A lot has happened to Mark Hurd in the last few months. For instance, Hewlett-Packard forced Hurd to resign as CEO over ethics violations, and he was then was hired by Oracle, who owns the company that produces the Java platform, to be its new vice president. And now HP is filing a civil complaint against Hurd in California.

Just a little over a month ago, iWinUX reported that Mark Hurd, then CEO of HP, was forced to resign over what was then thought to be sexual harassment allegations. HP’s board did investigate Hurd over a sexual harassment complaint made by an independent contractor; however, HP concluded that while Hurd was innocent of violating the company’s sexual harassment policies, the contractor received compensation and incorrect expense reimbursement from Hurd as an attempt to keep the contractor quiet about the relationship. And thus, HP asked Hurd to step down from chief executive officer.

Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that Hurd had been hired by Oracle, the conglomerate that owns Sun Microsystems, to replace Charles Phillips as president of the company. The shift came as Oracle is looking to move from a software company to a hardware company, which is something Hurd knows a lot about as he more than tripled HP’s profits. The company, which is trying to make a lasting impression in Silicon Valley, is looking to get into server sales.

Not long after after Oracle announced the acquisition of Hurd as president, HP filed a civil complaint against Hurd for breaking trade secret agreements. HP said in the complaint, which you can read here (.PDF), that Hurd signed documents agreeing to keep confidential information secret and that HP “intends to enforce those agreements.”

Update: Oracle has issued an official statement on its website:

“Oracle has long viewed HP as an important partner,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “By filing this vindictive lawsuit against Oracle and Mark Hurd, the HP board is acting with utter disregard for that partnership, our joint customers, and their own shareholders and employees.   The HP Board is making it virtually impossible for Oracle and HP to continue to cooperate and work together in the IT marketplace.”

Ben Huh, the CEO of Cheezburger Networks, has offered to purchase the social link sharing website from current owner Condé Nast, after the two companies squared off earlier today over Condé Nast’s refusal to run ads supporting California’s Proposition 19 on Reddit.

Proposition 19 calls for the legalization of marijuana within the state of California (of course). Condé Nastt’s official stance was that the company does not want to “benefit financially from this particular issue.”

Nevertheless, Reddit’s engineers must agree with the Californian proposition, as they are currently running the ads on the site for free. But the link-aggregation website does need money, as Condé Nast is not giving the site the budget it needs. It has already asked for donations once.

So, Ben Huh has stepped in and offered to buy Reddit in letter written on The Daily What:

“I believe that Reddit is one of the best communities I have seen on the Internet. I also believe that Reddit would benefit from more resources and less corporate interference. We can offer all of the above. And we’d love to buy Reddit and all those pesky troublesome users that we love so much,” he wrote.

He also said that believed the website “would do better under a strange and weird start-up like [Cheezburger Network], rather than a corporate giant like Condé Nast.”

Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft in 1975 with Bill Gates, has filed suit against 12 major corporations over technology he claims to have patented.

The companies: Google, Facebook, eBay, Apple, Yahoo Inc., AOL Inc., Netflix, Office Depot Inc., OfficeMax Inc., Staples Inc. and YouTube, a subsidiary of Google.

All four patents are for technology innovated more than 10 years ago by a software company that Allen owned. Interval Research Corp was financed for about $100 million by Allen during the Dot Com bubble, and was shut down soon after.

The second patent,which allows a website to offer suggestions related to items that the user is viewing, is a feature on Amazon, but Amazon has not been listed. (Maybe for being Seattle-based?) Microsoft, the company that Allen co-founded with Bill Gates, is also missing from the list of companies being filed upon.

The other patents are for technology that enables ads and stock quotes (among other things) to flash on screen, and provides links of related news stories for readers who are viewing a topic.

No doubt that the reason Allen and his firm, Interval Licensing LLC, are suing is from the success of NTP Inc, who won the suits it had with Apple, BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion Ltd, and Microsoft in 2006.

One result was RIM settling out of court with NTP at the price of $612.5 million. So maybe Allen has a chance?

There are just some people who Facebook suggests through the People You May Know tool that you really don’t even want to think about, but if Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is one of them: too bad. You can block whoever you want, but not if it’s Zuckerberg.

The website BlockZuck.com used to tell users how to block the Facebook Chief Executive Officer, but the website has now been updated to reflect the new error message that users receive after trying to block Zuckerberg.

The error message? “General Block failed error: Block failed.”

You would think that with all of the privacy concerns over Facebook, that the social media company wouldn’t allow one single account to access all of the website’s 500 million user profiles. But they do.

Regardless if Zuckerberg is the boss or not, he shouldn’t have access. What do you guys think? Is this a big deal, or is it not? Go ahead and give us your opinions in the comments!

Facebook has finally launched its “check-in” service, called Places, that will allow its users to share their location with other people. The service has been in development for quite some time, as it was a well-known secret that the social networking giant had been working on a direct competitor to Foursquare.

Places is aimed to help Facebook users find the whereabouts of their friends and to disclose the location of themselves. Places is not developed from scratch, however, it includes tools developed by Foursquare and another geolocation site, Gowalla.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hopes that Places will bring in additional advertising revenue from his site’s 500 million users. Borrell Associates indicate that Facebook could earn as much as $4.1 billion in annual ad revenue by the middle of the decade. Zuckerberg also noted, at the Places launch party, that his company could produce an advertising component for the geolocation service.

Services that help Web users share their whereabouts and find nearby friends could generate as much as $4.1 billion in annual ad sales by 2015, according to Borrell Associates. The features can help marketers more easily target customers — say, by reaching shoppers when they’re close to making a purchase. In the future, Facebook may include an advertising component to Places, Zuckerberg said at an event in Palo Alto, California.

Services like Foursquare and Gowalla aren’t out of the clear, however, as Places “lessens the need” for users to depend on alternatives. “Facebook’s entry doesn’t mean the immediate death of other location-based services,” Michael Gartenberg, an analyst for the Altimeter Group, said. “It will, however, put much more pressure on them to evolve.”

The service is, currently, only available in the US and on a mobile device. iPhone users will be able to use the “check-in” service on the new Facebook app expected Thursday, and other smartphone users will be able to access Places through the touch.facebook.com website.

The rollout begins immediately.

What seems to be just continuous bad luck remains the same as Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd resigned earlier this week following a sexual harassment allegation. Hurd joined HP in 2005 as CEO and president, and quickly rose to Chairman of the board as well.

HP’s board of directors unanimously voted to oust Hurd after a former marketing contractor accused the CEO of sexual harassment. The board did find violations of the company’s Standards of Business Conduct (PDF) however.

The contractor hired famous sexual harassment lawyer Gloria Allred, of Tiger Woods mistress fame, to represent her, so her identity is still unknown. Allred did state, however, that there was “no affair and no intimate sexual relationship”.

Chief Financial Officer Cathie Lesjak took over as interim CEO, but has said that she does not wish this to be a permanent position within the company. Earlier this week, she sent an internal memo to all of HP’s employees detailing the shift in command, the sexual harassment allegations, and the Board of Director’s investigation results. (See the memo, in its entirety, after the jump.)
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Nokia Corporation, which has been struggling in the smart-phone business, is reportedly looking for a new CEO to replace Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo.

The Wall Street Journal reported that “sources close to the situation” have said that the move is due to Nokia not being able to keep up in the smart-phone race and hold valid competition against Apple and Android-based phones. Even though the company still sells more mobile phones than any other manufacturer, the Finland-based company’s stock has dropped 42% since April.

The WSJ had trouble reaching Nokia spokespeople in Finland, however, a U.S.-based spokeswoman declined to comment on the speculation. One of the New York City-based newspaper’s sources said that Nokia’s board members are set to make a decision at the end of the month.

According to sources, Nokia has flown in, at least, two U.S.-based CEOs of major technology companies for interviews and neither were interested in moving to Espoo, Finland, the company’s international headquarters.

Analysts blame the Finnish company’s operating system and its applications to compete with Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android operating system, which has recently taken the world by storm in the Motorola Droid X.