These are my links for December 28th:

• Former Morgan Stanley Coder Gets 2 Years in Prison for TJX Hack | Threat Level | Wired.com – The two great friends talked every day and shared information about all of their exploits — sexual, narcotic and hacking — according to prosecutors. Now another thing they’ll have to share information about is their experience in federal prison.
• Torrent Search Engines Unlawful, U.S. Judge Says | Threat Level | Wired.com – The operator of a popular BitTorrent search site said Monday he will likely challenge last week’s landmark decision by a U.S. judge declaring such sites unlawful and no different from conventional peer-to-peer piracy services.
• Piracy Surcharge Set To Force 40,000 Households Offline | TorrentFreak – Earlier, ISP BT predicted that operating an anti-filesharing scheme in the UK would cost £365m a year. Now the government has admitted that not only will broadband customers have to foot a £500m bill, but that burden will prove too great for 40,000 households – who will have no choice but to give up their Internet connections.
• Top 7 Disruptions of the Year | Epicenter | Wired.com – Technology is like a dog; each year of it seems like the equivalent of seven human years — at least when you get to the end of it and realize it’s only been 12 months since that now indispensable service first launched.
• Code That Protects Most Cellphone Calls Is Deciphered – NYTimes.com – A German computer engineer said Monday that he had deciphered and published the secret code used to encrypt most of the world’s digital mobile phone calls, saying it was his attempt to expose weaknesses in the security of global wireless systems.
• Palm Pre Users Rejoice: webOS 1.3.5 is Coming Today – Here’s a nice Christmas present for Palm Pre users: According to Sprint’s website, a new version of Pre’s operating system, webOS 1.3.5, is due to go live today.
• Facebook more than doubled its number of users this year | Technology | guardian.co.uk – Even by Facebook's standards, the past 12 months have been remarkable. The site cemented its position as the world's favourite social network, reached the verge of profitability and even exerted its influence over the race for the Christmas No 1.
• Twitter’s List Of 370 Banned Passwords – Twitter appears to have learned from its security scare earlier this year and seems to be taking password security more seriously than most Internet services.
• 5 Reasons to Learn Social Media | Search Engine Journal – Have you ever noticed how many bloggers and social media marketers just tell people that they should go out try social media? How you shouldn’t worry about learning social it? That you’ll learn it on the fly and everything will be fine.

This is the Link Report for August 23rd through August 24th:

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• Victoria Advocate | Social networking helps some businesses gain customers – Social Media helps some businesses gain customers. It's true so long as you're willing to work at it and cultivate the relationships.
• MediaPost Publications The Social Media Rules Are A-Changin’ 08/21/2009 – Social Media unrealistic for corporate America? That's what one PR CEO says.
• Fanbase Launches Wikipedia-Style Directory Of All Things Sports – Billed as the web’s “largest almanac of pro and college athletes, built entirely by fans”, Fanbase is today launching its directory of all things sports to the world after 18 months of work and a few months of public beta. Backed by $5 million in venture capital from Benchmark, Fanbase’s aim is to mobilize and unite fans around pages of any athlete or sports team at any level.
• TWEET IDEAS: 13 Things to Do on Twitter Besides Tweet – Besides Tweeting, what else can you do with the microblogging platform?
• Snow Leopard Has Arrived, Shipping August 28th – Nice price point. Wish Windows 7 would be that cheap.
• Why AT&T can’t keep up with iPhone data demand | TechBlog | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle – AT&T just can't handle the pressure or the load of the iPhone.
• Send big files the easy way. Files too large for email attachments? No problem! – Need to send a big file to some one sendspace is a great service to do this.
• 10 Best Ways to Backup Data – by Digital Trends 2009 08/23 – Most computer users recognize the importance of backing up key files on a regular basis — be it documents, music, irreplaceable photos and camcorder footage — but not everyone is aware of how to go about doing it, and which products are needed to pull it off. Here we look at a handful of top-rated backup solutions to help you make a suitable choice based on your needs and budget.
• FastStone Image Viewer, Screen Capture, Photo Resizer … – An image converter / resizer intended to enable users especially digital camera owners to convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text and watermark to images in a quick and easy BATCH mode.
• List of Best SEO plugins for WordPress – Amazing list of great SEO Plugins for the WordPress Blogging Platform as tweeted by @wpchick