PAUL CEGLIA THE FACEBOOK SCAMMER???

Paul Ceglia, who says that a 2003 contract entitles him to half the Facebook holdings of the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg, showed no deception on a polygraph test about his claim last week, his lawyers said in a court filing.

The June 11 test was disclosed in papers filed on Friday by Ceglia’s lawyers opposing Facebook’s request that it be allowed to immediately inspect the original of the alleged contract and the emails Ceglia claims he exchanged with Zuckerberg in 2003 and 2004, before being required to turn over any evidence to Ceglia.

“I respectfully suggest that Mark Zuckerberg undergo the same polygraph examination I have in order to expose who is really telling the truth,” Ceglia, 37, said in a sworn statement submitted on Friday to the federal court in Buffalo, New York, where his suit is pending.

Mark Zuckerberg. 

In the filing, Ceglia’s lawyers asked the court to order both sides to turn over evidence to determine whether the contract is genuine, including all of Zuckerberg’s documents, emails and instant messages relating to Facebook before July 30, 2004. Ceglia asked the court to order both sides into mediation.

Ceglia hasn’t shown the original contract publicly or to representatives of Facebook. The two-page document is in a bank safe-deposit box in Hornell, New York, according to Ceglia’s lawyers.

Stake in Facebook

Ceglia claims he is entitled to a multibillion-dollar stake in Facebook. The closely held company may be worth $US69.3 billion, according to Sharespost.com, an online marketplace for investments in companies that aren’t publicly traded. Palo Alto, California-based Facebook runs the world’s biggest social networking site.

In its June 2 request, Facebook called Ceglia “a hustler” who has engaged in various swindles over the past several years. The company said Ceglia’s claimed contract is “an amateurish forgery” and the emails fabricated. Facebook argued it needed to examine the documents immediately to put an end to a fraud on the court.

“Ceglia’s lawsuit is a shell game, shifting and changing with every filing,” Orin Snyder, a lawyer for Facebook and Zuckerberg, said in a statement responding to Ceglia’s filing yesterday. “Ceglia does not dispute that he has a track record of forging documents to rip people off.”

‘Terrible toll’

Snyder said polygraphs are easily manipulated and routinely disregarded by courts.

“This case and the tactics of Mark and Facebook have taken and continue to take a terrible toll on me, my wife, our two sons, and even our parents,” Ceglia said in his sworn statement filed Friday. “I have been repeatedly called a liar in the press and in the papers filed by defendants in this action.”

Ceglia sat for the polygraph test on June 11 in the Erie County, New York, office of Michael Pliszka, who administered the test, according to the court papers.

“The questions asked during the polygraph examination were designed to determine whether Mr. Ceglia had fraudulently forged or doctored the agreement,” Pliszka said. “It is my opinion that the examination results are classified as ‘No Deception Indicated.’”

In his statement, Ceglia said he and Zuckerberg met in the lobby of a hotel in Boston on April 28, 2003, and signed the contract, which Ceglia prepared by cutting and pasting from two different forms.

Document testing

Ceglia’s lawyers proposed subjecting the original contract to testing, which would be conducted by a mutually agreed or court-appointed expert, to determine the age of the ink on the contract. The necessary tests would destroy part of the document, they said.

Included in Friday’s filing are the opinions of two document experts and a computer expert.

John Evans, a computer expert hired by Ceglia, said his firm took from him 169 floppy discs, 1075 compact discs and two computer hard drives. One of the floppy discs has three Microsoft Word documents containing copies of email correspondence between Ceglia and Zuckerberg. Ceglia said he copied the messages from his internet-based msn.com email.

In an amended complaint filed in April, Ceglia quoted from emails he said he exchanged with Zuckerberg, which he said support his claim that the two men formed a partnership that gave Ceglia half-ownership of Facebook when it was started in 2004.

Zuckerberg said in a court filing that Ceglia hired him in 2003 to do web-development services for StreetFax.com, a business Ceglia was trying to start at the time. Zuckerberg, then a student at Harvard University, signed a contract drafted by Ceglia, which referred only to the StreetFax work, he said. The contract made no mention of Facebook, which Zuckerberg started months later, he said.

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Facebook sly grog deliveries

set to dry up because of legalities

Cheap booze deals for Sydneysiders advertised on Facebook.

It’s sly grog for the 21st century. A Facebook page offering round-the-clock booze delivery in Sydney has piqued the interest of NSW liquor licensing authorities, who are threatening fines of $11,000 and a 12-month jail sentence.

The Blind Pig Sydney page recently went live on Facebook, offering free delivery of six packs of beer and bottles of wine for $15 a piece and bottles of vodka and whisky with mixers for $50.

Delivery in the inner west, eastern suburbs, north and south Sydney is free, according to the ad, and proof-of-age identification is required on delivery.

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Facebook: the new sales frontier

Forget website sales – a new class of business is instead focusing on Facebook to build and market products and services.

This approach has become increasingly popular since Facebook added shopping cart functionality to its site, allowing businesses to transact through the popular social networking forum

Sourced & Published by Henry Sapiecha

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Facebook declares

US lawsuit a fraud

May 28, 2011

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg … the company says Paul Ceglia’s claim of ownership is a “fraud”. Photo: AP

BUFFALO, New York: Lawyers for Facebook are calling a man’s federal lawsuit claiming part ownership of the company ”a fraud & an affront on the court”.

In their latest legal response, the lawyers for Facebook have accused Paul Ceglia of doctoring a 2003 contract that he says proves he bought into the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s idea for the site when Mr Zuckerberg was still at university.

Mr Ceglia ”has now come out of the woodwork seeking billions in damages,” the response filed in the US District Court in Buffalo said.

Mr Ceglia’s lawsuit relies on a two-page ”work for hire” contract.

Mr Ceglia says he and Mr Zuckerberg signed the contract after Mr Zuckerberg responded to his help-wanted ad for work on a street-mapping database he was creating.

According to the lawsuit, Mr Ceglia paid Mr Zuckerberg $US1000 to develop software for the street-mapping project and gave him another $US1000 after Mr Zuckerberg told him about his Facebook idea, with the condition Mr Ceglia would get half if it took off.

The company said the document was a fake. ”To be clear, Zuckerberg did not sign the purported agreement … which is a ‘cut-and-paste’ job fraudulently & self servingly manufactured by the plaintiff for this lawsuit,” the filing said.

Associated Press

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Facebook sued over social ads

using minors as endorsers

without permission

Facebook, the world’s most popular social networking site, is being sued for not getting parents’ permission before displaying that minors “like” the products of its advertisers.

The lawsuit seeks class-action status on behalf of Facebook users in New York state under the age of 18 who had “their names or likenesses used on a Facebook feed or in an advertisement sold by Facebook Inc. without the consent of their parent or guardian”. The suit was filed in federal court in Brooklyn this week.

Facebook began offering “social ads”, which display the names and likenesses of users’ Facebook friends who click on the ads’ “like” button, in November 2007, according to the complaint. The names or likenesses are also displayed to friends when a user RSVPs for an advertised event, according to the complaint. The endorsements also show up on Facebook friends’ home-page feeds.

“Users can prevent their endorsements from being shared with their friends by limiting who can see their posts through their privacy settings,” according to the complaint. “There is, however, no mechanism in place by which a user can prevent their name and likeness from appearing on a Facebook page if they have ‘liked’ it.”

The suit was filed by Justin Nastro, a minor in Brooklyn, through his father, Frank Nastro. Facebook doesn’t seek parents’ permission for the minor users’ endorsements, according to the complaint.

The suit invokes the New York Civil Rights Law, which prevents using a person’s picture for advertising purposes without that person’s permission. The law allows suits for damages. The Nastros’ suit seeks revenue Facebook derived from the unauthorised commercial use of the names and images.

“We have not received the complaint so I’m unable to comment at this time,” Andrew Noyes, a Facebook spokesman, said in an email.

Bloomberg

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Facebook investors heading

for the exits as value hits $70bn

A group of Facebook shareholders is seeking to offload $US1 billion worth of shares on the secondary market, a sale that would value the company at more than $US70 billion, according to five sources with direct knowledge of the situation.

It would represent one of the largest transactions of Facebook shares to date and points to a growing wariness among early-stage investors and employees who fear Facebook’s growth cannot keep pace with its market valuation.

The sellers have lowered their price after previously trying to offload shares at a price that valued the company at $US90 billion, which would make Facebook more valuable than Time Warner and News Corp combined. But buyers balked.

“At the current valuation where it is, it is really hard to justify the investment,” said Sumeet Jain, partner at venture capital firm CMEA Capital, who has examined Facebook deals recently and has taken a pass. “It’s hard to imagine it will turn into a $US270 billion company in the next few years.”

The current deal, which includes stock held by Facebook employees, is awaiting approval from top Facebook executives including Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman, according to two sources.

Facebook declined to comment.

Investors, ranging from venture capital firms to rich individuals to investment banks, have scrambled to get a piece of the privately held company before its expected IPO next year.

Facebook raised $US500 million from Goldman Sachs Group, and Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies, for instance, giving it a market value of $US50 billion. Weeks later, private equity firm General Atlantic piled into the company, valuing it at $US65 billion, according to CNBC.

Tim Draper, the well known venture capital partner who founded Draper Fisher Jurvetson, told Reuters this month he recently looked at buying shares of Facebook deals, but passed because of an unattractive valuation.

One wealthy person, who has fielded calls for the past month involving Facebook pitches in the range of $US200 million to $US1 billion, is also sitting on the sidelines.

“It’s priced to perfection in the private marketplace,” said the person, who did not want to be named. The person said the pitches implied a valuation of $US90 billion. “I don’t like to own anything I can’t sell right now.”

Created in a Harvard University dorm room in 2004, Facebook rocketed from an online directory created for college students to the world’s No. 1 social network with more than 500 million members worldwide.

The company’s astounding growth and popularity have put some of the internet’s biggest guns on notice – including Google – and have made it the darling of investors seeking to stake out claims in private companies before they go public.

Facebook, the world’s No. 1 internet social network, earned $US355 million in net income in the first nine months of 2010 on revenue of $US1.2 billion.

It is one of a handful of internet companies including Twitter, Groupon and Zynga whose soaring valuations recall the heady days of the late 1990s.

It is questionable whether new investors would realize the exponential growth that early-stage investors got in Facebook, said Oppenheimer & Co managing director Stephen Todd Walker.

That’s particularly true, he said, as the company faces more competition abroad from social networking sites like China’s Renren Inc, which is expected to go public next week.

“For Facebook, the larger you get, the harder it is to have that explosive growth,” said Walker.

Nonetheless, an array of investors has piled into Facebook. Mutual fund giant T. Rowe Price recently disclosed that several of its funds owned stakes in Facebook, valuing the company at $US25 per share, which implies a valuation of $US50 billion.

Yet one hedge fund manager who passed on smaller Facebook deals recently said that, for him, the opportunity to get in on the action had passed.

“By the time T. Rowe Price is investing,” he said, “you know it’s too late.”

Reuters

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Foreign Affairs officials told the daughter of a dying Australian man stranded in China to use Facebook to raise money for her father’s medical expenses.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade bureaucrat included the suggestion in an email advising Canberra woman Tracy Woolley that the Federal Government would not help with her stricken father’s plight.

Ms Woolley’s father Thomas Barry Moore, a former air force serviceman, has been in a coma in a Chinese hospital for 118 days after suffering a stroke on December 31 in Zhengzhou in north-central China.

Ms Woolley contacted DFAT on January 4 asking for help because she could not afford to visit her father or cover the estimated $160,000 for his repatriation to Australia.

When it became apparent MrMoore was likely to remain in a vegetative state, she asked doctors to turn off his life support but was told ethical concerns prevented them.

Ms Woolley is currently sending the hospital $770 a week to keep her father alive but said she could not afford to meet these payments beyond next month.

On March 4, an official from the consular operations branch of DFAT sent Ms Woolley an email suggesting she collect money to cover medical expenses from online ”friends” who had joined a Facebook ”causes” page she created for her father.

”Perhaps [use] your friends on the social networking site you are using to alert people to your father’s plight may also be able to provide funds to further extend your father’s care,” the email said.

Earlier in the email he wrote, ”despite our best intentions and our embassy speaking with the hospital and Mr Zhang on many occasions, there is no further action we can take to improve your father’s situation.”

DFAT has not shifted its stance on Mr Moore since The Canberra Times broke the story of the man’s plight on Tuesday. The department now says Ms Woolley never made a request for financial assistance, despite emails revealing otherwise. A DFAT spokeswoman said financial assistance for medical evacuations was only provided in special situations. She said these were limited to, ”medical evacuations where medical facilities are inadequate to treat their condition satisfactorily or their condition is so severe there is no time to consider other funding sources”.

A spokeswoman from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs said while she couldn’t comment on Mr Moore’s case for ”privacy reasons”, veterans who travelled overseas should take out insurance.

Ms Woolley said her father had funeral insurance and was covered for six weeks of medical care, excluding repatriation, by the Henan University of Technology, the place where he had worked for two years as an English teacher. Ms Woolley said her father was unable to take out travel insurance because he had lived overseas for more than a year.

RSL NSW offered to pay for airfares to help Ms Woolley travel to China but she asked that the money be allocated to his medical expenses instead. ”I said that was very nice but I need more than that. My father would never have wanted what is happening to him.”

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

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Spy on your kids’ Facebook

without being their friend

April 27, 2011 – 2:03PM

Internet security firm Check Point has launched software that lets parents watch over offspring on Facebook without being “friends” at the online social network.

ZoneAlarm SocialGuard alerts parents to signs of trouble in a child’s Facebook account without them being privy to all posts, comments, pictures, videos or other digital content shared between friends at the website.

The program scans Facebook profiles, communications and “friend” requests and uses algorithms to identify potential bullying, sexual overtures, or talk of drugs, violence or suicide. 

SocialGuard software runs unseen in the background, flagging suspicious activity and sending alerts to parents, according to its Redwood City, California-based creators.

“It’s about protecting your kids from the social threats out there, while still respecting their privacy and fostering open communication,” said Check Point vice president of consumer sales Bari Abdul.

“We are offering Facebook users a simple way to embrace social networking safely,” he continued.

SocialGuard is crafted to detect hacked accounts, malicious links, online predators, and cyber-bullies, according to Check Point.

The software also checks to determine whether people contacting children online are being deceptive about their ages or if a stranger is trying to become a Facebook “friend.”

“Parents are increasingly concerned, and rightfully so, about the dramatically increasing trend of criminals, predators and bullies targeting children over social networks,” said analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group in Silicon Valley.

“SocialGuard provides a strong suite of tools that can effectively protect children from these types of social threats that are keeping parents awake at night.”

Check Point cited a survey indicating that 38 per cent of teenagers have ignored requests from parents to be friends on Facebook, and that 16 per cent of children have only done so as a condition of using the social network.

SocialGuard is available to order online in Australia for $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year. It can be bought from zonealarm.com.

AFP

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Facebook fury: Kate Middletons

locked out of network

April 22, 2011

Prince William and Kate Middleton 

It’s not easy being Kate Middleton.

The woman who will marry Prince William on April 29 at Westminster Abbey has a face and name known around the world – which is creating some hilarity and a host of problems for the hundreds, if not thousands, of women who share her name.

It’s a global goof: Some colleagues bow when they pass Catherine Middleton in the hallway of the school where she works in Sydney. When people in Pepper Pike, Ohio say they’ve heard she is about to marry a prince, Catherine Argentieri Middleton replies “I already did.”

From Queen Victoria to Princess Mary, we step through time to study royal bridal fashions past and present.

One Kate Middleton in Birmingham, England, says she does not want to talk about her royal name since she’s “had enough of hearing of it.”

To comprehend the struggles faced by the many women who suddenly found themselves answering to a famous name, take the case of Kate Elizabeth Middleton, a mother of two from Kent, England.

Everywhere she goes, people ask if she’s the real thing – the bride to be, of course, not a teacher living in the English countryside.

Her passport shows her name is Kate Middleton, but thanks to a security glitch, the technology wizards who run Facebook did not believe her. She and her fellow namesakes have had to prove it.

She was born Kate Elizabeth Walker and hadn’t heard of the prince’s romance when she married Mark Middleton on April 17, 2004.

When the royal engagement was announced, Middleton the teacher, 34, changed her Facebook status to “thinking of reverting to her maiden name for a year” because of all the buzz.

“It is just crazy, particularly at the moment,” she said.

Not all the attention has been an inconvenience. Her well-known moniker has led to “fun” television and radio appearances – but the novelty has faded, especially since she was booted off Facebook.

When Middleton tried to log on to Facebook recently from her home, she saw that her account had been disabled by a security system in place to weed out imposters and fraudulent accounts.

She thinks Facebook should have recognised that there are plenty of real Kate Middletons – it is, after all, a fairly common name.

“My status updates aren’t about a lady set to marry a future king,” she said. “Just things that someone with children would do.”

After a certain amount of rigmarole, she convinced Facebook that she was legitimate and had her account reinstated with an apology.

Several other Kate Middletons reported similar experiences.

Facebook executives said some mistakes were inevitable as they tried to keep the social network secure.

Middleton has high hopes that this season of silliness will end once her famous namesake is actually married on April 29.

“Soon she’ll be Princess Catherine or Princess Kate and I can just be plain old Kate Middleton again,” she said.

“Fingers crossed. Otherwise I might cry.”

AP   Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

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