The news that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is joining Apple's board of directors has Silicon Valley afroth with rumors. Schmidt used to work at Sun Microsystems -- so could he be helping to broker an acquisition of Sun by Apple, as tech pundit John Dvorak suggests?

ZDNet's Dan Farber dismisses the idea as "pretzel logic": Google did a distribution deal with Sun recently, its CEO joins Apple's board -- Sun + Google, Google + Apple, therefore Sun + Apple? The math hardly stands up.

It helps to remember that rumors of an Apple-Sun deal are almost as old as the companies themselves. According to Sun co-founder Bill Joy, Ars Technica reported back in January, Sun and Apple almost joined forces six times. The iconoclastic proto-blog Suck.com mused on such a scenario ten years ago -- though at that point, Sun, with a Java-inflated market cap, would have been the acquirer.

Image courtesy of Suck.com

We thought we'd seen all kinds of click-fraud lawsuits, but this one takes the cake: Management consultant Theresa Bradley has sued Google for, among other things, wasting her time, eWeek's Google Watch blog reports. Bradley's $250,000 lawsuit alleges that her staff spent 100 hours placing Google AdSense ads on Bradley's Brava Corporation website, only to have Google remove them, alleging that Bradley clicked on her own ads in violation of the AdSense user agreement. (For a website's publisher to click on one's own ads is widely considered "click fraud," which is why online-advertising distributors like Google and Yahoo forbid it.)

But Bradley contends that she only clicked on the ads to verify that they weren't for competing products. Google promises to remove such competitive ads on request. And it might seem she has a point there: Without clicking on them, how else would she know whether they're for competing products? Except for one thing... AdSense has a preview tool that lets you see ads' destination websites without actually clicking them on your live site. Nice try, Bradley.

Another thing that seems curious about Bradley's lawsuit, notes Jennifer Slegg on JenSense, is that Bradley's website only has 27 pages. So Bradley's suing Google for her staff having spent roughly four hours per page to put AdSense on her site. The Browser has implemented AdSense before, and it takes all of a minute per page, tops. We have to wonder: Can Google countersue Bradley for being a complete dolt?

Mark Warner, the popular former governor of Virginia and oft-mentioned 2008 Democratic presidential candidate, is about to become the "first American political figure to hold an event in the virtual world," according to the website of his PAC,, Forward Together. Warner will be interviewed at 3:30 p.m. EST today in Second Life, the wildly popular online role playing game, by Wagner James Au, a Second Life blogger who has seen just about everything the virtual world can offer.

"But it's still a bit vertiginous," writes Au, "to be in-world standing there in front of the avatar of a man that leading Democratic Party financier Chris Korge ... pronounced 'the one to watch as an outsider in [the 2008] race.'" And Au is even awed by Warner's online physique: "Mark Warner's avatar seems presidential, too--tall, stern, and statesman-like."

Pols going virtual obviously brings new meaning to Tip O'Neill's famous maxim about all politics being local, not to mention taking the message to the "streets." It also would seem to open up a whole new lucrative domain for political consultants: Someone has to design those avatars and sort out where and when candidates should appear, virtually. None of this, however, will surprise the private sector, which, as usual, got there long before Washington. A quick consult of Second Life's Wikipedia page reveals that at least ten businesses have already "operated inside" Second Life, including Adidas, MTV, and, yes, the American Cancer Society.

Photo courtesy of New World Notes

The FBI showed off their Investigative Data Warehouse, a massive antiterror database, to reporters yesterday in Washington. They were hoping, says the Washington Post, "to address criticism that its technology was failing and outdated as the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks nears." But some techies were quick to raise concerns, according to the Post. The system apparently has 659 million records, "culled from more than 50 FBI and other government agency sources," and can do what used to take over 32 thousand hours in less than 30 minutes.

Those numbers are impressive, but they make David Sobel, senior council for the Electronic Freedom Foundation, nervous. Sobel told the Post that "the Federal Register has no record of the creation of such a system, a basic requirement of the Privacy Act," and also expressed concern that "the system includes 250 million airline passenger records, stored permanently."

Techdirt, for its part, noted that big databases are inherently unmanageable, recalling a recent story of British workers hacking into government databases to check out friends' data. "With any of these big databases, it's only a matter of time before that data is abused in some manner -- no matter how carefully government officials claim that the data is only used for legitimate reasons."

Absolutely right, say Techdirt's readers. "Even small databases that refer to personal 'soft' data require huge amounts of continual tidying up to correct inaccuracies, out-of-date or subsequently disproved hypotheses and need strong editorial control," comments one. "Who exerts editorial control in a national mutli-agency setting, when the provenenace and quality of the data is unsure? Answer: No one."

What do you think? Is the FBI's antiterror database a risk to our privacy?

Google has taken the next step in its grand plan to bring the world's books online: Web users can now download the full text of "public domain" works as a PDF to their desktops. "Until now," notes The Guardian, "the search engine giant only allowed people to read the...books online." Now, however, Shakespeare's Macbeth, for example, in the form of a 4.2 megabyte PDF, is just one click away. And it comes with this helpful explanation from Google: "This is a digital copy of a book that was preserved for generations on library shelves before it was carefully scanned by Google as part of a project to make the world’s books discoverable online. It has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the book to enter the public domain."

That may be true for out-of-copyright books, but that hasn't calmed the nerves of certain publishers who are still suing the search engine. The issues are subtle, but chief among them is Google's related effort to allow full text searching of all books, including those that are still under copyright. While Google is not actually allowing downloads - or even revealing the full text - of copyrighted books, they are creating and using a searchable index of the material, which some publishers feel is unacceptable. "This is a battle over "a legal doctrine known as 'fair use,'" CNNMoney reported months ago, "which allows the use of copyrighted material for certain purposes, including teaching, research and news reporting."

Very likely this one will spend years in the courts. In the meantime, as one character says to the King in All's Well That Ends Well, "There's honour in the theft."

Here's a new twist on high-tech crime. When Web designer Ben Clemens' phone was stolen, he cancelled the service and thought that was the end of it. But software that he'd installed on the phone kept uploading photos taken by a stranger -- presumably the thief, or someone else who'd obtained the phone after it was stolen -- to Clemens' Flickr account. At first, Clemens thought about disabling the uploading software, but concluded that the photos were so cool that he'd let the uploading continue -- which it did for a while until it abruptly stopped. On Digg, posters went into full-on CSI mode, using clues from the photos to help discern where the phone might be located.

While Clemens seems to enjoy the serendipity of the incident, this strikes the Browser as a startup business plan waiting to happen: software that automatically starts taking pictures as soon as you report that your camera's been stolen. In Manteca, Calif., cameraphones are already being used to fight vandalism, but using cell phones to prevent cell-phone theft seems like a more logical move.

The New York Times reports that the Indian state of Kerala has announced it will attempt to migrate all public offices away from Microsoft software: "Naturally, being a democratic and progressive government, we want to encourage the spread of free software," said Kerala's education minister to the Times. Kerala thus becomes the latest government to go activist on the software front, incongruously following the lead of Massachussets. The news has provoked heated debate on Slashdot. Anticipating the pro-Microsoft response, one open-source advocate comments, tongue-in-cheek: "Remember, when downloading free software, you're downloading communism." To which another -- clearly in the minority -- responds with even more sarcasm: "Let's encourage all schools to not teach with Microsoft products... That way, when you graduate - you won't be prepared for the workforce, where most companies do use Microsoft."

Slashdot wars aside, the trend is obviously a concern for Redmond. But commenting in PC Magazine, John Dvorak is quick to dismiss the notion that Microsoft is in for an early death: "I suspect that in five years I'll be hearing once more how Microsoft Office is doomed! Hah!"

Way back when, the Well was known as the "world's most influential online community," with futurists, journalists, and Internet types hanging out in its virtual halls. But these days, the Well seems to have trouble getting its phone calls returned. When Comcast started filtering out e-mail from Well members, according to the San Jose Mercury News, Well communities director Gail Williams wasn't able to get through to a technician to explain why the site was blocked until she contacted Comcast PR.

Comcast later said it had detected spam coming from Well.com e-mail addresses, so it shut down the e-mails. By Tuesday afternoon, Well e-mails were still being blocked, and on Wednesday morning, Well's status page didn't offer any updates on the situation. Yahoo employee and Well customer Jeffrey McManus says that this incident shows Comcast is "not the sharpest tool in the shed" and suggests Comcast broadband customers switch to another Internet service provider.

What do you think? Was Comcast in its rights to block Well e-mail?

When Google launched Google Calendar in April, the founders of Kiko, a Cambridge-based web calendar startup, knew the handwriting was on the wall. A week ago, Kiko put itself up for sale on eBay. Soon enough, a deal was struck.

"What a deal," writes Caroline McCarthy on the CNET blog. "An eBay user known as 'powerjoe1998' has scooped up Web 2.0 calendar site Kiko for $258,100 in an auction that ended Saturday." Digital Micro-Markets describes the cash as a "consolation prize" for the Kiko execs, who came out of Paul Graham's startup incubator "YCombinator." But at least one seemed relatively pleased by the outcome. On the Kiko blog, co-founder Emmet Shear writes, "I think this venture has proven that auctioning off intellectual property assets is a legitimate revenue route for a company to take. Hopefully others will follow us in this, because so many valuable pieces of software wind up simply abandoned instead."

Well, Shear wasn't the only one to have the idea -- or even the only one this month. In fact, this approach seems to be the newest twist on exit strategies for flailing Internet companies. "A little known, very early-stage Pasadena-based startup, Yoosi.com, has turned to the internet marketplace eBay to try to raise money for the firm's founding team," reported SocalTech on August 9. Yoosi eventually went for a mere five grand, but The Browser senses a trend -- and one that can only be good for eBay. Playing small-scale investment banker could be lucrative for the auction giant, which is always in search of new revenue streams. Who needs Google ads when you've got fee income from brokering M&A deals?

You can't buy a latte in San Francisco or Mountain View without overhearing some tedious conversation about RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, and how the technology for distributing blog posts and news headlines is going to change the world.

Well, here's a reality check: Dead2.0 points to recent research that shows that only 1 in 10 people have even heard of RSS, and a mere 2 percent actually use it. That's a pretty lousy adoption rate for a technology which dates back to 1999. (A wag on Wikipedia notes in RSS's entry that even older "push" technology, similar to RSS in concept, introduced in the mid-'90s by once-hot startups like Backweb and PointCast "probably had a comparable marketshare to RSS today.")

Communications consultant Ian Joyce puts the best possible spin on the numbers on his blog: "Digital technologies are an important way to reach influencers." That's marketingspeak, we think, for telling your clients to overspend on unproven media in an attempt to get buzz.

How did Amazon.com get its hands on pricing for Windows Vista, Microsoft's long-awaited new operating system? The online retailer is based in Seattle, not far from Microsoft's Redmond headquarters, so perhaps Amazon.com employees picked up word at a local coffee shop. According to Amazon, which is now taking Vista preorders, the OS will be released January 30, 2007.

However Amazon may have gotten its hands on Vista's price tag, the revelation is causing a ruckus online. A new copy of Windows Vista starts at $199, and goes up to $399 for an enhanced edition with TiVo-like digital video recorder features, notes JupiterResearch analyst Joe Wilcox on his Microsoft Monitor blog, where he pulled together prices for all of Microsoft's multiple Vista versions.

The price to purchase a new copy of Vista are pretty close to what Microsoft charged for its last version of Windows. But it's the add-on prices that have people scandalized. As more and more families have multiple PCs, Windows developer Robert McLaws observes that a family of four, each with its own PC, would have to pay $588 to upgrade to Vista. "I'm not even going to mince words here," writes McLaws. "Microsoft, you REALLY boned this one up."

Are you willing to pay the price to upgrade to Vista?

Minneapolis has spurned national heavyweight Earthlink and given the nod to a small local firm, U.S. Internet, to build out its planned municipal WiFi network. While urban WiFi has been much-discussed for more than a year - notably San Francisco's partnership with Google -- the clear move forward in Minneapolis signals that business model and technology challenges are being being worked out, and city-managed Internet access may yet become as common in American cities as municipal water and electrical services. It's also a reminder that some business, like all politics, is local. According to the Star Tribune report, "U.S. Internet would build and operate the roughly $20 million Minneapolis Wi-Fi network and would offer consumers high-speed Internet service for $20 a month," a monthly fee that would be capped for ten years.

TechNewsWorld has a round up of the municipal WiFi movement, noting that "Anaheim, Calif.; Cleveland, Ohio; Corpus Christi, Tex.; Grand Rapids, Mich.; Minneapolis, Portland, Ore.; Philadelphia; and Temecula, Calif. are working on citywide networks that residents will access at various rates." Despite much talk of bridging the "digital divide," a driving factor in the move to municpal WiFi, notes dailywireless.org, is the need for cities to upgrade their aging emergency communications networks: "the city also wants to replace its expensive cellular radio communications used by police cars with a cheaper and faster wireless data network."

When Google announced Google Apps today, a package of Web-based communications and office-productivity software, most of the coverage portrayed it as a straight-up Microsoft vs. Google fight, with Microsoft's lucrative Office suite locked in Google's sights. But in this battle between giants, there may be collateral damage to a host of startups trying to tackle the same business-software market, says venture capitalist and former Business 2.0 Magazine columnist Paul Kedrosky. For all those startups thinking of taking on Microsoft Office -- Red Herring counts 17 of them -- Kedrosky asks a simple question: "Why? What makes you think that you can do it so much better than Google can that the inevitable free Google Apps product doesn't kick your ass out of the office market?"

Well, here's a simple answer: Google's magic touch in search and advertising hasn't translated to hits in any other product category. While it's released dozens of neat little features, none of them is a runaway hit. And Web 2.0 blogger Richard McManus, who's reviewed a number of competing Web-based office-software products from Zoho, ThinkFree, Zimbra, and others, likes the startups' chances.

Will it be Microsoft, Google, or a startup that prevails in the fight to create a Web-based alternative to Microsoft Office?

Amanda Congdon, the former anchor of videoblog Rocketboom, has reappeared at Popurls, a website which automatically displays up-to-the-minute listings of the most popular news headlines, videos, photos, and podcasts on the Web. Congdon won't be back on video, though -- she's just posting her own list of favorite links. Robert Scoble broke the news, but declared it "lame" that Congdon was just posting links, not doing an Internet video broadcast.

It appears that Scoble, like many Rocketboom fans, is more than a bit obsessed with catching a glimpse of Congdon. Not only is he downcast that she won't broadcast, but he confesses that he signed up to get an alert whenever her name's mentioned anywhere in the blogosphere: "Oh, Amanda, you think I didn’t build an RSS feed for your name on Technorati?"

Now that's devotion. Or something. Well, buck up, Scoble: Congdon promises to post a proper video announcement about her new gig soon. You'll get to gaze into Congdon's disturbingly doe-like eyes again soon.

Wikimedia, the parent organization of Wikipedia, has launched a new page which maintains a running count of the most popular search queries on the online encyclopedia. Though only up for two days, the page has caught the attention of Digg readers, one of whom summarizes the list neatly: "Sex, terrorists, and anime.... Well, and some celebs." That's not far off, but the top ten also includes items currently in the news, such as the former planet Pluto and Wii, the new video gaming platform from Nintendo.

Sex aside, the use of Wikipedia as a real-time news monitoring mechanism may be the most interesting aspect of the new page. As another Digg reader remarks: "What gets me the most is that people use Wikipedia like a search engine rather than an [encyclo]pedia." Indeed, the convergence of the open-source encyclopedia and news is just another example of the trend of readers taking control of the news online.

It also reminds us of the famous words of Phil Graham, onetime publisher of the Washington Post: "So let us drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of a history that will never be completed about a world we can never understand." Nowadays, though, thanks to sites like Wikipedia, everyone's writing the rough draft.

An Internet-era successor to your bedside clock-radio was unveiled this weekend at Foo Camp, an exclusive geek conference north of San Francisco, and is getting lots of love on the blogs this morning. And perhaps with good reason. The device is called Chumby, and it looks a bit like the name suggests: unassuming and squeezable.

At its most basic, the gizmo, which will be priced around $150 when it hits the market next March, will wake you up in the morning. But instead of FM or AM radio, it can play MP3 files streamed off the Internet, or fire up a podcast, or deliver headlines from your favorite news site. As the Chumby creators explain on their web site, "What we decided to build was a really low-cost, wireless (Wi-Fi), Internet-connected device that will sit on your bedside table (or in your bathroom, or kitchen, or living room, or maybe even plug into your car somehow...) that could do a lot more than this old clock-radio (or your cell phone, if that’s what you use to wake yourself up.)"

What's capturing the collective geek imagination is that Chumby is entirely open to modifications -- not just in its software, but also in its hardware. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch got his hands on an early Chumby and explains it this way: "Don’t like something about your Chumby? Hack it. The founders not only allow it but are actively encouraging modifications... The hardware can easily be ripped out of the shell and put inside something else. The hardware itself can be hacked... Use the USB port to take a thumb drive with MP3s and build a music player widget, for example. Or a DivX player. Or use Chumby to control the air conditioning in your house. Or as a remote control for your television. Etc."

All that hacking sounds interesting, but the damn thing better work when we just need to get up in time for our flight. And one other question. We can't help but notice that the gadget's name rhymes with a certain plasticine figure from our youth. What's with the geek love affair with Gumby?

Could a terrorist use a Sony PlayStation Portable to hack into government networks? In theory, yes, writes Robert A. on PSP3D.com, a videogame-news discussion site. "The PSP has all the prerequisites" for penetrating government networks," says Robert: Wi-Fi and a decently powerful computer chip. "What's stopping terrorists and malicious individuals from sending a child, armed with a PSP ... to walk by the FBI ... building in Washington, D.C. (whose wireless networks reach the public sidewalk alongside the building), and gather data which could be used to thwart the government which protects us?"

That's the theory that Robert A. came up with after he innocently parked his car on Constitution Avenue and decided to play a round of Tekken. Sitting there with the car's lights off, he attracted an officer's attention, and soon found himself sitting on the curb, handcuffed, and interrogated by a crowd of policemen. It seemed absurd at the time, and the police eventually let him go, but reviewing the incident later, Robert concluded that the threat was real: "A portable device equipped with wireless capabilities ... is capable of anything," including hacking into government computer networks. The good -- if discomfiting -- news is that if Robert's theory is accurate, the D.C. police are aware of the threat.

What do you think? Were the police right to question someone who was just playing games?

Will Microsoft's new operating system play high-definition movies -- or won't it? The tech world has been buzzing over the news, reported by APC, among others, that some versions of Vista won't play HD-DVDs or Blu-ray discs. At the root of the issue is Hollywood's fear of high-definition movie piracy. The details get geeky, but it amounts to this: While Vista will have built-in piracy protections when it runs on new, 64-bit processors like the Intel Core Duo, older 32-bit machines are not as secure. As APC notes, "by far the majority of PCs use 32-bit processors," so this is not a minor problem.

Yesterday, Microsoft spokesman Steve Riley announced that “Any next-generation high definition content will not play [on 32-bit computers] at all.” Today, however, Microsoft said Riley had misspoken. It seems the content can be played, but only if the studios "certify" the media-player software. That doesn't take away the underlying insecurity, of course, it just shifts the liability from Microsoft to the studios.

Boing Boing has picked up the story quoting an anonymous Microsoft employee who says: "[Windows] Media Player won't play HD-DVD and Blu-ray, but you'll still be able to play them (on XP, even) with third-party programs like WinDVD and PowerDVD, in full HD.... The screwball thing about all this is that essentially the same risks of hacked drivers and whatnot exist with PowerDVD and WinDVD." (PowerDVD and WinDVD are two popular Windows software programs, which aren't made by Microsoft, for playing DVDs.)

So, why the inconsistency? The employee casts doubt on the possibility of a Hollywood vendetta against Redmond, and concludes, simply enough, "The studios all have tech consultants, and many of them are not fools, so... it's probably the usual: Human stupidity rolled up in a big ball."

Ahh, can't we all just agree not to steal? Piracy restrictions just make for endless heachaches.

The specter of Internet "addiction" is suddenly everywhere: The Guardian reports that Shanghai "has opened mainland China's first shelter for Internet addicts," and Ars Technica picks up a Rutgers University study that suggests "employers who encourage workers to remain connected all the time... may be legally liable for creating an environment in which workers may become addicted to technology."

OK, it may seem a bit farfetched, but then not long ago so too did the notion that cigarette manufacturers could be sued for the health risks associated with smoking. Certainly, it's way too early to sell short those companies with the fastest Web connections and the most generous BlackBerry policies, but the dangerously habit-forming nature of Web access isn't entirely laughable either.

It seems a study by the Chinese Academy of Sciences "blamed Internet addiction for 80% of the failure rate among students." The Browser is sympathetic, knowing how hard it is to pry oneself away from the glowing screen, the compulsive email checking, the tingling of carpal-tunnel-wracked digits.

We ask you: Is the threat of on-the-job Internet addiction bunk, or a legitimate concern for corporate America?

Almost five years ago, Amazon.com made an announcement that dealt a heavy blow to Sun Microsystems: The online retailer had switched from Sun's Unix servers to vastly cheaper servers running Linux. Amazon cut its technology expenses by $17 million in one quarter -- money that presumably came out of Sun's hide.

Now Amazon.com is looking to take money away from Sun again. This time, Amazon's not just a former customer -- it's an outright competitor. It has launched a new service, the Elastic Compute Cloud, which rents out time on Amazon's servers. Amazon is undercutting Sun's similar Sun Grid service by 90 percent, charging 10 cents per server per hour versus Sun's $1 charge. (Amazon also charges for the volume of data transferred back and forth over the Internet, a charge Sun doesn't have, but all but the most bandwidth-greedy customers are still likely to come out way ahead.)

Initially, Amazon's hoping to target the same startups that are already using its S3 Web-storage service. S3, launched earlier this year, rents out storage space on Amazon's servers to companies like photo-sharing website SmugMug, which stores customers' photos on S3 when SmugMug's own servers fill up unexpectedly. Those startups still had to keep their own servers to run the software behind their websites, however. What EC2 means is that Web 2.0 companies won't have to build their own server data centers at all, says software consultant Sergey Schetinin at his Maluke & Co. blog.

That's good news for Amazon, which is hoping not just to rent servers to startups but persuade them to build in links to its online store through its Amazon.com Associates affiliate-marketing program. Here's Amazon's value proposition: Save money by renting our servers, and make money by funneling customers to our store, where we'll split revenues with you. That's a perk that Sun can't offer at any price.

You know you're in trouble when even your biggest fans say your products don't rate. The Unofficial Apple Weblog has stacked up Apple's .Mac service against Google's Web-based applications, and found .Mac comes up dangerously short. Sure, Apple's Mail software is prettier than Google's Gmail, but its spam-filtering and email categorization features lag far behind Google's, says TUAW. Down the list, from Web storage space to online calendars, Apple comes up wanting. And worst of all, .Mac users are paying $99 a year for the service, while Google users get all their online goodies for free.

The post has mostly sparked sad agreement. On his Surfbits blog for users who have switched from Windows PCs to Macs, Jeff Powell writes that he'd "love to see Apple revamp the service and wow us all over again." If Steve Jobs is serious about declaring war on bad software, he might want to start doing battle with his company's own Web-based applications.

Kobi Alexander, the former CEO of scandal-ridden tech firm Comverse, fled the United States earlier in the month in the face of an options-backdating investigation. But now he's been tracked down in Sri Lanka, apparently by a private eye working for unidentified hedge funds and/or venture capital firms.

Oh, the wrath of hedgies and VCs scorned. For those new to the story, Alexander, once known as the "Larry Ellison of Israel", built Comverse from startup to a tech powerhouse with over $1 billion in sales. Though worth well over a hundred million dollars himself, Alexander was apparently unwilling to face up to charges related to $6.4 million in improperly backdated options -- so he wired $57 million to a bank account in Israel and disappeared from the U.S. But, perhaps uneasy over Israel's extradition treaty with the U.S., Alexander decided to take up residence in the small Sri Lankan town of Negombo. (Isn't there a civil war raging in that country? Alexander seems to be leaping from the frying pan into the fire.)

But here's the real moral of the story for would-be fugitives: Think twice before you place a VOIP call while on the lam. It seems the VC's private eye had no trouble tracing Alexander's furtive VOIP communications to Negombo. Sounds like using Skype, despite its encryption features, was a bad call.

If you're a fan of the original U.K. version of "The Office," here's a treat for you: A 2003 Microsoft U.K. training video, "The Office Values," has surfaced on the Web, with actor Ricky Gervais reprising his role as the world's worst boss, David Brent. The video is hilarious: Gervais, as Brent, issues cunning management bromides like "Trust no one" and "Keep your good ideas to yourself" -- this, of course, in an effort to reinforce Microsoft's core values of integrity and openness.

Upon watching it, one's first reaction is to think that Microsoft intentionally circulated this video to show that the software giant has a sense of humor about itself. But Microsoft and Gervais didn't approve the release, it turns out, and aren't that happy about the leak. Silicon.com reported that Microsoft's U.K. office, which commissioned the video for internal use, was "red-faced" over the incident. And Gervais for his part, was concerned that the videos' appearance now might lead fans to think he had revived the Brent character, which he has no plans to do, a spokeswoman for the comedian told ZDNet UK.

But what must be especially galling for Microsoft is that rather than popping up on MSN, the videos have surfaced on archrival Google's video website. Click below to watch "The Office Values."

Wikipedia, the free-for-all encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, will begin experimenting with a more hierarchical approach. Jimmy Wales, the site's founder, has told News.com that the German version of the online encyclopedia will soon test a system wherein veteran users approve the content submissions of relative newcomers. Per News.com: "As always, anyone will be able to make article edits. But it would take someone who has been around Wikipedia for some yet-to-be-determined period of time -- and who, therefore, has passed a threshold of trustworthiness -- to make the edits live on the public site."

Though limited to Germany for now, if successful, the move could migrate to the main, English-language site which has struggled with problems of accuracy and vandalism. Ars Technica notes that "the move comes in response to a German court decision early this year that ruled against Wikipedia for publishing the name of a deceased hacker whose family was involved in a court case over his death." Apparently, in Germany, "simply claiming that 'but anyone can edit, your honor!' isn't going to cut it anymore."

What Wikipedia is trying may be new to the site, but it's not new to the Web. eBay members rate each other, of course, and Slashdot readers rate posts, among many other examples. But such rating systems can bring their own problems. Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal summarizes the problems neatly (paid subscription required) in an article on the troubles that Yahoo Answers has had with just such a "points economy."

Unrepentant MP3 pirates beware: Weird Al Yankovic, the original melody rip-off artist, has released a song about copyright infringers. Among the more amusing lyrics of "Don't Download This Song," are the following: "Cuz you start out stealing songs, then you're robbing liquor stores, and selling crack, and running over school kids with your cars."

The irony of Weird Al poking fun at overly strict copyright enforcement is not lost on Slashdotters, who are all over the song: ""Weird Al is distributed under a faux independent label, Volcano Records, which is owned by Sony BMG, who brought us intrusive DRM and is a proud part of the RIAA intellectual 'property' lawsuit cartel. Now I have to get a new goddamned movement for my irony meter!"

All the buzz this week is about SanDisk's new Sansa MP3 player, which offers twice the storage for the same price as Apple's iPod Nano. It's not surprising SanDisk can offer such a good price, since unlike Apple, it makes its own flash memory and can pass the savings on directly to gadget buyers. News.com is even asking whether Apple has lost its touch, since it hasn't brought out a new iPod model since February.

But Apple's secret with the iPod has always been to jump on the latest technology and package it into a gorgeous device. Back in 2001, with the first iPod, that was a high-capacity, compact hard drive. With last year's introduction of the Nano, Apple adopted flash memory. Now, writes Sean Alexander in his Addicted to Digital Media blog, Apple could be set to take another technological leap, thanks to a $500 million investment it made last November in an Intel-Micron flash-memory joint venture.

Later this year, the joint venture, IM Flash Technology, is set to start making memory chips with unprecedently small circuits, which means more flash memory bang for Apple's buck. (In his blog post, Alexander errs in saying that SanDisk is making chips ten times the size of IM Flash's, but IM's will still be smaller than SanDisk's current line.) So Apple may just be waiting until it can counter SanDisk with even more powerful chips to put inside its iPods. This battle is far from over -- but it will all come down to the chips.

Somewhere in the suburbs of New York City, a TiVo Series 3 DVR sits, quietly recording dual streams of quality high-def Cablevision programming. Or so we can gather from photos posted by HDBeat, a high-definition gadget blog, which shows a Series 3 underneath a Cablevision-branded set-top box. Last month, Zatz Not Funny reported that TiVo was notifying retailers and cable companies that its Series 3 boxes were hitting some retail markets.

What's so great about the Series 3? For starters, it can record high-definition TV. It also takes a fancy new CableCard, which obviates the need for a cable set-top box to decrypt digital cable programming. (You still need a set-top box for interactive features, like video on demand, however.) CableCards have proved controversial, however -- Time Warner Cable in Raleigh, North Carolina, first told a user that it wouldn't support CableCards, and then rapidly backpedaled, according to TiVoBlog.

Even if you can get the cable company to support CableCards, you're still going to face an arduous installation process. HDBeat's tipster told the blog it took three visits by a cable technician and four different cards before they got it to work.

Is a dual-tuner HD TiVo worth the bother? Post a comment and let us know what you think.

Sony's $65 million purchase of video-sharing site Grouper tops the blogs this morning. Most are caught up in the arcane nuances of Web traffic measurement. Why? Now that the Grouper deal has given online video a market valuation -- in dollars per viewer, mostly -- Grouper's larger rivals like YouTube have, at least in theory, price tags on their heads.

TechCrunch crunches the numbers, noting that ComScore says Grouper had 542,000 unique visitors in July, which would imply a value per viewer of $70. The implication? All caveats aside, Marshall Kirkpatrick writes, "... the $65 million valuation on Grouper suggests a YouTube valuation of around $2 billion." Astounding: YouTube's co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have seen their imputed valuation jump from $1 billion to $2 billion in less than a month.

Rafat Ali at PaidContent.org casts a more jaundiced eye on the news, however, pointing out that "the valuation is not really based on traffic." According to Ali, Sony is paying for "a solid management and technical team," as well as an online video-editing tool called "Groovie." Groovy.

And, lest you thought this market wasn't entertaining enough, Ali thinks there's more action to come: "This probably signifies the start of a shakeup in the video-sharing space," he writes. No doubt.

Is YouTube worth $2 billion? Tell us what you think by leaving a comment below.

How will YouTube go from time-waster to money-maker? The strategy became a bit more clear as the site launched a branded "channel" featuring Paris Hilton today. The Paris channel, which is paid for by the Hilton label, Warner Bros. Records, a division of Warner Music Group, is the first of many planned pay-for-placement channels on the site, according to TechCrunch. Fox is advertising its television show "Prison Break" on the Paris pages.

It would be tempting to say that YouTube has sold out, but the site has always been a unapologetically pop phenomenon. And, of course, if anyone knows how to turn the -- ahem -- exposure gained through viral video into a business, it's Hilton, who parlayed her online sex-tape infamy into lucrative advertising deals, like those seamy Carl's Jr. commercials.

But will the new channels pay YouTube's million-dollar bandwidth bills? Mashable says yes: "Despite all the anti-hype around YouTube and the recurring question of 'Where's the business model?', I think it's pretty clear that YouTube is a powerful branding platform -- and not just for stars like Paris Hilton." Though the early returns are barely in, Mashable's instincts appear on target. The Paris Channel as already been viewed over 44,000 times and gotten hundreds of adoring comments.

When Web-search market-share figures come out, the story has become familiar: Google's numbers go up, while everyone else's fall. But the story changed this month when the newest figures came out from ComScore Networks. Something unthinkable happened in July: Google's share of Web searches dropped a percentage point to 43.7%.

What does this mean? Barry Schwartz at SearchEngineRoundtable picks up the debate, in which some say that the change in Google's market share is statistically insignificant, while others say it's evidence that Google has "topped out." Garrett Rogers of Googling Google is in the latter camp: "When it comes to innovation in search technology, Google has been relatively static for a long time — maybe users are getting bored?"

Rogers points out that Google hasn't introduced many visible innovations into its core Web search engine. Meanwhile, Ask.com has become newly aggressive under Barry Diller's ownership, rolling out "Smart Answers" that help users refine their search until they get the results they're looking for.

And sure enough, the latest numbers show that Ask has been gaining market share at Google's expense. No wonder Google co-founder Larry Page is going nuts about Google engineers who refuse to work on search results projects that they deem "boring."

How much for those startups in the window? For Microsoft, the answer is a cool $649 million.

That's how much the software giant spent on startups through its 2006 fiscal year -- more than three times the amount it spent in 2005, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. How are those big bucks paying off? One recent acquisition, Onfolio, has already seen its blogging software released as Windows Live Writer, a product which has gained some positive Web buzz. Other deals are as much about attracting talent as acquiring products. Last year's acquisition of Groove Networks brought Groove founder Ray Ozzie on board, paving the way for Bill Gates to step down last month and give the chief software architect title to Ozzie.

But it's hard to calculate whether individual deals are paying off for Microsoft, since the company generally only discloses aggregate numbers for its startup spending. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is exercising some caution, according to the P-I: It turned down a $500 million deal to acquire a company with less than $20 million in revenues.

But the fact that Redmond even thought about it tells you something about Microsoft's desperation for innovation -- despite its multibillion-dollar R&D budget.

In a satisfying bit of retro futurism, an Aussie company with the excellent name Pie Networks has launched a coin-operated, Internet-enabled payphone. Who says the old workhorses are on their way out? Australian newspaper The Age writes that the new "WebPhones," which connect to the Web via wireless broadband, will let users "check Web-based email applications, perform online transactions, download music from online retailers, and transfer and email their photographs from digital cameras."

And, naturally, they'll also let you place a call -- using voice-over-Internet-protocol technology. Finally, as an added bonus for those still planning to tote around their laptops, the payphones may also "double as Wi-Fi hotspots."

Surprisingly, Pie Networks aren't the first to think of VOIP payphones. The do-it-yourself crew over at Make built themselves a Skype payphone last year, though that was hardly a commercial venture. It remains to be seen if, in a world of massively widespread cell phones, there will be much demand for Pie's WebPhones beyond its home turf of Perth in western Australia, but it's worth noting that the margins on charging for email may well be better than those on local calling. And it's nice sometimes to travel light. Got a dime? I need to place an instant message.

Photo by junku-newcleus

Online advertising is set to reach $26 billion by 2011, according to one projection. But that will still only add up to 9 percent of the U.S. ad market. That's why Google is going after the $74 billion TV advertising market, according to Donna Bogatin at the Digital Micro-Markets blog.
"When you watch the television you see ads that are clearly not targeted for you," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the recent Search Engine Strategies conference.

Schmidt isn't just grousing about this -- he aims to change it. Already, the company has started to apply its targeting techniques to the $20 billion radio market it entered through the acquisition of dMarc broadcasting. Now, as the Browser noted back in March, Google is hiring engineers to build similar technology for television, allowing Google to place ads on behalf of advertisers just as it does on Web pages today.

Is the world ready for such a grandiose expansion of the Google empire? Yes, according to at least one netizen. "This sounds great to me," writes blogger Thor. "I absolutely HATE TV commercials, especially how they become up to 50 percent louder than the TV show you were just watching, to 'get your attention,' and I would absolutely LOVE to see what my boys at Google can do with it."

Munich-based chipmaker Infineon announced today that it won a contract from the U.S. government to supply chips for a next-generation electronic passport. The Inquirer summarizes the news, noting that Infineon plans to supply chips for "several million passports" -- and that Washington's goal is that, by the end of the year, all newly issued passports will be electronic. Infineon's passport chips, which function using an RFID signal, contain "an encrypted version of a human's name, date of birth, photo and the validity period of the passport."

The Ministry of Tech blog, which has been following e-passport developments closely, says that "countries such as Germany, Hong Kong, Norway and Sweden are also using Infineon's security chip for their electronic passport systems." That might seem reassuring, but the blog reported earlier in the month that German security consultant Luke Grunwald has successfully hacked the new system.

Says Grunwald: "The whole passport design is totally brain damaged. From my point of view all of these RFID passports are a huge waste of money. They're not increasing security at all."

After all the scary headlines about sexual predators on MySpace, it was inevitable that someone would come up with a family-friendly social-networking website. So here's Famster: A certifiably Web 2.0 site designed as a private social network for your family. It even has an online-predator finder -- a feature that Marshall Kirkpatrick at TechCrunch finds a bit distasteful for playing on people's fears. There are other family-centric features built into the site, like a database of 23,000 recipes and an online shopping list.

One small problem with Famster's premise: After spending hours every day in the real world together, why would siblings have any interest in networking with each other, let alone their parents? Sure, moms could lay down the law and enforce the use of Famster for putting events on the family calendar, but that's just bound to make using the site seem even more uncool. The Browser's take: Famster's a cute idea, but it won't work in practice.

Others agree: "I just don’t see people checking in as much as email," writes educational technology consultant Kevin Lim at the Theory.isthereason blog. And Craig Burton asks, "How many social networking sites do we need? I guess you could say 'The bubble is baaaack!'"

Farecast, a Seattle-based "airfare prediction" website that caught the attention of prominent bloggers when it launched earlier this year, has expanded its service to 55 U.S. cities. The Seattle Times reports on the move, noting that the company has thus far raised $8.5 million in venture capital and that CEO Hugh Crean "hopes to capitalize on the frustration of finding multiple fares for the same destination one week, only to have them change without warning and seemingly without reason the next."

Now that fuel prices are sending airfares skyrocketing, it would seem the market is ready for Crean's innovation. In June, when the site had first launched but was limited to flights to and from Seattle and Boston, John Battelle wrote: "The basic premise is neat -- Farecast pays attention to the market price of all airline fares out of particular cities.... It then uses this data to help forecast when the right time might be for you to buy your ticket (and get the best price). In short, it's a ripoff detector for flights."

Sounds like an innovation that's more timely than ever.

After reports surfaced in June of unseemly labor conditions at Foxconn, one of Apple's major contract manufacturers, Apple launched its own investigation. Now, the Mac and iPod maker has published the results. Mostly, Apple gave its suppliers a clean bill of health. The report notes that their pay levels do meet China's minimum wage laws, in response to concerns about the factory workers' low pay. But it also noted problems with a lack of privacy in some off-campus dormitories and a lack of transparency in workers' paychecks due to a complex scheme of bonuses for skills and attendance, as well as deductions for meals and housing. The workers' single biggest complaint? There's not enough overtime available during nonpeak periods.

"Good job, Apple," says The Unofficial Apple Weblog. "Here's hoping that some people's lives will improve just a little bit because of all this." TUAW notes that Apple has hired Verité, a nonprofit which monitors offshore manufacturing sites, to keep an eye on Foxconn and its other suppliers.

But none of this clears up The Browser's original question: Do Apple's iPod workers make enough money to afford even a measly iPod Shuffle?

Dell has long resisted ordering chips from AMD, saying it preferred to stick with longtime supplier Intel. But now that AMD has succeeded in getting Dell to purchase some of its server chips, analysts believe a lot more orders are on the way. According to News.com, Bank of America's Sumit Dhanda believes Dell will order 2 million AMD chips for the rest of the year -- 1.2 million desktop and server chips and 800,000 notebook chips. By those numbers, Dell is giving AMD 15 to 20 percent of its business. That adds up to a big blow for an already embattled Intel. Is AMD poised to trounce Intel? Leave a comment below.

The Browser rises early to blog for you lot, but we found ourselves staying up late for the season finale of the "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" comedy series featuring Danny DeVito on FX. And there we saw the Fox cross-promotional machine in fine fettle. "Sunny," of course, has a profile on MySpace, as do pretty much all Fox movies and TV shows since Fox parent News Corp. acquired MySpace last year.

But in a breakthrough for corporate product placement, the episode had an entire subplot tied to MySpace, which included the horror of finding that your parent has a profile on the site, and the frustration of waiting for someone to add you as a friend. For anyone who hadn't heard of MySpace, the breezy banter of the episode's opening scene amounted to a MySpace 101 tutorial. It wasn't subtle, but since when has Fox been known for subtlety?

Don't count YouTube out yet. After an unplanned outage and discouraging traffic numbers that were released earlier this week, cofounder Steve Chen punched back by announcing boldly that, within 18 months, he expected "to have every music video ever created up on YouTube."

Is that just big talk from a cocky startup guy? Nope: Warner Music and EMI confirmed they have been in talks with YouTube cofounders Chen and Chad Hurley. Finally, to cap off an eventful week, the boys took the site down briefly yesterday evening -- this time, the outage was planned -- and brought it back online with a few new nifty features, notably the ability for users to customize their own MySpace URLs (no more dopey strings of random characters), and the addition of a whole new section devoted to music videos. Watch out, MTV.

One year after it launched, Google has finally upgraded its instant messaging client, Google Talk, with some slick file-sharing functionality and voicemail capabilities, which could help increase Google's market share.

The instant messaging wars have gotten hot again, now that the software includes the ability to make VOIP calls to regular phone lines. As Om Malik notes in his comments on the news, this upgrade is "part of the trend of some demographics turning to IM to manage their online communications instead of email." But Google's young service has lagged far behind the competition in signing up users. That's a rare misstep for the search giant, which is usually good at getting the young crowd to try out its products.

Today's upgrade, however, could give Google a boost. An effusive in-house bloggger at Google describes how the file-sharing works: "You can drag and drop one or more files directly onto a chat window. As soon as your friend clicks 'Accept', the bits will start flowing." And it works even better for photos: "When you drop up to 10 photos on Google Talk, smaller previews automatically appear right inside the chat window, so you can chat about them right away."

While file-sharing has long been a feature in AIM and other IM software, Google's version is easeir to use and, importantly, well-integrated with its popular Gmail email service which should drive adoption.

Wi-Fi is beginning to seem less like a coffee-shop frill and more like a civic right, with cities from Philadelphia to New Orleans and San Francisco planning wireless networks that cover the entire city. The problem has been the cost of deploying enough routers to provide adequate coverage, especially in busy areas with lots of potential Wi-Fi users.

Tropos Networks, a maker of wireless routers, thinks it's solved that problem with its new line of routers, News.com reports. The new routers have two radios instead of just one -- one for providing Wi-Fi service, and the other for transmitting the resulting traffic up to the Internet. That means Tropos can provide 50 percent more coverage for an area with the same number of routers, explains Wi-Fi Networking News. As a result, overall network costs could drop about 30 percent -- and that's good news for any city trying to come up with a budget for a wireless network.

That's a nice change of pace. After all, how often do municipal infrastructure costs drop instead of spiraling out of control?

Back in the bubble days, a small army of men in blue shirts and khakis acquired their MBAs from Harvard or Stanford, got hired by dotcoms, printed up business cards that said "business development," and then marched from offices to bars and parties, trying to strike deals with other Internet companies. These deals would, in theory, attract more users, advertisers, partners and maybe even revenues. Then the bubble burst, and the biz-dev soldiers scattered to the four winds.

Lately, by the looks of things, the blue-shirt troops seem to be making a comeback on the streets of San Francisco and in the office parks of Silicon Valley. But the Web 2.0 crowd is wondering what the point is. Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake points out that she doesn't have time to return all the biz-dev guys' plaintive e-mails begging for a meeting.

She's glad, however, to let programmers tinker with Flickr's software using an API -- a standard coding interface -- to build something that works with Flickr's photo-sharing service. That's exactly what photo-printing startup Qoop did, and now the company is Flickr's official printing partner -- no biz-dev guys required.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson weighs in with a half-dozen other examples of deals brokered without any help from biz-dev, like how Technorati uses Del.icio.us's tags to make searching blogs easier. He also points out that when people do strike a biz-dev deal, like Simply Hired did to put job listings on MySpace, customers often ignore it, meaning all of that blue-shirt dealmaking energy went to waste.

The simple alternative? Hire smart engineers, build a great website, and let partners and users discover it. Easier said than done, but it seems more productive than sending MBAs to parties.