News : OpenSocial, Firefox 3 Beta 1 and the poor fella who got 10 years for uploading Star Wars – III

Some news round-up today.

1. Google is back in Social networking space with a new Social Networking platform called OpenSocial. This means now we can code websites/blogs to talk to social networking data. So far, Google’s Orkut , LinkedIn, hi5, XING, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning have already joined.

OpenSocial and its implications : http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=6813

2. Firefox 3 Beta 1 released today. I gave it a try at my Office on Windows and the interface is a lot slicker. By default it was missing the search tool bar. I had to manually customize to get it. Still a lot of add-ons are not compatible with this release. But they are coming. It still has a lot of open bugs. The release is strictly meant for testing purposes.

Changes and Release Notes : http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0b1/releasenotes/

Go2Lnux just reviewed the changes : http://www.go2linux.org/firefox-3-vs-firefox-2

Get it from here.

And the now the news which spoiled my mood.

3. Another eliteTorrent uploader gets convicted. Gets 10 years. Here’s more on this.

Duc Do, aged 25, of Orlando, Florida. What he did? He uploaded Star Wars 3 on internet. All he did was shared some stuff on internet. I wonder how retarded are the law makers in that country called US. This definitely sets up a bad example for uploaders and spoils my mood. More so when I just learnt that a rapist also gets average 10 years in that country. Comparing this with such crimes is ridiculous.

I think there’s an urgent need for revving up the bit torrent protocol to that its respects a little bit of people’s privacy. And yes, it definitely needs not be open. May be kazaa or sthing along those lines was the way to go.

Lets just pray that *axxo* is not from US