Skype client instead.

For instant messaging functionality, the Skype client is not the best thing going. It lacks any good equivalent to the tabbed chat windows that Messenger (and virtually every other instant messaging client) sports, and its support for media sharing is inferior to Messenger's.

Confirming earlier reports, Microsoft officially announced today it would be retiring its Windows Live Messenger instant messaging service in favor of Skype.

For those who grew up in the pre-Facebook, pre-smartphone era, the news is bittersweet. Some of our first social activity online took place using instant messaging programs like AIM, ICQ and Windows Live, once known as MSN Messenger.

Beginning January 28, 2013, users' "full names" will be displayed across the check-in service and venue owners will have increased access to users' check-in data, the company announced in an e-mail sent to users late last night.

Foursquare's careful explanation of the new policies comes in the wake of an Instagram user revolt over new privacy policies that appeared to grant the Facebook-owned service perpetual rights to sell users' photographs without notifying or compensating the photographer.

After a fruitful partnership lasting three years, PayPal decided to ruin their relationship with the so-called “bullet-proof” hoster by freezing the company’s funds for up to 180 days. On PayPal’s advice PRQ opened a second account to get by while the dispute was being sorted out, but then without warning PayPal seized those funds too.

Not content with freezing two accounts, last week PayPal sent an email stating that they will be keeping all funds in PRQ’s primary account for up to 180 days to act as a reserve in case of any chargebacks. PRQ informs us that historically there have been almost none of those.

The average webpage is now 1.2 megabytes and around 60 percent of that rather large payload comes from images. That’s a lot of data, whether you’re handling images responsively or just trying to speed up a desktop site.

And in fact there’s already a way to solve this problem with HTTP headers, namely the Accepts header, which tells the server which image formats the browser supports. Based on that information the server could then “re-encode, recompress, resize, strip unnecessary metadata and deliver the optimal format.”

"This decree is binding," said Weichert, who added that it is unacceptable that a U.S. portal like Facebook keeps violating German data protection law. To ensure users' rights and comply with data protection law in general, the real name obligation must be immediately abandoned by Facebook, the ULD said.

"We believe the orders are without merit, a waste of German taxpayers' money and we will fight it vigorously," a Facebook spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. It is the role of individual services to determine their own policies about anonymity within the governing law, she added.

Vic Gundotra, formerly Senior Vice President of Social (and now, of Engineering) at Google, and head of the company’s social networking service Google+, hasn’t posted anything on Twitter since July 2011.

Sullivan gets Gundotra to say that Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page is who the senior Google executive effectively considers to be ‘his boss’, after which the former quips about now knowing who asked Gundotra not to tweet.