scheme

Full Tilt Poker lashes out at Ponzi scheme claims

Full Tilt Poker has lashed out at the U.S. Justice Department for calling it a Ponzi scheme.

"While the government has obviously taken issue with the underlying activities of FTP, under any reasonable interpretation, the world-wide operations of the online cardroom are not a so-called Ponzi scheme," Full Tilt Poker attorney Ian Imrich told The Wall Street Journal in an interview published today.

Earlier this week, the Justice Department amended an earlier civil complaint against the site's executives, including celebrity poker players Howard Lederer and Christopher Ferguson, charging them siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars … Read more

Full Tilt Poker cheated players out of $300 million, WSJ says

The U.S. Department of Justice accused celebrity poker players Howard Lederer and Christopher Ferguson and other executives who ran the Web site Full Tilt Poker of defrauding players of more than $300 million, The Wall Street Journal reported today.

The U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York amended an earlier civil complaint to allege that the players and two other directors of Full Tilt Poker ran a Ponzi scheme, in which the individuals illegally paid themselves with funds that were deposited by players supposedly for safe keeping.

The Web site's domain has been seized by … Read more

EU locks carbon market after security breach

LONDON/BRUSSELS--The European Union locked all accounts in its carbon market today, after a security breach, seeking to protect the battered reputation of the EU's main weapon against climate change.

The United States, Japan, and Australia have all delayed implementing similar cap-and-trade programs, and the latest glitch to the EU system could detract further from carbon trading as a global policy.

The trading scheme limits the carbon emissions of all big EU factories and power plants by issuing permits for each tonne of carbon emitted, which companies can then trade among themselves.

The European Commission suspended much of its … Read more

Four ways to reduce your PC's carbon footprint

Roughly speaking, powering a desktop PC with a 17-inch LCD 8 hours a day, 20 days a month costs about $35 a year. That's according to the energy-use calculator on Michael Bluejay's Saving Electricity site.

The same site indicates that computers and electronics represent less than 10 percent of the average energy bill in the U.S. That's about the same amount we spend to power our refrigerators and a third of what the typical home pays for heating.

But if you're looking to reduce your carbon footprint along with your electric bill, minimizing your computer'… Read more

Chart maker

Create diagrams and charts for presentations with Diagram Studio. This program has many of the same capabilities that complicated graphics and engineering programs have, but with an interface that anyone can use. Files created with this application can be saved as JPEGs, PDFs, or HTML documents that you can insert into other programs or share via e-mail or on the Internet.

Diagram Studio is intuitive to use. Anyone familiar with graphics or engineering programs will have no trouble navigating it, but there's a Help file as well as an extensive tutorial for those who need more guidance. The tutorial … Read more

First "Two-Way" iPhone Application Set Debuts

Developers continue to push the envelope on iPhone application development, skirting the bounds of Apple's development guidelines and discovering means for implementing undocumented, pioneering functionality. The latest breakthrough comes from Innerfence software, and is best described by its author: "Go somewhere; do something; come back."

Most iPhone applications offer a one-way street when it comes to accessing other applications' functionality. Click on a URL in Mail, for instance, and you are transported to Safari. In order to get back to Safari though, you need to click the home button then tap the Safari icon again. In other … Read more

CNET Live--Episode 52

Attorney Colette Vogele of the Rules for the Revolution podcast joins us to talk copyright law. She delivers her five things you should know about copyright law.

Watch the show on CNET TV.

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Microsoft's instructions for how to restore default power schemes in Windows XP.

Extreme Tech's tips for speeding up Windows Vista. Of course, there's the simple within Vista way (… Read more

Yuwie: Social networking gone very wrong

I came across a very disturbing social networking site last week called Yuwie. It's another site that's decided that for some reason, using a free, and highly functional social service populated by your friends (like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc.) is worth ditching for something built with very little ease of use or original design, but created to help you make ludicrous amounts of money by selling out your friends.

It works like this: you get a share of money for every page view on the service (the site makes its money by selling ads). Also, the more people visit your page, the more page views you get a percentage of. Yuwie then takes it a step further with referrals, letting you get a percentage of money from the activity of any friends you've invited to the service, along with their friends, and people who their friends have invited. This goes on for 10 "levels," so you could theoretically have close to 100,000 referrals if your friends and their invitees continue to invite others who use the service beyond the one-month probation period.

Does this idea sound familiar? It's a pyramid scheme. The problem with this, economically, is that it's unsustainable. The people at the top can't possibly pay out the promised amount, and the people stuck at the bottom aren't getting the same benefits as those who have spammed referrals to their friends higher up in the chain. Speaking of spam, even if you're on there with your friends, you're bound to get an intolerable amount of spam from people you don't know as the service grows. The second most popular group on the service at the moment has been specifically designed as a place to add random groups of other folks to beef up your bonus money. Is this the kind of network you want to be a part of? At least the site isn't asking for a sign-up fee--if it did, it'd be illegal. And it ought to be.

The worst part is that Yuwie is pretty much a carbon copy of MySpace, circa two years ago, with nearly identical profile features--meaning you're not really getting anything more than you would with a mainstream social network.… Read more