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Tyler Winklevoss, Divya Narendra and Cameron Winklevoss: the three founders of Harvard Connection want a judge to force Facebook to hand over IM conversations involving Mark Zuckerberg.

Un-friended: Winklevoss twins begin ANOTHER Facebook lawsuit

The brothers won’t appeal an earlier case, but are launching another one claiming Facebook withheld information.

THE WINKLEVOSS TWINS have filed details of a new lawsuit against Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg – less than a day after confirming they would not appeal a previous legal defeat against the social network.

The brothers, who claim Zuckerberg stole the concept of Facebook from a similar site they had hired him to work on, are to ask a Boston judge to investigate whether Facebook withheld information from them during talks on a legal settlement in 2008.

Specifically, the Los Angeles Times reports, they want an investigation into whether Facebook “intentionally or inadvertently suppressed evidence” during those discussions, which formed the basis for the Oscar-winning film The Social Network.

PC World says the trio are also looking for access to instant messages sent by Zuckerberg to other people, including Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, which they claim could throw new light on the nature of their business relationship.

If the conversations are released, Cnet added, the three will then seek ‘appropriate relief’.

The Winklevosses had sought to renegotiate that settlement earlier this year, but in April were told they would have to make do with their original $65m deal. Yesterday they said they would not appeal that finding to the Supreme Court.

The Winklevosses – and their original business partner Divya Narendra, who had not sought to appeal the earlier ruling – struck their original settlement based on a share valuation of $36 each.

At the same time, they argue, Facebook was giving staff the option to buy stock for $9 each – meaning Narendra and the Winklevosses could have picked up four times as many shares as they originally got.

The trio say Facebook should have made them aware of the internal stock offerings during the original talks, but that they were never informed of them.

Facebook has dismissed the new claims as “baseless” and that it considered the case to have been “closed for a long time”.

The group’s original project, HarvardConnection, later became ConnectU which closed last year.

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    Mute Eamon Harbison
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    Aug 11th 2011, 10:37 PM

    Seems to me that Amazon has no one to blame but itself if its data center lost power…. They should have had ample UPS to bridge the utility power loss and the time their N+1 generators kick in. Also, they should have diesel tanks onsite to store at least 72hours worth to run the center on full load, and a local supplier on contract to re-fill the tanks after 24 hours. If Amazon do not have any these redundancy measures in place, I would be very surprised… If they do and they still had power loss that affected their customers services, then they need to look internally for where to point the finger of blame!

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    Mute Christopher Duffin
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    Aug 12th 2011, 9:47 AM

    Not to mention their own software hampering restoration of the downed instances and a complete lack of help from their support in trying to restore things. This has been a joke from the beginning.

    I also cannot understand why they only had power from one sub station supplying the DC. Any data centre I’ve been involved with has had power coming from at least 2 sub stations to avoid these issues.

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    Mute John Jacob
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    Aug 11th 2011, 11:15 PM

    who gives a crap really ?!?!

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    Mute Darren O'Brien
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    Aug 12th 2011, 2:42 AM

    I give a crap. Our company had a good chunk of our infrastructure down
    for 2 days because of this. Im an Irish system administrator working in Spain and this was embarrassing to say the least. We chose Amazon for its reliability and really cutting edge cloud services. The fact that its in Ireland was a bonus and made me proud that one of the best cloud facilities in Europe, if not the world, is in my home country. But we’re going to think hard about continuing with Amazon as I’m sure many others will. It’s a pity but when your company’s existence depends on servers staying on, and even minutes of downtime cost thousands in revenue and incalculable loss of reputation, you’ve got to go where you’ll be sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen.

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    Mute Damian Keane
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    Aug 12th 2011, 12:30 AM

    People who think that Ireland could make some sorely needed money by being a reliable cloud computing bridgehead for Europe.

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    Mute fitszpatrick
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    Aug 12th 2011, 3:47 AM

    Loss of power is a serious issue. Hundreds of thousands of children on the brink of death by starvation with no back up systems. This is going to have a detrimental effect on their profitability.

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    Mute Jane Bresnan
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    Aug 12th 2011, 8:04 AM

    Maybe there was a lack of surge protection? 48 hours is a long time for a data center to be down. There must have been equipment damage. All data centers will have bought at least two independant feeds from the esb as well, were the esb supplying both from the same substation?

    It is very embarrassing for this to happen. Ireland has been trying to market itself as an ideal data center location because of the lack of extreme weather conditions, distance from earthquake zones and political stability. Top class electrical infrastructure is part of that marketing speil.

    We do not want to lose the investment and employment brought by these corporates.

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