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Trends: Goodbye cruel online world
The Times of London has a hilarious story on the rise of a new phenomenon they dub the "Facebook Suicide," -- completely deleting all your information from a social network. If this were an actual, measurable trend, it might cause some consternation in the social networking world, but, after reading the article, Silicon Valley should be relieved. All the people quoted come off like complete technophobic loons. Take 27-year-old Stephanie, who quit Facebook to save her relationship with her insecure, insanely jealous, and manipulative boyfriend, who couldn't stand to see old pictures of her on her exs' profiles. ""Facebook was damaging my relationship with my boyfriend to such an extent that if I hadn't done it [deleted her profile] we wouldn't be together now," she states. "As soon as my Facebook profile died, our relationship improved." Right-o there, Steph. It's Facebook's fault that your boyfriend is an abusive control freak.But leave it to the therapists to take the whole...

Google: Esther Wojcicki, did your journalism degree teach you disclosure?
Huffington Post's Esther Wojcicki gushes over Google's Lunar X Prize. It's not the $30 million those nice Google boys, Larry and Sergey, are offering whomever can successfully land a rover on the moon. This Palo Altao school marm is keen on all the teaching tools the Lunar X Prize is providing educators. She writes, "The team at the Lunar Xprize has prepared free learning guides, videos and other resources to help stimulate student interest not only in space but in math, science and technology as well." She sees this as an effort to rectify the "anti-science trend in schools." Google's efforts are all well and good, but there's another reason why this journalism teacher is so sweet on Larry Page and Sergey Brin -- she's Brin's mother-in-law. Her daughter Anne married him in May. But the Google ties go even deeper. Her daughter Susan Wojcicki is Google's VP of product managementand Susan's garage in Menlo Park served as the search engine's first headquarters. Even daughter Janet...

YouTube: Pitzer College Offers YouTube Class
Or, as Michael Arrington puts it, WTF? Although maybe it's not so far-fetched since, as we pointed out earlier in the week, Stanford is offering a similar class: Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook."

Rumormonger: Adam Bosworth going to Facebook?
We're hearing whispers that Adam Bosworth, ex-Google and Microsoft engineer who created XML and the Access database, will soon join hot social network Facebook. Not 100% on this yet -- Facebook PR head Brandee Barker is traveling and unavailable for comment -- but the rumors seem strong and very plausible to us. If true, this sheds new light on Bosworth's swift and sudden departure from Google, where he was head of Google's beleaguered health project. The most surprising rumor is Bosworth's supposed new title: Vice President of Engineering, a position currently held by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Know anything more? Please fill us in.

Caption Contest: Kevin Rose cracks his iPhone
"I dropped my iphone :(" says Kevin Rose, co-founder of social sites Digg and Pownce. Best caption wins an iPhone ringtone version of "Umbrella."

Digital Music: Village People to YouTube: "Can you say D-M-C-A?"
Perhaps emboldened by Prince's move to sue YouTube, eBay, and Pirate Bay for encouraging others to violate his copyrights or -- more likely -- seduced by Web Sheriff who is assisting both artists to create a minor media brouhaha, disco band The Village People has announced its own plans to sue YouTube for a video featuring Hitler and a coterie of prominent Nazis singing "YMCA." Unlike Prince who seems to have given little regard for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's provision which allows potentially infringing parties an exception until a take down notice has been issued, Web Sheriff and The Village People have sent more than 500 take down notices for the same offending clip.Every time YouTube complies, another user uploads the same video -- which may provide The Village People an actual legal argument . On the other hand, while The Village People have every right to be offended by their music being associated with Nazis, doesn't Hitler dancing and singing gay men's disco...

YouTube: Prince is gonna sue you like it's 1999
Purple Rain vs. Chocolate Rain: Prince is suing YouTube for not actively removing illegal copies of his work. His argument is simple and solid: "YouTube ... are clearly able (to) filter porn and pedophile material but appear to choose not to filter out the unauthorized music and film content which is core to their business success." YouTube responded with the usual lines.The company's top lawyer said, "Most content owners understand that we respect copyrights, we work every day to help them manage their content, and we are developing state-of-the-art tools to let them do that even better." This bullshit started to smell months ago, and Prince has long been a caller-out of bull. (Remember that the "my name is now a symbol" stunt was his way of avoiding an unfair label contract.) On the other hand, YouTube knows that it's easier for most labels and artists to give in and take a cut of ad revenue from these illegal clips, than to constantly delete the clips that users will submit...

Quotable: Being either too aggressive or too compliant ...
Being either too aggressive or too compliant can be disasterous when negotiating with Apple so News Corp's president Peter Chernin opts for the safety of being obvious. On upcoming music negotiations with the computer maker: "I assume it will be prickly and dicey and contentious like all negotiations are and like all negotiations should be." [Reuters]

Google: Land on moon, collect $30 million
One-upping the $10 million non-profit X Prize for commercial space travel, Google is offering $20 million to the first private enterprise that makes it to the moon. Of course, this is a Google venture, so the winner has to compete some secondary tasks to get the prize. Once they're done with the main bit of landing on the freaking moon, prize seekers must take video and walk some specified distances. Google offers bonus prizes for finding ice, spotting Apollo equipment, and surviving the lunar night. Great, the next lunar landing will play like an episode of Survivor.

Confirmed: PRWeek confirms our month-old scoop that ...
PRWeek confirms our month-old scoop that Facebook has hired PR firm OutCast to help manage the hungry journalists seeking information on the hot social network. [PRWeek]

Six Apart: Six Apart parts with CEO
After Livejournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick left for greener, Googlier pastures, we told you to expect more drama from blogging software company Six Apart, and here's the latest installment. Barak Berkowitz, pictured, is out as CEO and will be replaced by Chris Alden, the former head of 6A's Professional Division and the person in charge of the recent Movable Type 4 upgrade. Alden came to Six Apart after last year's acquisition of feed reader company Rojo, a purchase which some saw more as a play to bring Alden to Six Apart than for the technology behind Rojo. As for Berkowitz, there is no word on his next professional move -- a spokesperson for Six Apart said that he was taking a "well earned vacation" immediately following the handover and would then "explore new opportunities."

Your Privacy Is An Illusion: Google wants Web privacy standards
Peter Fleischer, Google's privacy czar, wants universal privacy laws -- no doubt Google wants to establish a base standard so it won't continue to get called on its own anti-privacy actions. At a United Nations agency conference in Strasbourg, Fleischer cited the proliferation of personal data on the Web as a cause for concern, particularly because things like credit card numbers passes through several nations, all with varying privacy laws, before completing transactions. "If privacy principles can be agreed in such divergent countries [as Australia and Vietnam], then we think that is a model for the rest of the world," said Fleischer in reference to guideline established by Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. Of course the real question is who will enforce them.

Techcrunch: Is TechCrunch turning into Valleywag?
That's not our question. It comes from this blog.. The evidence is the following list of headlines, which the writer apparently feels is beneath Michael Arrington. * Breast Isn't Best On Facebook* Something Going On At Twitter? * Googlers Get Kinky On Wikipedia * Multi-Day Paypal Subscription Outage * Like Sands Through The Hour Glass, Another Person Is Claiming To Have Founded Facebook * What Do You Get When You Ask Gmail Fans To Express Email Delivery? * Sprint Sucks And Their New Website Is Stupid * Attack Of The Fake BloggersIyer clearly thinks Arrington is going to the dogs. But we think those heds are fab--and can't understand why everyone doesn't want to be like us.

Media: We do TOO have a lot of traffic, says BusinessWeek
In the category of "the best defense is a good offense": The editors at BusinessWeek are not interested in anyone's analysis of why their website's traffic lags Forbes.com and Fortune.com--even when it says they're not to blame. Silicon Alley Insider's Peter Kafka tried to give them a break, yesterday, saying that a 24/7wallstreet.com report blaming their crappy numbers on crappy content was faulty analysis; they were actually the victims of poor distribution. Fortune.com, for example, benefits from all the traffic at CNMoney.com, while BusinessWeek.com stands alone on the web. Yet editor-in-chief John Byrne responded by saying that the ComScore numbers were completely wrong. Yes, they probably understated the case, but they weren't completely out of the ballpark, even according to Kafka. So the question remains: why DO they lag so far behind the other financial sites? I'd pick poor distribution. It's a lot easier to fix.

Videogames: Ever-growing concern that children play too ...
Ever-growing concern that children play too many videogames has led one Texas GameStop retailer to refuse school-age customers who can't prove they have good grades. He'll even buy students earning straight As a new game. [Kotaku]

: We do TOO have a lot of traffic, says Business Week
In the category of "the best defense is a good offense": The editors at Business Week are not interested in anyone's analysis of why their traffic lags Forbes.com and Fortune.com--even when it says they're not to blame. Silicon Alley Insider's Peter Kafka tried to give them a break, yesterday, saying that a 24/7wallstreet.com report blaming their crappy numbers on crappy content was faulty analysis; they were actually the victims of poor distribution. Fortune.com, for example, benefits from all the traffic at CNMoney.com, while BusinessWeek.com stands alone on the web. Yet Editor in Chief John A. Byrne responded by saying that the ComScore numbers were completely wrong. Yes, they probably understated the case, but they weren't completely out of the ballpark, even according to Kafka. So the question remains: why DO they lag so far behind the other financial sites? I'd pick poor distribution. It's a lot easier to fix.

Silicon Valley: Vinod Khosla thinks all you Prius owners ...
Vinod Khosla thinks all you Prius owners are on personal guilt trips. The venture capitalist likens it to giving money to "art museums instead of starving people [in Africa]." Ethanol and bio-fuels are better bets because the average consumer isn't willing to spend $5,000 to save a half ton of carbon per year. Neither is Khosla. [VentureBeat]

Online Video: You CAN teach old media new tricks. The New ...
You CAN teach old media new tricks. The New York Times posted its first video to the editor sent in by film maker Charles Ferguson as a rebuttal to an Op-Ed on the disbandment of the Iraq army. [Editor & Publisher]

Junk Food: Care for a frypod with that shake?
What red-blooded American child wouldn't rather have nice, healthy apple slices in a frybox than the warm, salty bits of FAT that they're used to? Burger King, doing its best to be a good corporate citizen and fight the good fight against obesity, is offering this new snack in a "frypod." Better question: which marketing consultant decided that evoking "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" in a snack would make it more appealing?

Reality TV: "It's time to dump the term "reality TV." ...
"It's time to dump the term "reality TV." At this point, it's rather like referring to packaged fruit snacks as "produce." My suggested replacement would be "partially scripted TV," which I imagine would be preferable to "fabricated" for those who work that end of the business." Ray Raymond, for the Hollywood Reporter.

Social Networks: Viacom throws social networks into Flux
Unable to match the pure social power of MySpace or Facebook -- no matter how many Virtual Laguna Beaches it launches -- Viacom is taking the next leap in the networking frontier. Instead of hosting, it's getting all Matrixy and becoming the network. Its Flux platform is sort of like Microsoft's PassPort or Google Checkout -- a universal profile and set of user features that will appear across Viacom's sites and any interested third parties. A smarter move considering we're all sick of remembering multiple logins, but when will we finally reach social network saturation?

Online Video: World shocked, shocked by Sony's download move
OMG! Sony is challenging Apple to a video-download service duel! Howard Stringer, Sony's CEO, has a novel plan to use the PlayStation 3 as a trojan horse into the living rooms of America -- supplanting the struggling Apple TV. Please. The only thing shocking about Sony's service is that it took the company this long to sort things out. And that's not particularly shocking, since this is Sony we're talking about -- the conglomerate that couldn't coordinate its way out of a paper bag. The surprise is not that Sony has a video-download service in the works -- it's that Sony management feels confident enough about the effort to spoon-feed a story to the Wall Street Journal about it. Here's the back story that the Journal didn't bother to provide.When Microsoft announced its Xbox Live Marketplace for the Xbox 360, which offers television and movie downloads, last November, it was only a matter of time until Sony felt compelled to offer a similar service for its PlayStation3. As a...

Microsoft: On the Xbox, Linux is a dirty word
Microsoft, apparently sick of taking guff from Windows haters, has banned users of Xbox Live, the Xbox 360 videogame console's online service, from setting their motto to "Linux." Apparently the company views competing operating systems -- especially dreaded open-source ones -- as "inappropriate" words. Unix is also considered too naughty for public display. Mentions of Apple, iPod, or variations of Mac OS X are, however, permissible. (Photo by zarcx)

Apple: The best PR gig in the Valley
An article in Ad Age purports to expose something that every Valley reporter has long known, but never come out and said: Apple's PR department is the biggest group of slackers to grace the tech world. What, exactly, do they do all day long? It's a mystery. For the uninitiated reporter looking to get a quote, the list of Apple PR contacts, complete with direct-dial numbers, seems heaven-sent. But don't get too excited. Every call goes straight to voicemail, like the entire PR department paid its credit card bill late and is now ducking the collection agency. If you leave a voicemail, reporters say, it more often than not disappears into the ether, never to be returned. As Ad Age points out: "if you Google 'Apple did not return calls,' you'll come up with 2.35 million hits." That claim is more than a bit sloppy. The exact phrase "Apple did not return calls" returns 3,100 hits. But still, Apple makes the rest of the Valley look like pikers when it comes to withering silence. "Google...

Layoffs: AOL considers mass firings to amass profits
Time Warner's troubled Internet unit, having resorted to me-too strategies in search, copying Google, and in portals, copying Yahoo, is now copying itself, going back to its old ways of mass layoffs. At Silicon Alley Insider, Henry Blodget crunches the numbers on various layoff scenarios. And here's the thing: It's not like AOL is losing money. Far from it. It's simply not as obscenely profitable, as, say, Google, which is adding employees as fast as AOL seems to be shedding them. A layoff of a quarter of its staff would lift AOL's profit margins from 39 percent to 52 percent, Blodget estimates. Given the constant dwindling of its Internet-access business, and the uncertain growth of its online advertising sales, cutbacks, while regrettable, seem logical. Let's just not pretend Time Warner's doing this to keep AOL alive; they're doing this to keep AOL gushing cash.

Hires: One more down at the Red Herring
Congratulations to Scott Morrison, the former editor of Red Herring's website, on escaping the troubled publication and landing a new job in the San Francisco bureau of Dow Jones. No matter what they say, Rupert Murdoch has to be a better boss than Alex Vieux, whose mismanagement is driving the once-storied tech-magazine brand into the ground. We suspected he was on to greener pastures when coworkers told us he started missing work, but an announcement on the website of the The Society of American Business Editors and Writers confirms the new position for us. And for the rest of his colleagues, too. Note to Scott, next time you switch gigs, it might be more polite to send out an internal email before your underlings find out via an industry newsletter. Or some scurrilous gossip rag.

Videogames: Double Fusion means double the ads
Nearly 7 out of 10 Americans play videogames, spending a combined $7.4 billion to feed their habit. But if the attraction of playing games was an escape from nonstop marketing in the real world, they're in for a disappointment. Greedy advertisers want a piece of the action and are expected to drive in-game advertising sales up to $852 million by 2011, according to ABI Research. Startup Double Fusion plans to help spike the numbers by allowing developers to add ads to games without hardcoding spots during development. For instance, ads served in Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas appear on virtual billboard kiosks -- the kind you'd run into in a mall -- that held fake ads themed to the game's environment. Even after Ubisoft launched its in-game advertising service early this year, real ads could only appear in the kiosks. With Double Fusion's software, Ubisoft would be able to create spots on the fly. Billboards could appear on any surface. If it works, Double Fusion has...

San Francisco: Sonic.net tries mob rule for municipal Wi-Fi
With San Francisco's municipal Wi-Fi program stuck in purgatory thanks to EarthLink's budget concerns, Internet service provider Sonic.net aims to be the city's wireless savior. Not that legions of dirty hippy leechers deserve free Wi-Fi. Nonetheless, Sonic says customers can obtain a subsidized wireless mesh router and hook it up to a DSL line. Why? To create a network of wireless access points. Web surfers browsing from the wireless network will be served Google ads to subsidize their surfing. Sonic will implement a profit-sharing plan that will credit their customers' accounts. Sounds like both a cheap attempt to turn EarthLink's woes into free PR, and a blatant ripoff of Fon's business model. More power to Sonic. A plan so crass can't help but work.

Marcy Simon: Googlephone PR in the hands of CEO's girlfriend
Marcy Simon, Valleywag has learned, doesn't just have a coveted desk and a phone line in Google's cramped New York offices. She also has a seemingly hot assignment: PR for the yet-to-be-launched Googlephone. All this, simply for serving as married Google CEO Eric Schmidt's piece on the side? Yes, that's right: Schmidt's girlfriend, despite having no experience in wireless or telecom, is handling the launch of one of Google's most-whispered-about initiatives. Why the Duchess of West Chelsea, as Valleywag has dubbed Simon, is handling this, and not say, David Krane, Google's telecom-savvy director of corporate communications, is telling about both Schmidt's character and the fate of the phone project.I've written before that Google will not come out with its own phone model, as Apple has done. And indeed, the need for any Googlephone escapes me; Google should be building services that work on any phone, no matter who makes it or what OS it runs. At best, the Googlephone project,...

Silicon Valley Tool: Stan Oleynick sets a record for Internet snake-oil sales
Stan Oleynick, the smug guy pictured here, wants to sell his name to raise capital for his new startup. The highest bidder will win the chance to rename the 23-year-old and a 10 percent stake of the entrepreneur's planned "revolutionary" venture. To sweeten the pot, Stan promises to break a world record, thereby getting into the Guinness Book of World Records, where his sponsored name will live on forever -- or until someone else beats the former Oleynick's record by eating more hotdogs in an hour or whatever. Sound suspicious? We thought so, too. And it turns out this is just the latest of Oleynick's self-promotional stunts.Two years ago, he created this breathless PR release touting milliondollarstate.com, a Million Dollar Homepage copycat. Oleynick, though, charged $100 per "virtual acre" instead of $1 per pixel, in a precursor to today's Weblo scheme. Sounds like Oleynick is the type of guy to sell you a bridge, doesn't it? Fun fact, he's done that, too! (Musical bridges,...

Loser-generated Content: Are you a self-righteous, humorless hippie ...
Are you a self-righteous, humorless hippie with no sense of what is socially acceptable? Have design skills? PETA wants you to create its new blog advertising campaign. [BlogAds]

Stats: Almost a quarter of senior executives, including ...
Almost a quarter of senior executives, including CEOs and CFOs, admit to playing casual flash games while at work says videogame publisher PopCap. [Gamasutra]

Vint Cerf: Father of the Internet hates streaming video, too
Vint Cerf, founding father of the Internet and Google's underemployed Net evangelist, has a theory: The Internet will kill the television set. The problem is that online-video initiatives are focused on streaming media. Cerf proposes a shift towards downloadable, Internet-delivered content -- called "IPTV," after the Internet Protocol Cerf helped invent. IPTV would work more on the TiVo model of record now, watch later. According to him, it would then be possible to serve content faster than real-time -- it would take 16 seconds to download an hour's worth of video on a 1 gigabit-per-second connection -- which would eliminate strain on service providers and placate consumers seeking videos without jagged images and distorted sound. Or we could all just use BitTorrent.

Digital Music: "The iPod will be obsolete," says Rick Rubin, ...
"The iPod will be obsolete," says Rick Rubin, co-head of Columbia Records. In order to combat file sharing, the recording industry needs to operate on a subscription model, he says: "You'd pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you'd like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television," he explains. Oh, you mean already extant services like Napster, Rhapsody, or Yahoo Music? [The New York Times]

Feuds: The Apple-NBC Universal spat continues. Shortly ...
The Apple-NBC Universal spat continues. Shortly after NBC announced it wouldn't renew its iTunes contract, Apple decided to kick the upcoming NBC season off its digital shelves. In a counterstrike, NBC has announced its shows will appear on Amazon Unbox as soon as next week. Burnnnnn. [Ars Technica]

Media: Time Inc. sends secret ninja "kill teams" to shut down Business 2.0
We'd already heard that the October issue of Business 2.0 would be the last one published by Time Inc.; now, the New York Times reports on the Bits blog that it will be the last one, period. Talks with Mansueto Ventures, publisher of Fast Company and Inc., apparently failed; as we predicted, Time Inc. did not want to strengthen a competitor. A few staffers will join Fortune and Fortune Small Business. The rest will fall victim to what Bits colorfully calls "kill teams." This being Time Inc., don't expect black-suited corporate operatives. Or anything the least bit colorful. Instead, the teams will likely kill with kindness -- and boredom. Time Inc.'s HR presentations -- some of which, I should disclose, I sat through as a Business 2.0 employee -- are legendary as cures for insomnia.

Acquisitions: Yahoo is spending $300 million in cold, hard ...
Yahoo is spending $300 million in cold, hard cash to buy BlueLithium, an ad-targeting startup. If the rumors we hear are true, founder Gurbaksh Chahal, who's not sticking around for long after the acquisition, will find ways of spending that. [PaidContent]

Clips: HBO buys a Second Life movie
The Internet just imploded: HBO, television's supposed savior, has paid "six figures" for the rights to a Second Life "documentary" titled "My Second Life: The Video Diaries of Molotov Alva." For the uninitiated, machinima, short films recorded entirely within the game world, is a rather popular genre among the videogaming set and usually parodies of the originating property. The most famous machinima series is the five-season long Red Vs Blue, which is based on, and in, Bungie's Halo 2. Apparently HBO hopes to cash in on the virtual world/machinima hype with My Second Life. The short segments star Molotov Alva, a dude who disappears from his first life and winds up recording video diaries in his second one in an attempt to figure out how he wound up there. Sounds like most Second Life users I know. I'm always wondering what happened to their actual first lives, too.

Palm: The folly of Jeff Hawkins
For years now, Palm cofounder Jeff Hawkins has been promising his company will come up with "a new product category" -- some leap of the imagination, akin to the original PalmPilot handheld organizer, that will define an entirely new submarket of gadgets. The Treo smartphone was, genuinely, such an advance. And the way Hawkins talked up the Foleo, the lightweight, underpowered Linux laptop he revealed at the D: All Things Digital conference earlier this year, you'd have thought it, too, was a real breakthrough. Hawkins may have fooled himself, but he fooled no one else, including, at long last, Palm's own management. Palm is taking a $10 million charge against earnings to cancel the development of Foleo -- and this on the eve of its release.Palm CEO Ed Colligan, a longtime associate of Hawkins, blogged the news yesterday, less than two weeks after Engadget editor-in-chief demanded the Foleo's cancellation -- a screed for which Colligan, masochistically thanked Rojas. (I'm not...

Palm: Remembering the Foleo
Were you actually looking forward to the release of the Foleo, Palm's underpowered Linux laptop meant to be a companion to its Treo smartphones? Crushed that it was cancelled? Relive the Foleo's brief glory days thanks to this clip of Jeff Hawkins demonstrating the device on AllThingsD.com.

Confirmed: A Google spokesperson obliquely concedes, ...
A Google spokesperson obliquely concedes, in a follow-up item on Valleywag's scoop, that Marcy Simon, CEO Eric Schmidt's gal pal, is working as a consultant at the company. [New York Post]

Venture Capital: Google goes from sugar daddy to supplicant
How quickly things change. In late 2005, Google's Chris Sacca bragged to Business 2.0 about how the company was buying young startups outright, snatching them out of the hands of venture capitalists. Unsurprisingly for a Sacca-led initiative, that approach has seemingly faltered. Now, BusinessWeek writes, Google is seeking to make venture investments of its own. BusinessWeek spins it as a new rivaly for Google -- but it's actually a comedown. Once able to buy a startup in toto, and absorb its engineering talent into its ceaselessly expanding ranks, Google must now settle for a piece of the action. It's also a sign of the expanding pool of venture-capital cash, the increasing ambitions of entrepreneurs, and the inflating value of tech stocks. Why take a Google buyout offer now, when you can entertain dreams of an IPO?

Real Estate: Make room for Marcy Simon! Google is expanding ...
Make room for Marcy Simon! Google is expanding its offices in West Chelsea, taking space in the Chelsea Market building across the street from its current digs. [New York Observer]

Apple: The fanboys are amazed by Apple's completely ...
The fanboys are amazed by Apple's completely new iPod lineup. Wall Street? Not so much. Apple shares are down almost 3 percent. [Yahoo Finance]

Your Privacy Is An Illusion: Big Brother is driving cabs off the road in New York
How typical of Gawker to report on a story -- in this case, the New York taxi strike -- and obliviously miss the tech angle. Why are some New York City taxi drivers going on strike? Why, they're protesting a requirement that cabs be outfitted with GPS transponders. The GPS devices, some contend, could be used to track drivers' movements. Corporate employees endure similar snooping of their every move on the Web, thanks to email-scanning and Web-tracking software installed by their overlords -- and yet you don't see them going on strike. Our guess is that access to porn and Flash games isn't as important to tech workers as the threat of vehicle tracking is to cabdrivers. Whatever. If this means that we'll actually be able to get a cab in Brooklyn, we say track those bastards down to the last foot. (Photo by sposnick)

Surly Adopter: Apple slashes iPhone prices
Did you rush out and buy an iPhone the moment they went on sale? Then there's a word for you: SUCKER. After rolling out a new line of iPods, including touchscreen models that do everything an iPhone does but make calls, Apple has dropped the price on the most expensive iPhone to $399, a 33-percent slashing. Of course, Apple's iPhone is competing with heavily subsidized cell-phone models, which rapidly drop in price after soaking the early adopters for everything they're worth. It should come as no surprise to the technically adept, gadget-lusting geeks who splashed out for an iPhone early on. We just hope that paying $200 for two months of insufferable smugness was worth it.

Great Moments In Pr: Google kicks out the nerd media
Google has summarily disinvited Dan Frommer, editor at New York-based tech blog Silicon Alley Insider, from its October 3 press soiree. The excuse? A Google spokesperson told him that "this event is very much consumer-focused and based on your coverage, the content does not seem aligned with your topic area." As if Google itself fits in better with the content produced by invited guests W and Women's Wear Daily? Right. Sounds like an insecure college freshman, trying to associate with the sorority girls and cut ties from longtime nerd friends, lest she seem uncool by association. Watch out, though, Google PR. You think by inviting people from "consumer-focused" women's magazines, you're going to avoid hard tech questions and be able to give them the cutesy party line about the greatness of Google? It's not going to work that way. You're just opening yourself up to questions about Eric Schmidt's gal pal Marcy Simon. These magazines don't know much about tech, but they sure do...

Conflicts Of Interest: Arrogant Googlers tempt the gods
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. I'm not sure if Euripides, the Greek playwright, had Google's management team in mind when he wrote that, but it sure fits. Google, despite the occasional lost deal, billion-dollar lawsuit, and PR black eye, continues to succeed spectacularly as a business. "Somehow they continue shitting more money than you or i could realistically comprehend," writes one Valleywag reader. Indeed. And that money is driving the people who run Google insane. CEO Eric Schmidt's cosseting of girlfriend Marcy Simon with a plum PR job is just the latest, most blatant sign of that madness.When Google went public, it set up a two-class system of shares, ensuring that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, not Wall Street, would rule the company. Intended to shield the company from short-term pressures to goose earnings at the expense of long-term growth, this structure has encouraged a tendency to insular thinking that, in turn, has lead to arrogance....

Great Moments In Journalism: AllThingsD blogger John Paczkowzki, he of ...
AllThingsD blogger John Paczkowzki, he of the hypnotic eyebrows, outdid the rest of the geek press corps at today's Apple iPod event. While others used souped-up EVDO-equipped laptops, Paczkowzki liveblogged the event entirely on his now-outdated, overpriced iPhone. [AllThingsD]

IPhone: Add another layer of losers to Apple's iPhone ...
Add another layer of losers to Apple's iPhone price reduction announcement -- the hordes of eBay resellers trying to profit from the no longer quite so divine Jesusphone. [eBay]

Venture Capital: Kleiner searches for a little Google magic
VC blogger Paul Kedrosky points out that famed venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has revamped its website to highlight a search box squarely on its front page. This, of course, a mere eight years after it invested in Google. Kedrosky notes that there are no results returned for "business plan" -- good luck searching your way into Kleiner's portfolio -- but we noticed something else that struck us as amusing. While searching for mentions of Kleiner partner John Doerr's infamous, tear-drenched appearance at this year's TED conference, the result was topped off with a sponsored ad for Ted, United Airlines' low-cost carrier. Well, that's one way to boost the value of Kleiner's Google holdings.

Your Privacy Is An Illusion: Facebook gets greedy for traffic
It was inevitable the moment Facebook let any old Internet user sign up to stalk friends, acquaintances and strangers. The social network is now opening up its walled garden to the masses -- and the Web. Unregistered guests will be able to search through limited profiles from the site's homepage, and soon Google and other search engines will start indexing the site. A sensible ploy by Facebook, of course, to boost traffic by getting your second cousins, great grandmother, and neighborhood bully onto Facebook's site, without the bother of registration. Facebook is giving its users a month to set their privacy settings and limit their ability to be found. You may be able to control what unwelcome visitors see, but that doesn't make them any more welcome.

Ipo: Sony's continued financial woes -- a projected ...
Sony's continued financial woes -- a projected loss of $630 million in its fiscal fourth quarter -- have led it to offer up Japanese insurance subsidary Sony Financial as a sacrificial lamb. It's selling off 33 percent of the company in an initial public offering on October 1, and will use the proceeds to fund its electronics and gaming divisions. Wait: Why was Sony in the insurance business in the first place? [Bloomberg]

Search: Facebook's threat to people search
There are two possible side effects to Facebook's decision to let just anyone traipse through its student-union grounds. Since Facebook is easily one of the largest repositories of personal information, it creates a one-stop shop for such data. This means, hopefully, that people-search startups like Spock and the rest will be kicked to the curb, as users pass them up for Facebook's superior interface. Or, in another scenario, Facebook's move could be adding fuel to the fire. Next thing we know, Spock will be rolling our Facebook networks, complete with information about our school, work, and personal interests, into its profiles. And unlike Facebook, there's no control over what gets added to your Spock profile.

Online Advertising: Electronic Arts is jumping into the ad-supported ...
Electronic Arts is jumping into the ad-supported videogame field with a new title called Game Show. The free sports-trivia game is launching in October. Videogame publishers have been experimenting with the free-to-play business model as an alternative to the traditional model of charging for games, but EA's move is one of the biggest yet. [GameDaily Biz]

Google China: Peeking inside Google China
The San Francisco Chronicle has another look into Google's China offices. The pictures come from inside the Googleplex Zhongguancun (say that five times fast -- hint, the "c" is pronounced "ts"). Most importantly, there's a rundown of a typical lunch menu -- seafood pizza, pumpkin risotto, braised mushroom with bamboo and steamed crab. The most interesting takeaway? Google China's head, the underemployed, noncompeting Kai-Fu Lee, has his workspace on the traditionally unlucky fourth floor, though he pooh-poohs any talk of bad luck. "We don't believe in superstition." Good for you, Kai-Fu. We've always thought that "don't be evil" was an old engineer's tale, too.

Media: A turnabout for Business 2.0's former boss
Time Inc. has officially announced Business 2.0's closure in an internal memo obtained by Jossip. In it, Time Inc. executive John Squires explains that folding in some of Business 2.0's staff into Fortune will give it "the largest San Francisco bureau of any major business publication." The Wall Street Journal bureau will still be twice its size, but never mind -- we assume Squires meant "magazine." No, what's interesting in the memo is what's not said.Former B2 editor Josh Quittner, left, will get the title of executive editor, and Squires gives props to his tech chops in the memo. But Squires doesn't mention that as such, Quittner will be outranked by his predecessor, Jim Aley, right, who departed B2 abruptly in 2002 to rejoin Fortune after Quittner arrived to take over the magazine. From what we hear, Aley, an assistant managing editor and the director of Fortune's technology coverage will be the de facto boss of the tech-focused bureau, not Quittner. (Full disclosure:...

Loser-generated Content: A new Wikipedia tool redefines trust
We love Cal Tech graduate student Virgil Griffith's Wikipedia Scanner -- a tool that has revealed to the public what we've always known: That people working at corporations, government agencies, and mass media outlets are duplicitous bastards. For instance, a State Farm employee buried commentary on its Katrina policy, a Fox News reporter erased aggregated battery charge, and someone at the Israeli Embassy sorted out the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to his satisfaction. It's certainly good gossip to learn who's blotted out petty grievances, but you have to know what you're looking for. And therein lies the problem with Wikipedia Scanner.You likely already suspect the worst from, say, Wal-Mart and just want to know what its employees may have sanitized -- but you don't question any other contributors to the page, who may or may not be trustworthy. That leads to what persnickety researchers call an "observational bias." Which is why University of California at Santa Cruz professor...

Your Privacy Is An Illusion: Stern man in cheap wig wants your DNA
Lord Justice Sedley, pictured here looking prim, has ruled that every person living in or visiting the United Kingdom ought to submit his or her DNA to a nationwide criminal database, to offset the presumed bias against "ethnic minorities" who make up the bulk of the existing database. Apparently, this guy is a high-ranking official in the United Kingdom's judicial offices, though you wouldn't guess that based on the ill-fitting getup. (Seriously, polyester hair is so ugh.) Note: An unnamed Valleywag colleague originally misread his name as Smedley, not Sedley. We are all in agreement that the Lord Justice should look into changing his surname for our greater amusement. He can skip the DNA sample, though.

Format Wars: Make discs, not war, Sony says
Extending an olive branch in the midst of the high-definition movie-format wars, Sony has cordially invited HD-DVD rivals Microsoft and Toshiba to join the Blu-ray Disc Association. It is pretending HD-DVD backers didn't just shell out a ton of cash to get Paramount (and Michael Bay) on board.

Larry And Sergey: Google boys' jet sighted at Moffett Field?
We haven't heard much about the Google Jet, lately -- the converted 767 airline that serves as Larry Page and Sergey Brin's party palace in the sky. But we were intrigued by this tip: "Could have sworn I saw the Google Jet yesterday sitting on the tarmac at Moffett Field at about 6:30 p.m. How convenient for the boys!" Convenient, indeed, since Moffett Field is practically adjacent to Google's Mountain View headquarters. But last we checked, the airport was owned by the government and run by NASA, and not, as far as we're aware, available for private use. Google, however, has had a deal since 2005 to develop offices and housing at the NASA site. Could landing rights for Page's and Brin's private jet be part of the deal?

IPod: My internal monologue as I agonize over which new iPod to buy
Oh neat oh neat oh HOLY CRAP! Wait, really? I didn't expect that. The iPod touch looks pretty sweet, but won't I just feel stupid when I have to pull out my other phone? I'm all "whee, I'm surfing the Internet in a cafe on my iPod," or I'm all listening to music, and then ring, there's my phone, just like always, only this time I also have a big-ass minicomputer in my pocket. And there's no camera. Actually this looks like a raw deal. Okay, how about the iPhone? What's new there? Hrm. Not much, I guess.I mean, there'll be a new one next year so I might as well still wait. Man, at least I'm not one of those dudes who paid six hundred bucks for it this summer. Gotta suck to be them right now. Especially when they get their 130-page phone bill. Okay, how about the iPod classic?Looks kinda ... pudgy.Dang, it's just a slightly neater version of the last one, except ... yeah, it looks like it has baby fat. Man, why you even got to do a thing? They could have made it all svelte like...

Wireless: Verizon doesn't like to share, suing FCC
All this talk of auctioning and the 700mhz spectrum has thrown Verizon into a tiff. It's apparently none too happy that Google and other interested parties may soon have access to the airwaves once analog television broadcasts are discontinued in early 2009. So the telecom is suing the Federal Communications Commission on the grounds that its open-access rules -- that the auctioned bands be made compatible with any device -- are illegal. Sounds like its afraid of some friendly competition -- the freed 700Mhz band could be used for anything from new wireless phone to broadband service. (Photo by majorvols)

: Care for a frypod with that shake?
What red-blooded American child wouldn't rather have nice, healthy apple slices in a frybox than the warm, salty bits of FAT that they're used to? Burger King, doing its best to be a good corporate citizen and fight the good fight against obesity, is offering this new snack in a "frypod." Better question: which marketing consultant decided that evoking "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" in a snack would make it more appealing?

Stats: Whose favorite Internet past-time ISN'T ...
Whose favorite Internet past-time ISN'T watching YouTube? Analytics firm comScore says three out of every four Web surfers are watching online video, consuming an average of three hours a month, as of July. [PaidContent]