Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

North Oaks, Minnesota, a small suburb of St. Paul, has kindly asked Google to remove their Street View images of the town of 4,500. North Oaks is a private community, so Google’s images had to have been taken by somebody who was trespassing. Google kindly obliged. End of story?

The North Oaks City Council sent a letter to Google asking them to remove the images or be sited for trespassing. The streets in North Oaks are privately owned and maintained by the residents of the small town, so they have every right to determine who can and can not take to their streets. Apparently, Google is somebody they don’t/didn’t want in their realm.
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Arthur Firstenberg of Santa Fe, NM says he’s allergic to WiFi. “If I walk into a room of a building that has Wi-Fi, my most immediate sign is that the front of my right thigh goes numb. If I don’t leave, I’ll get short of breath, chest pains and the numbness will spread.” Apparently, he’s not alone in this claim and he and other “wireless sensitives” are banding together to stop Santa Fe from putting WiFi hotspots in public places.
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The Motion Picture Association of America won another big victory in its battle against film piracy. Two sites, ShowStash.net and Cinematube.net, were fined for merely linking to copyrighted movies, not actually hosting them. This comes on the heels of a $110 million judgment against the torrent tracker TorrentSpy, which in turn killed TorrentSpy for good.

Since most of the illegal films out there right now are stationed overseas, the MPAA can’t do a lot to take down guys in Kazakhstan from hosting a pirated version of Indiana Jones. Now, however, they are going after the sites within their purview that are linking to those overseas sites.
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In the largest anti-spam judgment of all time, “Spam King” Sanford Wallace and partner Walter Rines owe MySpace $230 million for their illegal spam practices on the social networking site after failing to show up for a Los Angeles court hearing.

The pair were prosecuted based on the 2003 federal CAN-SPAM law, which entitles companies $100 for each spam email sent, and the number is tripled if it is done “knowingly and willfully.”
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Kait Duplaga of White Plains, NY knew exactly what to do when thieves took her and her roommates’ possessions: find a computer, activate “Back to my Mac,” and turn on the camera.

Duplaga, who works for an Apple Store in Westchester, NY, had her home robbed of flat screen tvs, liquor, and her Apple laptop. Instead of accepting her fate, her knowledge of Apple applications and her membership in .mac.

.mac membership costs $99 a year and includes other services besides Back to my Mac, including a web gallery, 10G of storage space, IMAP mail access, and web hosting.
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