Google tries brinksmanship with DOJ in fight over Yahoo deal

Google’s ad deal with Yahoo probably couldn’t start soon enough for either company. Spending on ads is likely to be dropping in line with the economic contraction, and Yahoo could certainly use any cash it can get in order to avoid another round of layoffs. All that is likely to make the companies’ ongoing negotiations with the US Department of Justice over the antitrust implications of the deal that much more frustrating. Now, it appears that Google is trying to push things along by suggesting that it’s ready to walk away from the deal.

The potential partnership between the two companies would see Google place ads among those appearing with search results at Yahoo. According to the potential partners, Google ads would only appear when Yahoo had nothing relevant it could place on that page. Yahoo, for its part, claims that the deal would mean millions of dollars in annual revenue, which it would pump into improving its own ad-serving system. Both say that, since ad rates are controlled by auctions, the deal won’t allow either company to manipulate pricing.

Advertisers, for their part, have been concerned that any major changes of this sort will necessarily change what they pay, even if neither company directly intervenes. Perhaps more significantly, Microsoft has been publicly telling anyone who will listen that the deal represents a dangerously large market consolidation. Thus, it isn’t much of a surprise that the DOJ is looking into the deal’s antitrust implications. Although the general consensus is that the DOJ would be unlikely to prevail in court, the mere threat of delays, injunctions, and legal fees has brought all three parties to the negotiating table.

It now appears that the talks haven’t been going as quickly as Google would have liked them to. The search giant probably recognizes that, given recent economic events, it is very unlikely to ever again have a DOJ staff that’s this predisposed to letting market forces deal with concerns like antitrust. It is also watching the clock tick down to the election, after which the staff will start focusing on bringing its replacements up to speed and applying for new jobs. Google probably figures it’s now or not any time soon for the deal.

That’s almost certainly what’s behind a report in The Wall Street Journal that suggests that Google is ready to walk away and abandon the deal. This sent countless other news sources scurrying to ping their inside sources (we have none, so you’re spared that) and get responses from official spokespeople. The general consensus: both internally and publicly, Yahoo still wants the deal; Google spokespeople do too, and nobody knows what’s going on behind the search giant’s public facade.

Probably the most astute take on matters came from The Journal’s own blog site, where Kara Swisher referred to the rumors as Google “playing chicken” with the DOJ. She correctly notes that the original story more or less said that Google could walk away from the deal—unless it doesn’t, and lists a whole host of reasons that having the deal fall through would be a disaster for Yahoo. Although, on the plus side, she notes that it might finally kill off any Yahoo/AOL deal.

So, chances are very good that the rumors are simply Google’s way of nudging negotiations along, lest everyone get distracted and wind up focusing on voting for the country’s future direction instead.

Source: Arstechnica

Hacker faces 10 years for taking down Scientology

Posted by Martin

An 18-year-old New Jersey man will plead guilty to the January online attacks that took down the Church of Scientology’s Web site, federal prosecutors said Friday. Dmitriy Guzner of Verona, New Jersey, was part of an underground hacking group called Anonymous that has made the church a target of several attacks. He was charged Friday but has agreed to plead guilty sometime in the next few weeks, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement. He faces 10 years in prison on computer hacking charges.

The attacks began Jan. 19 and managed to knock the Scientology.org Web site offline by hitting it with several bursts of unwanted Internet traffic. The attack, known as a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, flooded the site with as much as 220M bps of traffic, according to computer security firm Arbor Networks. That’s considered to be a decent-sized DDOS attack and was enough to disable the Web site temporarily. Anonymous quickly followed its attacks with a series of YouTube videos, claiming its actions were a response to what it said were efforts by the Church to suppress a video of movie star Tom Cruise professing his admiration for the religion.

Hackers withdraw from Sarkozy’s bank account

It’s emerged thieves have been making fraudulent withdrawals from French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s private bank account. The news was confirmed in the French weekly “Le Journal du Dimanche”, which says Sarkozy’s office has confirmed that the president filed an official complaint last month. The thefts apparently concern sums of less than 200 euros a time. It appears the thieves managed to get hold of Sarkozy’s account details. Such crime is not uncommon – all that is needed are the bank details, name, and expiry date on the credit card in order to make fraudulent transactions over the internet.

Thieves then carry out purchases for relatively small amounts, in the hope that the owner of the card will realise the fraud as late as possible. There was outcry last year when the French parliament decided to award their head of state a 100% payrise. The swindlers may have had access to his £13,243 (approx $26,000) a month salary. Criminal and financial fraud squads and a prosecutor in the Paris suburb of Nanterre were investigating the case.

Obama buys first video game campaign ads

This could be his second ad, as we’ve seen the first ad on Burnout and now here’s the other ad on NBA Xbox game.

Barack Obama, flush with cash and ramping up his advertising in the final weeks before the November 4 election, is making U.S. political history by placing the first presidential campaign ads in online video games.

The Democratic Illinois senator is using the Internet ads, featured in 18 games through Microsoft Corp’s Xbox Live service, to promote his online voter registration and early balloting drive in 10 battleground states, a campaign spokesman said on Wednesday.

Unprecedented in U.S. presidential politics, the video game buy is targeted mainly at young adult males who are difficult to reach through more traditional campaign advertising.

“The 18-to-34-year-old male is the mainstream demographic for the hard-core video gamer,” said Van Baker, an analyst for Gartner Inc., a technology market research firm in San Jose, California. “They’re hard to get to because they don’t watch much TV and they don’t read a lot, so it’s a good venue to get that segment.”

The ads appear in games as banners or billboards with an image of Obama, the slogan “Early voting has begun,” and a reference to his VoteForChange.com website. The site allows users to register online to vote, obtain absentee voter information and find a polling location.

Polls consistently have given Obama, 47, an edge over Republican rival John McCain, 72, among younger voters.

Far from turning his back on more conventional media, however, Obama’s campaign last week said he planned to make a prime-time pitch to voters October 29 in a 30-minute ad slated to run on two broadcast networks, CBS and NBC.

Obama’s ads in Burnout video game

Video gamers who have recently played the racing game Burnout Paradise may find it offers more than a high-speed driving simulation: advertisements for Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, above, have begun appearing in the game. Players of Burnout Paradise who are connected to the Internet are also connected to an in-game system that allows real-life sponsors to place advertisements on billboards and other surfaces in its digital world. Jeff Brown, vice president of communications at Electronic Arts, which publishes Burnout Paradise, said Mr. Obama’s campaign had purchased ads to run in the Xbox 360 version of the game, which he said is most popular among male players ages 16 to 30.

The EA representative said that the ads would appear in only 10 different states, most of them contested battleground states. Paradise City residents in Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Colorado, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, and Wisconsin are being targeted by the campaign. In the 2004 presidential election, all of those states except Wisconsin went to Republican incumbent George W. Bush. Mr. Brown said Senator John McCain’s campaign had not purchased in-game advertisements, but added, “There’s still three weeks before the election.”

MobUI acquires Action Engine, plans iPhone apps

Mobile-app development company MobUI announced Monday that it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding and acquired Action Engine, a fellow mobile-app firm with customers including TiVo, AOL, and The Wall Street Journal.

Though terms of the acquisition haven’t been made public, the motivation for MobUI’s move is obvious: the success of Apple’s iPhone App Store. Since it was launched on in early July, more than 100 million mobile applications have been downloaded.

Other Action Engine customers include MarketWatch, Barrons, MSNBC, and Sports Illustrated. With the acquisition, MobUI said it plans to rapidly create iPhone, mobile Web, and downloadable applications for major consumer brands.

The round of funding was led by GlobalNet Mobile Solutions, a wireless application services provider in Latin America.

Source: Cnet

Zuckerberg: Facebook to further enable sharing

People increasingly comfortable with sharing personal info online, says Facebook CEO

A key part of Facebook’s focus for the future is to keep pace with its users’ increasing desire to share personal information, said Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at the Future of Web Apps conference in London.

“When we first started, people were relatively less comfortable sharing a lot of information. Early on there were a lot of questions, like ‘should I put my full name on Facebook?’ and ‘should I put my mobile phone number on Facebook?’, and a lot of what got people over that hump were privacy controls so they were sharing that information with just the people they wanted,” said Zuckerberg in an on-stage chat with conference host and organiser Ryan Carson.

“When there was only a little information that people could post, people would update their profile maybe once a month or every couple of months. Then we added things like photos and groups and the updates became more regular like once a week, once every couple of days, and now with status updates and all the different applications that people are using, the rate is increasing so much. Now most people probably update stuff on a daily basis.”

Zuckerberg believes sharing is growing exponentially: “One of the things that we have thought about at Facebook – we don’t have any conclusions on it yet – but an interesting historical analogy is Moore’s Law.” (The Law stated that the speed of processors would double every two years.) “And I wouldn’t be surprised, although there’s no definitive link yet, if something like that exists with the rate of sharing.”

Facebook’s recent redesign was in response to that idea, Zuckerberg revealed, and there’s more to come in future versions of Facebook: “Part of the redesign that we did was to reorganise the display of things to support the growth in sharing, and more and more parts of the site will start to be reorganised in terms of that.”

Source: Techradar

FCC report negates free Internet interference claims

A Federal Communications Commission engineering report released late Friday essentially backs a plan to create a free wireless Internet service by dismissing concerns about interference for existing providers.

The FCC has been considering auctioning 25 megahertz of spectrum in the 2155MHz to 2180MHz band. As part of the rules for using the spectrum, the FCC plans to require license holders to offer some free wireless broadband service.

The FCC sees the plan, which is based on a proposal submitted to the FCC by M2Z Networks in 2006, as a way to provide broadband Internet service to millions of Americans who either can’t afford or don’t want to pay for high-speed Internet access.

But existing providers like T-Mobile USA, which spent $4.2 billion in 2006 acquiring spectrum in an adjacent band, say that opening up this spectrum would cause interference and disrupt service.

Friday’s report, however, concludes that spectrum could be used as planned “without a significant risk of harmful interference.”

Click here for a PDF of the full FCC report.

It should be noted that this free Internet plan is separate from a proposal to use so called unused TV spectrum, also known as “white space” for wireless broadband services.

Source: Cnet

Obama uses iPhone to gain support

US Democratic candidate Barack Obama is set to turn the iPhone into a political recruiting tool with an application aimed at getting the vote out. The software has a “Call Friends” option to help organise contacts in swing states. A note about the software on Mr Obama’s blog said: “This tool is designed to help you become more directly involved in our campaign to change the country.” The free application was developed by volunteers in less than three weeks. “This really has the potential to help the campaign,” said Jason Grigsby, one of the project leaders. In a recent blog entry the campaign wrote: “With only 33 days left, it’s more important than ever to call your friends and family to make sure they are registered and voting for Barack.”

The blog also said that it hoped the “Call Friends” feature would “generate thousands of additional personal contacts” – that would then be turned into votes. Other features include making notes on which friends have been called, who they are supporting, and if they need a reminder on election day. The website said the total amount of calls the application made were tallied but no information left the phone, so the privacy of friends and users were protected. The application also passes on up-to-date news from the campaign, plus video, photos and talking points to help convince friends to vote for the candidate. Senator Obama has proved a fan of technology in his campaign and made headlines when he announced his choice of Joe Biden for vice-president via a text message.

Woman convicted of p2p crimes given new trial

A Minnesota woman who had been convicted of violating copyright laws by downloading music files has been granted a new trial, after the judge said he made an error in his jury instructions that may have prejudiced the outcome. U.S. District Judge Michael Davis on Wednesday granted Jammie Thomas’ motion for a new trial in the case, brought by the Recording Industry Association of America that alleged she illegally downloaded copywritten material off the peer to peer site Kazaa. Additionally, the judge urged Congress to redefine the definition of peer-to-peer piracy and prevent exorbitant fines to be levied against other defendants in similar situations, according to his ruling.

Thomas was initially found guilty of downloading 24 songs and ordered her ordered to pay $222,000 to six record companies. That equates to $9,250 per downloaded song. With the order of the new trial, Davis declined to rule on the fine, instead deferring that decision to the next round of litigation. Davis’s declared the mistrial because he said he believes he misled the jury in the initial court case when he told the jury that sharing music was the same as distributing it.