20 companies including Google, Facebook and Yahoo have been sued for hosting offensive material online in India.

For those of you who follow my musings, it should come as no surprise that as a result of all of the privacy challenges I have been following it raised a question: If my personal profile(s) are so valuable to marketers, how much might they be worth? Believe it or not there is a way to establish at least a notion of the value of your activity, at least when it comes to Twitter.

The iPad will withstand the flood of Android devices and continue to be the dominant player in the tablet space in 2012, accounting for more than 62 percent of all tablet sales, according to market analysis firm TrendForce.

As the pioneer in the tablet game, Apple's market share is sure to slip each year as more competitors enter the market with rival tablets. This is what makes Tuesday's projections so astounding. With a 66 percent market share in 2011, Apple's dominance is barely waning, even with new devices hitting store shelves every day.

It seems to be a Google kind of day. First came the news via a Microsoft blog that the folks in Redmond had filed a complaint in Europe to get regulators to say with them, “Google: Please don’t kill video on the Web.” Now, first reported on Bloomberg but mushrooming by the minute, comes news that the Google magnificent adventure to circumvent Apple privacy rules (uncovered by none other than The Wall Street Journal) in order to track Safari browser users surfing habits has drawn it first few lawsuits.

Shares of Alibaba.com skyrocketed on Wednesday after news broke that its parent company plans to take the e-commerce site private.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. said that it will look to buy the minority stake in the website for a whopping $2.3 billion, according to the Associated Press (AP). Alibaba currently owns 73 percent of Alibaba.com.

The offer of $13.50 Hong Kong dollars per share represents a 46 percent premium on the stock's previous listing price of HK$9.25. Trading of Alibaba.com had been suspended since Feb. 9 at the request of company, which is undergoing a shift in business strategy that is expected to result in slower short-term revenue growth and limited earnings, Bloomberg reported.

A Colorado fraud case has got many criminal defense attorneys really worked up over the prospect of a suspect being forced to turn over the hard drive of her laptop to federal agents. On Tuesday, a federal appeals court chose not to intercede clearing the way for a lower court’s order that Ramona Fricosu turn over an unencrypted version of the hard drive, according to news reports.

The case has led to questions whether protection against self-incrimination prevents someone from being forced to “unlock a computer's protected files,” reports The Associated Press.

Lawmakers in South Carolina are making headway in their effort to outlaw casino-style gaming machines that they believe circumvent state laws banning gambling.

The state Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday signed a bill that attempts to clarify the 12-year-old statute that outlaws games of chance. Authorities have claimed that the ambiguity of the law has enabled companies to market a new series of machines called sweepstakes devices, which allow users to buy items like long distance cards and then enter to win various prizes, according to The State. These machines also provide access to games like poker, keno and bingo.

The European Commission (EC) slammed the brakes on a highly-controversial anti-counterfeiting treaty on Wednesday by referring it to Europe's top court, which will assess the legality of the international proposition and give the EC guidance on its applicability.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been in the works for years and has been signed by 22 EU member states and the likes of the United STates, Canada and Japan, but has recently come under heavy scrutiny from consumer interest groups and rights activists who believe the treaty will infringe on free speech and inhibit the sharing of information.

In an escalation of the patent infringement war, Microsoft filed a formal complaint against Motorola Mobility with the European Commission on Wednesday, accusing Motorola of stifling competition with heavy-handed patent enforcement, the Associated Press (AP) reported.

Microsoft’s filing comes close on the heels of last week’s similar action against Motorola by Apple, the AP noted, adding that both actions followed a series of lawsuits filed by Motorola in Europe and the U.S. alleging that products offered by Apple and Microsoft contain Motorola’s patented wireless connectivity and video streaming technology without permission.

In an Internet Explorer (IE) blog post on Monday, software giant Microsoft accused Google of bypassing privacy protections in IE Google was breaking similar privacy protection rules on Apple’s Safari browser, wrote blogger Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president for IE.

The blogger wrote, “We’ve found that Google bypasses the P3P Privacy Protection feature in IE. The result is similar to the recent reports of Google’s circumvention of privacy protections in Apple’s Safari Web browser, even though the actual bypass mechanism Google uses is different.”

The United States Congress has passed a motion that will give the FCC the power to allocate a part of unlicensed television spectrum and reserve it against the new mobile spectrum auction. Some lawmakers opposed this bill, saying that they wanted all of the unlicensed space available to be auctioned. All the provisions for the spectrum are in the bill that was passed on Friday last week by both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. The bill also includes some tax breaks for those on payroll.

To clear things up, unlicensed spectrum is used for network communication via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Some corporations see the unlicensed spectrum as a gold mine, since it's not being used at this moment by any television broadcaster, for a proposition for a long-distance Wi-Fi communication medium that will cover more than what wireless antennas can provide. The payroll tax bill lets the FCC sell off some of the spectrum when a TV station gives up its piece of the spectrum, giving the TV station a share of the revenue in the spectrum purchase. This is known as an incentive auction.

Many sources have confirmed that all VoIP service has been shut down in Morocco, and many are pointing the finger at Maroc Telecom, an Internet and phone service provider, as the malefactor behind this brash move. Many believe that eliminating VoIP is just one step in Maroc Telecom’s strategy to monopolize the market.

After combing through numerous Facebook postings, sources such as TNW estimate that the strategy to shut down all of Morocco’s’ VoIP must have started over a week ago, for it was around that time that Moroccans began posting that they were encountering problems with Skype, TeamSpeak and Vibers

Today, Samsung announced they were getting out of the LCD business to focus all of their efforts on OLEDs. OLED displays, while initially far outshining their LCD counterparts, have historically had issues with fabrication yields, which made the displays prohibitively expensive, and for a very short (under 12 month) service life. Initial sets lost about half their brightness in 12 months.

While for the last several years, OLED demonstration TVs have been featured at the Consumer Electronics Show and Sony actually brought one to market, they have generally been science experiments and thought to be non-viable for the mass market. Samsung’s move suggests they have found the magic formula to making these displays, hit performance and price benchmarks and, if that is true, LCDs are dead.

As I noted in an article on start-up Personal a few days ago, the issue of the value and access to personal information is emerging as one of the most important challenges of our time. The issue erupted again today with an exhaustive and extremely illuminating story in the Wall Street Journal.

The posting says that Google and other companies have been bypassing privacy settings for people using Apple iPhones and computers who use the Apple Safari browser as the way for navigating the web. The bypass enables Google, and others who know about the bypass ability, to get around Safari’s default setting to block such activities in order to track user surfing activities in ways that are both deeply personal and appear at odds with Google’s own privacy guidelines.

The architects behind Lady Gaga’s social media campaign have raised around $4.5 million to scale ‘The Backplane’ and accelerate its goal to become the world’s most popular home page.

A Wall Street Journal blog reported Backplane Chief Executive Matthew Michelsen targeted a list of investors to help the social network scale operations, hone the product and hire engineers In part to maintain top talent in the start-up.

Michelsen said that he’s kept costs low and has spent less than $1 million so far to develop the community platform that will ultimately combine calendar, email and social networking functions including Facebook and Twitter, as well as photo sharing and multilingual chat functions.

We are the mobile generation, carrying sleek smartphones loaded with dozens of apps that we use for everything from catching up on news to finding the schedule of movies at nearby theatres to connecting with our friends via Facebook. We can’t imagine our daily lives without mobile phones anymore. And soon, it is also going to become an integral part of our business life. Why?

Cisco is far from the most open company in tech so it is ironic it is concerned about a monopoly over video conferencing a result of the Microsoft acquisition of Skype. The company’s Martin De Beer said, “For the sake of customers, the industry recognizes the need for ubiquitous unified communications interoperability, particularly between Microsoft/Skype and Cisco products, as well as products from other unified communications innovators.” This statement coincided with Cisco challenging an EU court over the acquisition.

One has to wonder however if Cisco underestimated Skype’s value. After all, the company has been sold twice in the last few years and the networking company didn’t close the deal either time.

Yahoo has reached an impasse in negotiations with its partners from Asia – with talks breaking down, according to news reports.

All Things D reported “sources close to the situation” called it “a potentially deal-breaking impasse.” Disagreements were reportedly about sales price and how the deal should be achieved. Yahoo was trying to sell both Yahoo Japan and its shares in the Alibaba Group.

MySpace, the once dominant social networking site that faded as Facebook grew to dominate, added one million new users over the past month. The site now has an average of 40,000 new registrations daily since launching its new MySpace Music Player back in December.

Facebook became a social networking giant due to Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts in 2009, while MySpace plunged in popularity. By March of 2011, MySpace lost 10 million users in a single month, according to BBC.

I’ve had a number of Intel based Ultrabooks in house for the last several weeks and I’ve become a fan; however, I’ve also had the first Super Tablet, the NVIDIA Tegra 3 based Asus Transformer Prime running the latest version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich, and in a number of ways it is better than an iPad (suggesting next month’s iPad 3 release is timely). However, the two products are starting to overlap a lot. Neither can replace the other yet, but with each step the gap is getting narrower.

I was going to compare the Asus products to each other but I think the Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook comes closer to the perfect blend of size and performance at the moment so I will use it instead. I’m using a pre-production Dell (it is due to start shipping shortly) and Asus is still backordered on the Prime so I was lucky to get my hands on one. Both are technology leaders for their categories.