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11:30 AM ET, July 25, 2008

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Full Text Of AOL Email: XDrive, AOL Pictures, MyMobile And Bluestring To Shut Down  —  Below is the full text of the email AOL EVP Kevin Conroy sent out to staff on July 14, outlining the reorganization of his product groups and announcing the “sunsetting” of XDrive, AOL Pictures, MyMobile and Bluestring.
RELATED:
Peter Kafka / Silicon Alley Insider:
More AOL Cost-Cutting: Dumping Properties; Cutting Back On Blogs (TWX)
Discussion: AppScout
Denver Post:
Missing ‘spam king’ kills self, family  —  BENNETT — Just four days after escaping a federal minimum-security work camp, “Spam King” Eddie Davidson shot his wife and child and wounded a teen-age girl before turning the gun on himself.  —  Sheriff's deputies responded to a report of gunfire …
RELATED:
Charlie Demerjian / Inquirer:
Escaped spammer kills himself  —  Comment Yay.  No, YAY!  —  NOT ALL STORIES have a happy ending, but the tale of escaped spam king Edward “Eddie” Davidson sure does.  After walking away from prison, he got a gun, killed his family, then killed himself.  —  While it is hard not to feel bad …
Lester Haines / The Register:
Inquirer celebrates spammer murder-suicide  —  ‘Yay.  No, YAY!’  —  Comment There's an air of celebration down at The Inquirer at the news that fugitive spammer Eddie Davidson decided to do the decent thing and kill himself.  —  Here's our take on the story, but check out the opposition's view on the whole sorry affair.
Discussion: CNET News.com
Andru Edwards / Gear Live:
Apple beta testing iPhone 2.1 firmware, adding more GPS features  —  We just got word that Apple has released a beta version of iPhone OS 2.1 to developers.  Along with the 2.1 firmware, a new version of the iPhone SDK has been seeded as well, but the new SDK can't be used for submitting applications to the App Store at the moment.
RELATED:
Aidan Malley / AppleInsider:
Apple seeds iPhone 2.1 with directional GPS, push notification
Discussion: The iPhone Blog and Apple Gazette
Richard MacManus / ReadWriteWeb:
Android Is For The Masses, iPhone For The Rich  —  Our network blog last100 has an interesting interview with Nicolas Gramlich, founder of anddev.org - an online community for Android developers.  As editor Steve O'Hear notes in his intro, there have been issues with Google's mobile OS of late …
Discussion: TeleRead
RELATED:
Steve O'Hear / last100:
Q&A: Nicolas Gramlich of anddev.org talks Android, Google's …
PR Newswire:
Netflix Announces Q2 2008 Financial Results  —  Subscribers - 8.4 million Revenue - $337.6 million GAAP Net Income - $26.6 million GAAP EPS - $0.42 per diluted share  —  Netflix, Inc. (Nasdaq: NFLX - News) today reported results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2008.
RELATED:
Chris Morris / Forbes:
Doom'ing The iPhone  —  While he's best known for creating graphics engines that push systems to their limits, game designer John Carmack is spending a lot of time with mobile gaming these days.  —  The co-founder of id Software is considered one of the creators of the first-person shooter genre …
Discussion: Digital Daily and Touch Arcade
Daniel AJ Sokolov / heise Security UK:
Speculation over back door in Skype  —  According to reports, there may be a back door built into Skype, which allows connections to be bugged.  The company has declined to expressly deny the allegations.  At a meeting with representatives of ISPs and the Austrian regulator on lawful interception …
Discussion: Memex 1.1, open and Zero Day
Kim Hart / Washington Post:
High-Stakes Race to Unlock a Wider Web  —  Critics Say New Technology May Hinder TV Signals  —  The nation's top technology companies have spent millions of dollars and nearly two years building devices, poring over laptops and working in federal labs trying to come up with a new way of …
Discussion: Digg
Stephen Shankland / CNET News.com:
Microsoft tries to one-up Google PageRank  —  Though a distant third place to Google, Microsoft thinks it can teach its rival a thing or two about searching the Internet.  —  A big part of Google's rise to search engine leadership was an algorithm called PageRank that assesses …
RELATED:
Dianne See Morrison / paidContent.org:
Italian Prosecutors To Charge Google Execs Over Third-Party Content  —  Four Google (NSDQ: GOOG) executives may be standing trial over failing to adequately monitor third-party content posted to their Italian language site.  Italian prosecutors are preparing to file charges in a two-year old case …
Svetlana Gladkova / Profy.Com:
Google's Begun Growing Very Fast  —  I have just seen a press release (in Russian) issued by Begun, the Russian contextual advertising company recently acquired by Google from Rambler.  The ad company reports on the revenue it has received in the first 6 months of 2008 …
Discussion: Mashable!
Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:
DRM still sucks: Yahoo Music going dark, taking keys with it  —  The bad dream of DRM continues.  Yahoo e-mailed its Yahoo! Music Store customers yesterday, telling them it will be closing for good—and the company will take its DRM license key servers offline on September 30, 2008.
RELATED:
Corynne McSherry / Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Here We Go Again: Yahoo! Music Throws Away the DRM Keys
Tom Magrino / ZDNet:
Scrabble-Scrabulous standoff spells L-A-W-S-U-I-T  —  It was only a matter of time before the Scrabble-Scrabulous feud came to a head, and that breaking point has now been reached.  Hasbro said today that it has filed suit in the Southern District of New York against Rajat Agarwalla …
Amit Agarwal / Digital Inspiration:
Believe In Superstitions?  Avoid The Word “me” In Product Names  —  If you are superstitious and believe that names can bring (or deny) good luck, avoid giving your products a name that ends with “me”.  —  This is not a recommendation of any soothsayer but just a personal observation …
Discussion: New York Times and MacBlogz
Jeff Atwood / Coding Horror:
Coding Without Comments  —  If peppering your code with lots of comments is good, then having zillions of comments in your code must be great, right?  Not quite.  Excess is one way good comments go bad: … I'm constantly running across comments from developers who don't seem to understand …
Discussion: webmonkey
 
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 More Items: 
James Quinn / Telegraph:
Thomson Reuters to venture into television
New York Times:
Microsoft Seeks an Ad Friend in Facebook
Adrian Covert / Gizmodo:
Golden Shellback Hands-on: Phones Can Make Calls While Underwater
comScore:
Are We There Yet? comScore M:Metrics Reports Mobile Map Use Grows …
University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute:
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH CANCER INSTITUTE
MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
Loopt strikes a deal to make massive use of GPS data cost effective
Darryl K. Taft / eWeek:
Open Web Foundation to Keep Data ‘Open’
Web 2.0 Asia:
A discouraging news for Korean open web movement
Discussion: open
 Earlier Items: 
Media Molecule hits little big time / BBC:
Game On  —  Sony has very high hopes for LittleBigPlanet
Dave McClure / Master of 500 Hats:
Second Age of Aquarius: Facebook Connect + Facebook Payments …
Discussion: Identity 2.0, Wikinomics and GigaOM
Nilay Patel / Engadget:
Toshiba working on a netbook / UMPC that's actually interesting
Joe McDonald / Associated Press:
China says has more people surfing the Web than US
Eric Eldon / VentureBeat:
Source: Facebook's internal valuation is $4 billion. But so what.
Discussion: The PE Data Center
Brian Stelter / New York Times:
Griping Online? Comcast Hears and Talks Back
Discussion: Gizmodo
Computerworld:
Forrester: Windows Vista rejected like ‘new Coke’ by enterprises
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:
Microsoft to show off spherical Surface next week
 

 
From Mediagazer:

Charlotte Tobitt / Press Gazette:
Ofcom rules that five GB News programs presented by Conservative politicians have broken its due impartiality rules and puts the channel “on notice”

Benjamin Mullin / New York Times:
Authentic Brands licenses Sports Illustrated's publishing rights to The Players' Tribune owner Minute Media for 10 years, with plans to keep the print edition

Todd Spangler / Variety:
YouTuber MrBeast announces a deal with Prime Video for Beast Games, a reality-competition show with 1,000 contestants, promising the winner a $5M cash prize

 
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