Digg has sent a cease and desist to the company behind USocial.net, the website pictured above. Should we be surprised? The site is publicly advertising its service that lets you buy votes in mass quantity on Digg, Stumbleupon, and Propeller.

The social news site has come under scrutiny for some of its recent bans aimed at preventing manipulation, but you can hardly blame them for trying to stop such blatant attempts to game the system. The letter sent to USocial’s owner is pasted below:

Dear ####:

My firm represents Digg, Inc. (”Digg”). We have become aware that uSocial.net (”uSocial”) is paying users of www.Digg.com to manipulate content rankings on the Digg website. Digg hereby places you on notice that its website terms of use (located at http://digg.com/tos) expressly state:

IN ADDITION, YOU HEREBY AGREE THAT YOU SHALL NOT USE THE SERVICE (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, BY “DIGGING” ANY CONTENT) ON BEHALF OF (OR PER THE REQUEST OR INSTRUCTION OF) ANY THIRD PARTY. FURTHERMORE, YOU SHALL NOT REQUEST THAT ANY THIRD PARTY, OR PAY OR OTHERWISE ATTEMPT TO INFLUENCE ANY THIRD TO, MANIPULATE OR OTHERWISE AFFECT THE SITE IN ANY MANNER (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, BY PAYING ANY OTHER USER TO “DIGG” ANY CONTENT).

Pursuant to the website terms of use, your manipulation of Digg’s content rankings constitutes tortious interference with Digg’s agreements (i.e. its website terms of use) with the Digg users involved such activity.

Digg hereby demands that you immediately cease all attempts to have Digg users manipulate or otherwise affect the Digg service. Please provide us with written confirmation of your understanding of this matter within the next ten (10) days and assure us that the foregoing demands will be met.

This message should not be construed as a waiver of rights, an offer of settlement, or reliance on any specific facts or legal theories. Digg reserves all of its rights and remedies under applicable law.

If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact me at ###-###-####.

---
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The Dwight Way is a remodel and the addition of a new building on the same site to create a 9-unit, mixed-use, urban infill project in the heart of Berkeley. Built originally as a corner grocery store with apartments above and a large side yard, the location had become one of the noisiest and busiest in the city. By restoring the existing building and adding a new one in an environmentally sensitive way, the project transforms this site into a green showcase. The goal was to use time tested methods to minimize energy use and to rely heavily on salvaged, recycled, and low-toxic finishes. Thoughtful passive design strategies such as excellent insulation, careful window placement and siting for passive solar benefit were among the most important strategies used to minimize energy consumption. The designers were able to achieve a 280% improvement in energy use in the existing building. The new building is almost twice as energy efficient as required by state energy code. The couple laid heavy reliance on salvaged and recycled materials saved tremendous amounts of manufacturing energy and reduced overall environmental impacts. Just three measures saved as much energy as the two buildings will use in a year: · Using blown-in cellulose insulation (made from old telephone books and newspapers) instead of fiberglass: · Substituting 50% of the cement in the concrete with fly ash (a by-product of coal burning); and · Leaving the aluminum siding on the existing building instead of replacing it with wood or stucco. The house has building materials which are published earlier on Superuse: Windshield Covering - http://www.superuse.org/story.php?title=Windshield-Covering Volvo Fence: http://www.superuse.org/story.php?title=Volvo-Fans Street Sign Fence: http://www.superuse.org/story.php?title=Street-Sign-Fence Other measures also contributed significantly to reduced overall environmental impact: · Reused car parts for awnings, railings, gates, shelves, parking bumpers and lighting. · Reused 3 1/2 tons of street signs for siding, eaves, gates, light shades and railings. · Insulated floor slabs. · Thousands of board feet of salvaged wood reused for doors, siding, trim, walls. · FSC certified, sustainably harvested 2 x 6 framing lumber. · Sustainably harvested oak slab counters. · Formaldehyde free kitchen and bathroom cabinet boxes in the new building. · FSC certified sustainably harvested hardwood flooring. · 100% wool carpets. · Non-VOC paints and woodwork finished with natural oils. · Photovoltaic panels. · Non-toxic permeable gravel paving instead of asphalt to retain rainwater on site. · Native and drought tolerant plants, eliminating the need for an irrigation system. · Bicycle parking area. · Small, gracious (average 785 sq ft, 2 bedroom, 1.5 bath) units reduce material demand. · Rehabilitation of existing buildings and infilling within the city reduce pressure to build in and commute from greenbelt areas outside the city. Karl Wanaselja and Cate Leger, lwarc The Dwight House (2004) Re-purposed Building Complex Berkeley, California, USA Source: http://www.lwarc.com/dwight1.html  » <a href='1'>original news</a>

div class="rxbodyfield"p page="1" class="ArticleBody"A group of open-source software advocates set out a road map for the software industry through 2020 at the Open World Forum conference in Paris on Tuesday./pp align="right"a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" target="_blank" /img src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" width="336" height="280" border="0" alt="" align="right"//a/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"The authors of the report, a target="_blank" href="http://www.openworldobservatory.org/download/owf_roadmap_20020.pdf"quot;2020 FLOSS Roadmapquot; (PDF)/a, made a number of predictions about the role of FLOSS (free, libre, and open-source software) in 2020, and 80 recommendations for the industry. Their use of the French word quot;librequot; (free as in unfettered) clears up the ambiguity inherent in the English word quot;free,quot; which can also mean without cost./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"b[ Track the latest trends in open source with InfoWorld#39;s a href="http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/?source=fssr"Open Sources blog/a. ]/b/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"They painted a rosy vision of 2020 in which FLOSS will have entered the mainstream of the software industry and contributed to reducing the digital divide between rich and poor. Social networks will rely on ubiquitous, open cloud-computing services and will allow people to interact not just with friends, but also with governments and businesses, they said. CIOs wary of vendor lock-in will champion the use of FLOSS, and such software will be at the heart of green datacenters and other business models with low ecological impacts, they said./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Reaching this computing nirvana, however, will require action -- and not just by bearded geeks. Investors, legislators, educators, electors, and even consumers also have a role to play, according to the report#39;s authors./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Governments must favor open standards and open services, they said. This is not just a matter of ideology, but also of necessity if data is to be exchanged between different services and systems./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"This requires a stable and neutral legal context in which a clear definition of open standards and services can be made and imposed, they said. Clear legal frameworks could also help avoid the proliferation of software licenses, they said./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Investors, whether state or private, should fund research leading to the development of strategic FLOSS technologies, and governments and businesses should set up academic and professional training programs to educate a new generation of software developers about FLOSS./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"There are some risks ahead, said the authors, including experts from Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Spain, and the U.S., although the majority of them are French./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Among those risks, the use of cloud-computing capacity on the scale required by some government systems will result in an over-reliance on a small group of powerful suppliers. That could signal a return to the era of monopolies in some markets, with the risk that entire countries could be held ransom by their service providers, the authors warned. In addition, organizations unable to pay the price for these elite services could be left running on unreliable, or unsecure, second-class systems./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Cloud computing and Web services pose other risks, too, said the authors, among them employees of networking vendor Alcatel-Lucent, cloud-computing user (and supplier) Google, and server and software vendor Sun Microsystems./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"By hiding away the software and presenting only the interface, they will limit our ability to see the source code for the applications we run. That could make some FLOSS licenses irrelevant, or their enforcement meaningless. It could also stifle innovation, if the individual programmers who code open-source applications today are reduced to mashing up future Web services through limited APIs, said the report#39;s authors./p/divbr style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=660d8f4fc8b01b166c682556fe8087d2p=1img alt= style=border: 0; border=0 src=http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=660d8f4fc8b01b166c682556fe8087d2p=1//a img src=http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=660d8f4fc8b01b166c682556fe8087d2 style=display: none; border=0 height=1 width=1 alt=/

pa href="http://flickr.com/photos/jdlasica/50185856/"img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/24/50185856_99b6867d40_m.jpg" align="right" border="0"/AJon Miller, former CEO of AOL and now one of the founders of VC firm Velocity along with Ross Levinsohn, is in the process of raising funds to try and buy Yahoo, a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122823988574372899.html" title="reports WSJ"reports WSJ/a, citing sources. The story says he has been trying to do it for months. Our sources say that WSJ might be reading too much into this: he and his partners at Velocity has been presenting to investors all across the globe, including a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_wealth_fund" title="sovereign investors"sovereign investors/a in Dubai, for raising a new fund for his VC firm. So I would not be surprised if the two things to confused along the way, and someone expressed interest in putting money into a Miller-backed consortium. /p p The story says that Miller believes he can do a deal that would be worth around $20 to $22 a share to Yahoo (a href="http://finance.paidcontent.org/paidcontent?Page=QUOTETicker=YHOO" class="ticker" title="YHOO"NSDQ: YHOO/a) shareholders, which means raising about $28 billion to $30 billion to purchase the entire company. I a href="http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-reliance-still-scouting-for-mobile-content-acquisitions-in-us-how-about" title="have said before"have said before/a that the Indian tech-media giant Reliance ADA should look at a Yahoo deal seriously, and it is likely Miller has had conversations with them, considering Velocity's India connections (it is an investor in NDTV there, among other companies). /p p All that said, Velocity itself has not yet been able to close its new fund, and considering the economic market and how funds worldwide, even sovereign ones, have suffered badly, it is unlikely any consortium could come together raise enough money to buy Yahoo, or even part of it. Our sources also says that both bMiller and Levinsohn have met Yahoo in the last few weeks/b, as part of the discussions for the search for a new CEO for Yahoo. /p p Miller almost got appointed to the Yahoo board earlier this year, when he was on an Icahn-backed slate of alternative board members...his nomination was nixed last minute due to a non-compete clause with AOL/Time Warner. /p p Meanwhile, Yahoo's stock is up about 11 percent right now, on this news... /p piSocial Media Deals Report: This 199-page report, filled with charts and data, examines the categories, number and size of VC and MA deal in social media from 2007 through 2008. stronga href="http://www.paidcontent.org/reports/"Visit the ContentNext Reports page/a/strongi/p pa href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/pcorg?a=s7aLCo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/pcorg?i=s7aLCo" border="0"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=G4G8O"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=G4G8O" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=l1uBO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=l1uBO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=Zgmmo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=Zgmmo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=3KzjO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=3KzjO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?a=qBZNO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/pcorg?i=qBZNO" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/pcorg/~4/472724583" height="1" width="1"/

Ecobank's reliance on foreign capital affects its share offering and expansion plans.

Cinematical has received this exclusive clip from the film Let Them Chirp Awhile, directed by Jonathan Blitstein, and starring a pretty impressive cast of indie talent like Justin Rice (Mutual Appreciation), Brendan Sexton III (Welcome to the Dollhouse), Zach Galligan (Gremlins) and Anthony Rapp (Dazed and Confused).

From the synopsis: "Let Them Chirp Awhile follows three twentysomething artists as they juggle their careers, relationships and emotions in New York City. Bobby (Rice) is a struggling screenwriter who tries to get romantically involved with a woman by agreeing to take care of her dog. His friend Scott (Sexton III) is a depressed, womanizing musician with a sweet and innocent girlfriend while Hart, (Galligan) Bobby's nemesis, is a successful playwright whose campy play about 9/11 has won awards and a run at an off-Broadway theater. What begins as a quirky comedy about relationships and writer's block becomes a coming-of-age tale about competition and self-reliance among the "me-generation."

Let Them Chirp Awhile opens in New York on December 5 (Cinema Village), Chicago on December 12 (AMC Loews Pipers Alley) and Los Angeles on January 2 (Laemmle Sunset 5).

Filed under: Comedy, Drama, Independent, Fandom, Home Entertainment, Trailers and Clips

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