Lady Gaga has reached a Twitter milestone: The first user to obtain ten million followers. The milestone was reached near midnight on May 15, when she thanked her fans by saying “we did it!” The milestone says as much about Twitter as it does about Lady Gaga, considering only two years ago, Twitter had its first user to reach one million followers, Ashton Kutcher. The jump from the one million mark to the ten million mark in only two years certainly shows the impact and reach and Twitter.

The debate over whether The Huffington Post, newly enriched following its merger with AOL, should pay its unpaid bloggers has launched an armada of blog posts and a fleet of media roundtables, but today, the stakes will be upped. A group of bloggers has announced that it will file a class-action lawsuit against The Huffington Post, AOL, and Arianna Huffington, who personally pocketed at least $20 million from the $315 million merger.

The lead plaintiff in the suit is a man named Jonathan Tasini, who began blogging for The Huffington Post in December of 2005 and ceased blogging in February of this year, a few days after the merger was announced.

More details TK, but we can only assume that at stake here will be whether The Huffington Post or AOL violated any labor laws in their use of unpaid labor or misled the bloggers as to what they were ultimately entitled to.

Update: The complaint has been filed, and Tasini & co. are asking for a whopping $105 million.

TheHuffingtonPost.com’s continued assertion that it, alone, should be enriched by the valuable content provided by Plaintiff and the Classes has the broad detrimental effect of setting an artificially low price for the valuable digital content created by Plaintiff and the Classes, depressing the market for such content and, over the long term, having a serious depressing effect on the value of intellectual content being created by Plaintiff and the Classes and on the ability of Plaintiff and the Classes to support themselves as creators of high quality, engaging, digital content.

(via Mixed Media)

Thirteen record companies are suing LimeWire LLC, makers of the file-sharing program LimeWire, for as many as $75 trillion, a hilarious sum of money that quite possibly doesn’t even exist. When the companies won a ruling against Lime Wire last May, they requested damages that could now end up totaling the aforementioned ridiculous amount, which is five times our national debt.

The plaintiffs requested damages from $400 billion to $75 trillion and argued that Section 504(c)(1) of the Copyright Act “provided for damages for each instance of infringement where two or more parties were liable,” which could explain how the total could somehow rise to the $75 trillion, because each “instance of infringement” could technically be counted as each and every separate download.

With Flash looking more decrepit than ever in the face of HTML 5, Adobe has released a tool allowing developers to convert their Flash files into HTML 5. Codenamed “Wallaby,” the tool is aimed at converting Flash-based content and returning them to iOS platforms. From the International Business Times:

The focus for this initial version of Wallaby is to do the best job possible of converting typical banner ads to HTML5 and supported Webkit browsers include Chrome and Safari on OSX, Windows, and iOS.

Though limited in its capabilities, Wallaby will likely bring bring Flash content to the iOS, where it has never existed before. The tool is currently available and runs natively on both current Mac and Windows environments.

(International Business Times via Slashdot)

Throughout the months leading up to the 2010 holiday season, J.C. Penney ruled Google Search results for various items including dresses, bedding, small appliances, and skinny jeans. While J.C. Penney does indeed sell such items, are they really the most popular place to buy them? Maybe for some, but definitely not for most. So, how did the struggling retailer repeatedly make it to the top of the Google Search list? By doing shady, illegal things, that’s how. By using what Google considers “black-hat” tactics, JCP successfully (and temporarily) became the go-to online store for everything imaginable. Until they were caught.

This guy must have done something pretty gnarly to his ex-girlfriend, who happens to have photo editing skills as well as the ability to navigate Google Images. But hey, word of warning: do not mess with someone who has such skills. Unless you want to end up as a really embarrassing Internet meme.

Earlier this week Verizon and MetroPCS filed suits contesting the FCC’s new net neutrality statues, the ones that aren’t even as firm as most internet users would hope.

The FCC is now requesting that the DC appeals court in which the suits were filed throw them out, on some solid but incredibly procedural grounds.

In as nutty a nutshell as we can get, people aren’t allowed to sue part of the government in front of the DC circuit court before the thing that they are suing about is published in the Federal Register by that part of the government.  The FCC’s new rules have only been announced. Verizon countered by saying that since the new laws would affect their licenses, the suits fall under a law about licensing, which says that you can sue as soon as the law is announced.

But it doesn’t stop there.

After making it through the Homeland Security Committee in December, Senator Susan Collins‘ Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010 faded from view during the mid-term changeover in Congress, and quite a few people fervently hoped that it would stay that way.

Unfortunately, Wired Magazine was informed by the bill’s sponsor on Friday that Collins plans to reintroduce the “internet kill switch” bill to a Senate committee quite soon.  Friday, of course, was also the day that Egypt shut down it’s own internet in a futile effort to stop mass protests.  (An action that, if it continues past Sunday, may be significantly damaging to Egypt’s economy.)

In a video uploaded to YouTube yesterday, President Barack Obama touched not only on the Egyptian protests, but on the importance of social media as a part of a universal right to free speech. In a question submitted to YouTube, the President was asked what he thought of the Egyptian crackdown on internet communications.

“It is very important that people have mechanisms in order to express legitimate grievances.” Referring to his State of the Union speech, the president continued saying that, “there are certain core values that we believe in as Americans that we believe are universal: freedom of speech, freedom of expression…people being able to use social networking or any other mechanisms to communicate with each other and to express their concerns.”

During the time when computers were still just a primordial ooze, even the greatest of minds couldn’t comprehend how immensely vast the Internet would become. As famously said by (apparently no one) “640K is more memory than anyone will ever need“. At the time, 640k was more than enough to store a bitmap or two, and likewise, filling 4.3 billion IP addresses would seem to be an unimaginably lofty goal.

But, the end is nigh. “Within weeks”, we will meet that limit, and the Internet will officially run out of address space, causing a major inconvenience as data attempts to find a buddy to packet-pool with. (Or, until the industry adopts IPv6, which is a much roomier protocol.)

Vint Cerf, the creator of the IPv4 protocol, has already sacked up and accepted blame for the shortage, although the real culprit is likely those glittery GeoCities sites which devoured the ’90s web like a black hole with yo mama at the center of it.

“I thought it was an experiment and I thought that 4.3 billion would be enough to do an experiment. Who the hell knew how much address space we needed?” — Cerf

The move to IPv6 will create trillions of additional addresses, which should buy us another year or so until this whole “Internet fad” comes to a halt.

(via SMH)