The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘steven-tyler’

It’s an unlikely relationship, but Twitter and sports have gotten along quite nicely over the past few months. We all know about Shaq tweeting, and perhaps you even heard about the players tweeting during halftime of games. And if you watch ESPN or read ESPN the Magazine, you’ll find it littered with dozens of references to the service. At first, these references were made in jest, but now they’re mostly serious. But the Twitter/sports relationship runs the risk of souring after a lawsuit was publicized today.

Tony La Russa, the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals Major League Baseball franchise is suing Twitter claiming that someone is pretending to be him on the site. Of course, he could have just asked the service to take that fake account down — something which it does fairly regularly — but instead, the suit filed last month in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco seeks “unspecified damages.” Twitter has since taken down the fake account.

The suit is specifically for “trademark infringement, trademark dilution and misappropriation of name and likeness,” according to MLB.com. It also said the tweets were “derogatory and demeaning.” ESPN has some other details including that La Russa’s lawyers apparently included screenshots of these fake tweets which included, “Hey there! Tony La Russa is using Twitter.” No such tweet exists on Twitter Search, but perhaps Twitter has purged the results. Some of the tweets in question also apparently talk about a couple of Cardinals players who have passed away in recent years, which angered La Russa.

Impersonation continues to be an issue on the web in general. Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler recently tried to sue a group of anonymous bloggers for pretending to be him — of course, since they were anonymous, they couldn’t be tracked down and thus, didn’t show up for court. But Twitter is particularly hot right now and so a lot of people are taking advantage of it to make fake accounts for famous people. This is something that made Kanye West mad as hell a few weeks ago.

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Kyle at the great site iFixIt.com has just opened a new service dedicated to the collection and curation of user-generated content called Gear Teardown. The service, sort of like a how-to site for crazy people, allows folks to document each step in the process of tearing down, and hopefully putting back together, their gadgets.

For example, this teardown of the Moto Krave shows six steps, some more esoteric than others, and essentially allows anyone to figure out which chips are used in each phone.

VeriSign has just put out its quarterly report on the web domain industry stating that there are now just about 183 million domain names in existence. This represents a 3% increase from last quarter and a 12% increase from last year. But perhaps most interesting is the slight turnaround that has taken place in the all-important .com/.net section of the industry.

The fourth quarter of the year is traditionally a slow one for .com and .net registrations, but the whole of 2008 was particularly slow, at least partially due to the “current macro-economic environment,” according to the report. But Q1 2009 saw those numbers turn around:

New .com and .net registrations were added at an average of approximately 2.4 million per month in the first quarter of 2009 for a total of 7.3 million new registrations in the quarter. This 17 percent increase from the previous quarter also marked the first positive growth rate in new registrations since the first quarter of 2008.

Also interesting is that domain renewals turned around for the first time in a few years. Beginning in Q1 2007, .com and .net renewal rates began declining from a Q4 2006 peak of 77%. That decline continued through Q4 2008, when the renewal number reached a low of 70%. But Q1 2009 brought the first uptick in the number (71%) in over 2 years.

So after a small depression, things appear to be looking up for .com domains once again. But that growth looks fairly minimal when compared to ccTLD (Country Code Top Level Domains). Those are the domains that end in things like .cn (China) and .de (Germany), representing countries. While .com is still far and away the biggest domain, .cn and .de have both surpassed .net for the number 2 and 3 spots on the list, respectively.

You can find a lot more data in the full PDF report here.

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Intel said today that it plans to acquire Wind River Systems, maker of software for embedded devices - think smartphones, other consumer electronics devices, in-car “info-tainment” systems, networking equipment and the likes- in a deal valued at approx. $884 million (or all outstanding Wind River common stock for $11.50 per share in cash). With the move, Intel aims to grow its processor and software presence outside the traditional PC and server market segments into embedded systems and mobile handheld devices, which it deems an important growth area for the company.

The acquisition is expected to close this summer, subject to certain regulatory approvals and other conditions specified in the definitive agreement, and will result in Wind River to become a full subsidiary of Intel under its Software and Services Group umbrella. Wind River has more than 1,600 employees and operations in more than 15 countries, and last reported annual revenues of $359.7 million.

Full release can be found here.

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Celebrities get impersonated on the web. They’re famous — everyone is anonymous — it happens. Most celebrities just ignore it; but some get pissed off. Kanye West got mad as hell about Twitter users pretending to be him last week. This week it’s Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler who is up in arms — to the point of actually taking anonymous bloggers to court.

Tyler attempted to sue a group of bloggers that he says were impersonating him, sharing private facts, making false statements even using his likeness on the web, NBC Los Angeles reports. The only problem? The whole “anonymous” thing. Seeing as no one really knows who these bloggers are, they naturally didn’t bother showing up to court. Hell, I’m quite certain they didn’t even know they were supposed to be in court. So the judge dismissed the case.

Tyler is apparently most upset about these anonymous bloggers posting some comments about his mother who passed away last year. I wasn’t able to find those, but I did find a robust web community around “Fake Steven Tyler.” There’s a popular one in the Rock Band Forums, a group on Facebook (also based around his Rock Band avatar), there’s even a Wikipedia page and an odd YouTube video (embedded below).

Twitter took down the fake Kanye West accounts at his request, but it’s hard to see what Tyler or a court could do in this case. A good first step would be to figure out who you’re actually suing though.

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