Google must divulge YouTube log: BBC

Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled.

The ruling comes as part of Google's legal battle with Viacom over allegations of copyright infringement.

Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called the ruling a "set-back to privacy rights".

The viewing log, which will be handed to Viacom, contains the log-in ID of users, the computer IP address (online identifier) and video clip details.

While the legal battle between the two firms is being contested in the US, it is thought the ruling will apply to YouTube users and their viewing habits everywhere.

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Free speech is thorny online: CNN

NEW YORK (AP) -- Rant all you want in a public park. A police officer generally won't eject you for your remarks alone, however unpopular or provocative.

Say it on the Internet, and you'll find that free speech and other constitutional rights are anything but guaranteed.

Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that's controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.

The governmental role that companies play online is taking on greater importance as their services -- from online hangouts to virtual repositories of photos and video -- become more central to public discourse around the world. It's a fallout of the Internet's market-driven growth, but possible remedies, including government regulation, can be worse than the symptoms.

Dutch photographer Maarten Dors met the limits of free speech at Yahoo Inc.'s photo-sharing service, Flickr, when he posted an image of an early-adolescent boy with disheveled hair and a ragged T-shirt, staring blankly with a lit cigarette in his mouth.

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Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon: The three survivors: Economist

Jun 19th 2008 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition
Illustration by David Simonds
What the diverging fates of Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon say about the internet

AND so Yahoo! survives. The internet company—which, at the age of 14, is one of the oldest—appears in the end to have rebuffed Microsoft, the software Goliath that wanted to buy it. It has done so, in part, by surrendering to Google, the younger internet company that is its main rival. In a vague deal apparently designed to confuse antitrust regulators, Yahoo! is letting Google, the biggest force in web-search advertising, place text ads next to some of Yahoo!'s own search results. Google thus controls some or all of the ads on all the big search engines except Microsoft's. Yahoo! lives, but on the web's equivalent of life support.

Yahoo!'s descent, first gradual then sudden, during this decade marks a surprising reversal of the fates of the only three big internet firms to have survived since the web's earliest days. Back in 1994 Jerry Yang and David Filo, truant PhD students at Stanford, started to publish a list, eventually named Yahoo!, of links to cool destinations on the nascent web. Around the same time, Jeff Bezos was writing his business plan for a website, soon to be called Amazon, for selling books online. The following year, Pierre Omidyar, a French-born Iranian-American, put an auction site on the web that would become eBay.

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As Microsoft Walks Away,Yahoo Enters Google Ad Pact: WSJ

Moves May Prompt
Industry Scramble,
Regulator Scrutiny
By MATTHEW KARNITSCHNIG and JESSICA E. VASCELLARO
June 13, 2008; Page B1

Microsoft Corp. abandoned its pursuit of Yahoo Inc., opening the way for Yahoo to complete a search-advertising pact with rival Google Inc. that pits the industry's two biggest forces against Microsoft.

Microsoft told Yahoo that it was no longer interested in pursuing a takeover, even at the $33 a share it offered for the Internet company last month. That price would have valued Yahoo at nearly $50 billion.

Microsoft also unsuccessfully floated an alternative proposal to acquire Yahoo's search business. It isn't clear how Microsoft valued the business, but as part of that deal, Microsoft said it was prepared to acquire an additional 16% of Yahoo for $35 a share, or about $7.73 billion, according to people familiar with the situation.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: As Microsoft Walks Away,Yahoo Enters Google Ad Pact: WSJ

Down on the server farm: Economist

May 22nd 2008 | SEATTLE

From The Economist print edition

The real-world implications of the rise of internet computing

EVEN when the sky is blue over Quincy, clouds hang in the air. The small town in the centre of the state of Washington is home to half a dozen huge warehouses that power the global “computing clouds” run by internet companies such as Yahoo! and Microsoft. The size of several football pitches, these data centres are filled with thousands of powerful computers and storage devices and are hooked up to the internet via fast fibre-optic links.

Yet even more intriguing than the buildings' size is their location. Quincy is literally in the middle of nowhere, three hours' drive from the nearest big city, Seattle. But it turns out to be a perfect location for data centres. As computing becomes a utility, with services that can be consumed from everywhere and on any device, ever more thought is being put into where to put the infrastructure it needs...

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Web 2.0 debates internet's future: BBC

By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

Opening up internet programming was a central theme of Web 2.0

San Francisco's Web 2.0 Expo conference brought together thousands of people responsible for crafting the future direction of the internet, and the world of applications - or apps - was front and centre.

Everyone from Microsoft to Yahoo to MySpace was on a mission to woo developers to create exciting applications for their devices.

Jennifer Pahlka of Techweb, one of the conference's co-chairs, said the carrot these big Silicon Valley companies were dangling to entice developers to get involved was that of openness and allowing people to devise programmes without constraints.

"Yahoo was talking about opening up advertising platforms, Mozilla was talking about opening up the mobile web and John Zittrain from Oxford University was talking about openness to drive innovation and creativity so we don't go into this closed system where every application has to be approved by someone else," said Ms Pahlka.

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