Up until now, Facebook has been pretty quietly anti-SOPA. Sure, they’ve been anti-SOPA from the start, but in a very reserved, quietly private way. They wouldn’t just up and tell you; you’d have to look into yourself. For instance, they were one of the Internet giants who took out that full page ad, and one of the ones who wrote that letter. They were even one of the companies reportedly considering the nuclear option. Nonetheless, they hadn’t public addressed users, until today.

In response to Rotem Guez launching LikeStore, a website that sells advertisers Facebook Likes for their Facebook pages, Facebook is suing him. LikeStore offers users free content for Liking a company’s page, which happens to be in violation of Facebook’s current Terms of Service, so Facebook decided it was time to shut the service down. Guez is unhappy, as one might expect, and claims that though LikeStore is indeed in violation of the current Terms of Service, many other companies offer the same service. So, Guez did what any rational person would do in response to a lawsuit from Facebook — he legally changed his name to Mark Zuckerberg hoping that the bad publicity of Facebook suing Mark Zuckerberg would deter their legal efforts.

There have been rumblings of Mark Zuckerberg making Facebook a publicly traded company for some time, but new information seems to point toward the possibility of a whopping $100 billion initial public offering (IPO) valuation. Such a valuation could raise huge amounts of money for the company, founded barely seven years ago when Zuckerberg was at Harvard. Those events have already been immortalized in film, and Facebook’s continuing struggles with privacy are the stuff of Internet legend, but a massive IPO would almost certainly open a new chapter for the social networking giant.

As you may be aware if you aren’t living under a rock, Facebook’s f8 conference was held today in San Francisco. During the conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made something very clear; there are some big changes coming down the pipe. The first and most striking, from a design perspective, is the Timeline.

The current (and previous) Facebook profile pages do a good job of representing your life in the recent past. While they present some static information like music you like, where you go to school, where you are employed, and so on, most of the information on your profile is very recent activity like status updates and posted links. The Timeline aims to change that by presenting information that aims to represent you as a whole instead of as the last few minutes or hours.

Because founding and expanding a multibillion-dollar company in his 20s apparently wasn’t hard enough: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken it upon himself to only eat meat from animals he has personally killed himself. Though it might sound radical on its face, the idea behind this “personal challenge” is to make Zuckerberg more ethically connected with the food that he is eating.

Zuckerberg explains:

This year, my personal challenge is around being thankful for the food I have to eat. I think many people forget that a living being has to die for you to eat meat, so my goal revolves around not letting myself forget that and being thankful for what I have. This year I’ve basically become a vegetarian since the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself. So far, this has been a good experience. I’m eating a lot healthier foods and I’ve learned a lot about sustainable farming and raising of animals.

I started thinking about this last year when I had a pig roast at my house. A bunch of people told me that even though they loved eating pork, they really didn’t want to think about the fact that the pig used to be alive. That just seemed irresponsible to me. I don’t have an issue with anything people choose to eat, but I do think they should take responsibility and be thankful for what they eat rather than trying to ignore where it came from.

The first animal Zuckerberg killed since taking up this challenge was a lobster, which he boiled alive; since then, he has slaughtered goats, pigs, and chickens. After killing the animals, he takes them to a nearby butcher in Santa Cruz, after which he tries to use as much of the meat as possible.

(via Fortune. h/t Laura June.)

It should surprise no one that many users on Facebook are below the required age of 13, but what you may not know is that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems alright with that. During a talk at the California NewSchools Summit, Zuckerberg voiced his desire to allow younger users to use the ubiquitous social networking platform. From ZDnet:

“That will be a fight we take on at some point,” Zuckerberg said according to CNN. “My philosophy is that for education you need to start at a really, really young age. Because of the restrictions we haven’t even begun this learning process. If they’re lifted then we’d start to learn what works. We’d take a lot of precautions to make sure that they [younger kids] are safe.”

The minimum age of 13 is set by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, a federal law passed in 1998. His statement is particularly bold; though social media is certainly pervasive it is not universally accepted or even trusted. Many recent news stories have highlighted online bullying of young people, some ending tragically. Facebook itself has faced a backlash as of late, with some people leaving the site, voicing displeasure about how the site handles personal information, and even creating alternatives.

It’s very easy to dismiss Zuckerberg’s dream of opening Facebook even further as simply an attempt to grow its user base. However, Zuckerberg may be riding the edge of a change in opinion.

In a court decision which further frees Facebook’s hand for an IPO in the near future, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has unanimously ruled that Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the Olympic-rowing twins who accused Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their idea for a social networking site, must accept the settlement they reached with Facebook in 2008. Their argument that Facebook had withheld relevant information from them during these negotiations has been rejected, and the settlement that the Winklevosses will have to take, which consists of $20 million in cash and a percentage of company ownership, has been previously valued at $65 million, but may presently be worth more than $100 million due to appreciation in Facebook stock’s value.

George Grellas points out an interesting irony:

I note one irony in passing. The ratio of the stock value to cash payment that made up the original settlement was not coincidental. The $65 million value consisted of 1.2 million Facebook shares originally valued at $45 million plus $20 million in cash. Receipt of such stock is a taxable transaction and, indeed, would constitute ordinary income to the Winklevoss brothers. Thus, they were to have received $65 million in taxable income, including $20 million in cash to help cover the tax. But that was then. Having chosen to fight the issue, they would not have realized any form of taxable income on this deal until they actually received the stock. As a result, when they now receive the cash/stock package, they will realize an estimated $170 million in taxable income (the cash plus FB stock worth $150 million), with only $20 million to help defray taxes. That stock will not be immediately marketable, even on the secondary exchanges and will require FB’s permission to be sold there. The net result, unless I mis-analyze, is that the Winklevoss brothers have by their choosing to fight managed to convert over $100 million in stock value from what would have been a long-term capital gain into ordinary income, will have to pay much higher taxes accordingly, and will (I would assume) be faced with a serious logistical problem in the form of a short-term cash squeeze in raising funds to cover the taxes. I am not a tax specialist and may be wrong on this, but I don’t think so.

FB dodged a bullet on this one. Had the settlement been set aside, the liability overhang would very likely have messed up its IPO, among other serious consequences.

Full court ruling below:

Mark Zuckerberg has been called many things — a punk, a genius, a traitor, a billionaire — but he’s also been called some unkinder things, and not just by people trying to promote some movie, but by random people searching Google. Publisher Exclusive Books makes a point of this fact in this ad for self-help books: All of the above are actual popular Google searches that follow “Mark Zuckerberg is.”

To those who think that he’s a thieving colorblind loser Antichrist, Zuckerberg is still “doing things that no one in this room, including and especially [you], are intellectually or creatively capable of doing.”

(via Copyranter)

Facebook overlord Mark Zuckerberg has obtained a restraining order against Pradeep Manukonda, 31, claiming Manukonda is stalking him, putting the safety of Zuckerberg, his sister, and his girlfriend at risk.

TMZ reports that law enforcement “sources” say Manukonda has visited several Facebook offices attempting to get into contact with Zuckerberg in order to ask him for money for his family, and has supposedly even sent flowers and a hand-written letter to Zuckerberg’s home.

Head on past the break to check out one of Manukonda’s somewhat creepy Facebook messages to Zuckerberg.

New dating site Lovely-Faces.com launched with over 250,000 member profiles, but rather than being a promising launch for a heavily-populated future, it turned out the site was basically a prank; one that happened to scrape all of their “launch member” profiles from Facebook (including names, locations and photos), then reuse them on the fake dating site. Head on past the break for details.