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A Russian programmer has once again taken top honours at Facebook's annual Hackers Cup - the third annual code-off took place on Saturday. 

Facebook had flown in 25 of the brightest programming minds from around the world after approximately 8000 people from 150 countries competed in a 72 hour qualification round in January. The 25 finalists were from China, Germany, Japan, Poland, South Korea, Russia, Taiwan and Ukraine as well as the United States. As with last year, the elite group did not include any women.

A group of 13 individuals in the United States have filed a lawsuit against Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Yelp and 14 other companies, accusing them of distributing privacy invading mobile applications.

The lawsuit seeks a permanent injunction against such data collection and the destruction of all personal data collected by mobile application vendors to date. The plaintiffs describe themselves in the complaint as users of Apple iPhone and users of Android powered handsets.

World famous iPhone “jailbreak” hacker, George Hotz aka geohot, was arrested for pot possession in route to the SXSW conference in Austin.

As expected, Yahoo today filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook. The online giant is claiming that the social networking site infringes upon 10 of it's patents. Yahoo is hoping to secure some portion of Facebook's revenue moving forward.

“Yahoo! Has invested substantial resources in research and development through the years, which has resulted in numerous patented inventions of technology that other companies have licensed” says a Yahoo spokesperson.

The All Assam Chutia Students’ Union (AACSU) yesterday criticized Facebook for blocking thousands of accounts in the Chutia community. Facebook likely believes the accounts are fake or just spam, but AACSU argues it’s all a big misunderstanding. The student organization burned a Facebook effigy in the five upper Assam districts of Tinsukia, Dibrugarh, Sivasagar, Jorhat, and Golaghat on Monday and demanded public apology from the social networking giant.

On Friday, I wrote a story about how Facebook was prompting users for their password when they navigate to Facebook’s Update Your Security Information webpage. Users said they were confused why it was happening, and frankly so was I. The prompt was ironic to me because most users get to the webpage from a Facebook ad (Sponsored Story) called “Account Protection” pushed out by Facebook itself to help them improve their account security.

Zynga will launch its own social gaming platform and open it up to third-party game developers, the company announced on Thursday.

The maker of "Mafia Wars" and "FarmVille" will soon have its own website where people can sign up and play games with their friends. Today its games are played primarily on Facebook, Yahoo and a few other websites, as well as on smartphones.

In a classic high-tech case of if-you-can't-beat-them-sue-them, Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) Feb. 27 accused partner Facebook of infringing on patents related to social networking and other technologies.

Yahoo is struggling to boost user engagement at a time when it is losing eyeballs to Facebook, Google, Twitter and other Internet companies. Yahoo wants Facebook to pay to use technology spanning 10 to 20 patents covering online advertising, Website personalization and social networking, according to The New York Times.

Facebook is being accused of snooping on its users' text messages, but the social network says the accusations are inaccurate and misleading.

In a legal skirmish that pitted a nephew against his uncle on harassment allegations for posting childhood Christmas pictures on Facebook, a judge has ruled that although comments about such images may be "mean and disrespectful," they and those pictures do not rise to the level necessary to remove them, or for a restraining order to prevent such images from turning up again.