This morning’s Observer column…
What’s in a number? Quite a lot, it turns out, if it’s a 16-digit hexadecimal (base 16) number that begins ’09 F9′. (That’s ‘9’ followed by ‘249’ in normal – base 10 – numbering.)
Why the fuss? Well, it appears that the 16-digit number in question is the cryptographic key for unlocking the copy protection on the new generation of DVD discs. It was discovered a while back and posted in obscure parts of the web, where it languished…
At the OU’s Curriculum, Teaching and Student Support conference earlier this week it dawned on Tony Hirst that some of our esteemed colleagues might not be, er, fully up to speed on the significance of RSS. So he composed a thoughtful manifesto/rant on the theme that the university ignores RSS at its peril. He’s right.
The WSJ is now saying that those ‘talks’ between Microsoft and Yahoo are off. One wonders now if they were ever seriously on. Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times is wondering if there’s been any insider skullduggery. After all, Yahoo’s shares jumped after the NY Post published its ‘scoop’.
The New York Post owes everyone a good follow-up story.
You can’t just drop a bombshell that jerks around 80,000 Microsoft and Yahoo! employees, rocks Wall Street and then fizzles before the day is over.
The Post should investigate — and report — whether its anonymous investment banker sources made any money off the huge run in YHOO caused by its story.
If the Post doesn’t do this, the SEC might. We don’t need any more reporter subpoenas.
At the very least, the Post needs to go back to its sources and clarify if and when Microsoft and Yahoo! ended their latest round of merger discussions.
Did the talks end sometime Friday, after the Post story boosted YHOO?
Stay tuned.
Ah, the poor dears. It seems that YouTube is infringing their intellectual property.
The English Premier League is to sue video-sharing site YouTube for alleged copyright infringement.
The football organisation said YouTube had “knowingly misappropriated” its intellectual property by encouraging footage to be viewed on its site…
Tut, tut.
From GMSV…
Yahoo stock is up more than 15 percent today after a New York Post report that Microsoft has formally renewed its effort to take over the Sunnyvale Internet giant at a price tag of $50 billion or more.
Many see the proposed takeover as a reaction by the Redmond, Wash. software sovereign to ever-increasing concerns about keeping up with the Googles, particularly after losing a recent bidding battle for online advertising specialist DoubleClick. With Google developing Internet-based software squarely challenging the dominance of Microsoft’s Office Suite, some think Microsoft has little choice but to move quickly and authoritatively.
Responding to such speculation last May, Yahoo CEO Terry Semel told the Mercury News: “My impartial advice to Microsoft is that you have no chance,” adding that it would not be smart to sell “your right arm while keeping your left.” Yahoo is thus far keeping quiet about today’s report.
Assuming some kind of agreement is reached, it’s all but certain to face heavy antitrust scrutiny. As blogger Vindu Goel points out, the critical question for regulators will be whether the government should allow a company with a monopoly in one field of technology to boost its position to fight another company with a growing monopoly in another field.
Thanks to Rex Hughes for the link to the original NY Post scoop.
Not mine, alas, but found on the Web while looking for something else. Ah, the marvels of PhotoShop.
Doug Stewart is not amused by the Digger’s revolt over the AACS DVD key.
To put it frankly, the actions of the digg community are idiotic. They are not “brave”. R3 was not “censoring” their “speech” and the infantile kicking of the ox goad that resulted was ludicrous in the extreme. “Brave” users seeking to stick it to the MPAA “Man” would have posted the offending string on their own blogs and thus exposed themselves to potential litigation, rather than dragging an unwilling digg into the fight. If they seek the destruction of the community they take part in, I can think of no quicker route than to get the creators sued into oblivion.
So well-played, diggers. You managed to make Slashdotters seem principled and Farkers seem reasonable by comparison. Dunces.
From CNET News.com…
Yahoo will begin to close down Yahoo Photos, in favor of Flickr, the competing photo sharing site the company bought just over a year ago.
Yahoo Photos users will be given the opportunity to move their pictures over to Flickr. But Garlinghouse admits that Flickr isn’t the right sharing site for many users of Yahoo Photos, so users will be given the option to instead move pictures to Shutterfly or the Kodak Gallery.
This is an interesting move for Yahoo, a company geared towards serving the mass audience of online users. Flickr is a great service, but it’s the black sheep of popular photo sites — it’s got a different organizational system from most sites, it’s more open, and it attracts a more tech-adept user base.
Thanks to Tony Hirst for the link.
Another list. Compiled by ComputerWorld staff. Looks as arbitrary as any other list.
From Technology Review…
The world of Second Life is divided into thousands of individual regions, or “sims,” each 65,536 square meters in area (about 16 acres). Linden Lab’s data facilities include more than 20,000 servers, each running one to four sims. The simulation software controls everything going on in its sim, from rendering the terrain and the 3-D models that make up the environment to animating members’ avatars, retrieving their inventories, performing searches, sending instant messages to members in other sims, and communicating with storage databases. If an avatar crosses from one sim into another, every bit of information about that avatar must be handed over to the new sim. The more sims Linden adds to accommodate new members, the more communication goes on between sims, and the greater the burden on each server and on the “backbone” lines connecting them.
“I don’t believe [this architecture] is scalable, at least not to the sizes I want to see it scale to,” said Zero Linden, a “studio director,” or software development manager, at Linden Lab, at a smaller meeting on May 2. (Linden Lab identifies most of its employees only by their in-world names, which always include the surname “Linden.”) But there are “major architectural changes underfoot,” he says, designed to reduce the need for constant connectivity between servers…