Facebook: 'Outrageous, wanton, reckless, callous, disgraceful, wilful'

QuotW This was the week when 70,000 stalkers/just friendly guys were left without a a way to cyber-search out the ladies.

iOS app Girls Around Me, which used Foursquare and Facebook APIs to spot females in the immediate area, was booted off amid cries of "Stalker!"

But the app maker, I Free, insisted it was an innocent socialising method, "designed to make geo-social exploration of popular venues easy and visual".

This was also the week when Microsoft was winning some fans in the developer world and losing others.

First up, Redmond joined the ranks of Linux lovers despite Steve Ballmer's previously expressed view of the operating system as little better than godless communism. The software giant made it onto the penguinistas' top 20 of companies that sponsor development of the Linux kernel.

Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer services for the Linux Foundation, waxed lyrical on the open source stuff, in an opinion that is no doubt shared by everyone over in Redmond:

Linux is the platform for the future of computing.

More developers and companies are contributing to the advancement of the operating system than ever before, especially in the areas of mobile, embedded and cloud computing.

Then Microsoft lost all its brownie points by annoying users of Visual Studio 2011. More than 4,000 of them have voted on Microsoft’s UserVoice poll to say the code development suite's black-and-white icons are offensive and they don’t work.

One anonymous programmer said:

Going from 2010 to VS 11 Beta, it just hurts my eyes. Everything looks the same and I have to spend more mental effort organizing where things were on the screen.

I don't mind a 'dark' or 'light' themed UI, but I'm strongly against the 'black white and gray on gray' scheme you have going right now. Seriously, I feel like I'm stuck in some 1920s film where all the color was sucked out of my life.

Over in the orchard, Apple fanbois proved they hate Android just as much as their fruity overlord when they took to the interweb to moan about the fact that Android users now get access to Instagram.

The photo-oldifying and sharing app is a huge hit among iPhone users and they were justifiably smug during the two years or so that Android-owners were without the nostalgic-pic-maker.

Now that Android phones are joining the party, some fanbois are rather upset.

One Twitterer, presumably trying to insult as many people on as many levels as possible, compared it to Section 8, the US Housing initiative that brought people on state housing benefits into privately owned properties:

iPhone instagram: Gated community. It wus a great community until Android instagram: Section Housing

And the simpler, but no less insulting:

Fuck them Android "Instagram" users slowing ere'thang the fuck up for the iPhone heads

Despite the advent of Instagram, things aren't all rosy over in the Chocolate Factory either, as Sony advised its customers not to upgrade to the much-vaunted Ice Cream Sandwich iteration of Android.

The Japanese firm said:

Although ICS is new and compelling in many ways, we would like all of our users to make an informed decision when selecting what Android™ software to use. We are actually proud to say that our Gingerbread software is very stable and has great performance, so it’s not a bad idea to stay on this release. Ice Cream Sandwich is more intensive, for example in terms of resource usage.

It was only a matter of time before someone decided to sue Facebook over the changes to the social network in the last two years or so and Canadian Debbie Douez took the prize.

She's filed a class action against the firm over the use of her photo and profile in Sponsored Stories, claiming that since she wasn't asked and she wasn't paid, it violates the Privacy Act.

Just to really ram the point home and work the office thesaurus, the court filing for the case said:

Facebook's use of the plaintiff and class members' names or portraits without consent was high-handed, outrageous, wanton, reckless, callous, disgraceful, wilful and entirely without care for the plaintiff's and class members' statutory right to control the use of their own names or portraits.

Haven't you always thought that there's just not enough litigation going on in the tech world? No? Well, that hasn't stopped HTC from launching a lawsuit against a French website for unveiling details about a phone that had already been leaked weeks previously at the Mobile World Congress.

Yes, poor old HTC-Hub reviewed a One X handset and compared it to another unreleased phone the One S, incurring the wrath of the very firm it's a fan of and got slapped with a lawsuit.

The site wrote to its readers (with the help of Google Translate), who had been tweeting and facebooking their support:

We are deeply hurt by this action from a brand we have always defended.

We will obviously not ask you to boycott HTC products - the products themselves are excellent - here the problem is more the representatives of the brand in France.

And finally, Pastebin has announced it'll be hiring more staff to get rid of hacker content posted on the site before it has to get reported.

As well as being a favourite dumping ground for hacktivist content, owner Jeroen Vader also said that it was an oft-used site for hacking practise:

In the last three months not a single day has gone by that we didn't get some kind of DDoS [distributed denial of service] attack. I do hear from people in the hackers' community that many hackers like to test their DDOS skills on Pastebin. ®