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12:20 PM 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:
Stephen Shankland / CNET News.com:
Reports: AOL cuts XDrive, Pictures, some blogs
Discussion: TechCrunch
Peter Kafka / Silicon Alley Insider:
More AOL Cost-Cutting: Dumping Properties; Cutting Back On Blogs (TWX)
Discussion: AppScout
Rafat Ali / paidContent.org:
AOL Trimming Up For Sale; Sun Sets On XDrive, AOL Pictures, Mobile And Others
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:
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: WebProNews
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 …
Margaret Kane / CNET News.com:   Escaped ‘spam king’ allegedly kills self, family
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:
Chris Foresman / Infinite Loop:
Apple releases iPhone 2.1 beta to registered developers only  —  Apple has posted a beta of iPhone OS 2.1 to its iPhone Dev Center.  The beta firmware also has a new SDK, allowing developers start working with the new functionality.  However, according to several developers …
Charlie Sorrel / Gadget Lab:   IPhone 2.1 Update to Bring Turn-by-Turn GPS?
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 …
RELATED:
Antone Gonsalves / InformationWeek:
Android, Symbian Expected To Become One OS
Discussion: AndroidGuys and Engadget
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 …
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 …
Discussion: eWeek, Startup Meme and Beyond Search
RELATED:
Alessandra Galloni / Wall Street Journal:
Italy Is to File Charges Against Google Executives  —  Italian prosecutors are preparing to file charges in a 2006 case against four Google Inc. executives over a video uploaded onto the Internet provider's Italian-language site showing a disabled teen taunted by peers, people close to the probe say.
Discussion: Techdirt
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
Corynne McSherry / Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Here We Go Again: Yahoo! Music Throws Away the DRM Keys  —  Just over a month after consumer backlash caused MSN Music to rescind its decision to deactivate the digital rights management ("DRM") servers that allowed MSN Music purchasers to “reauthorize” music files after upgrading operating systems …
RELATED:
Jeremy Kirk / IDG News Service:
Yahoo: Burn Your DRMed Tracks to CD Now
Om Malik / GigaOM:
Bomb Blasts Hit Bangalore, Impact to Be Felt in Silicon Valley  —  Updated at the bottom: Over the past few years, the quaint and sleepy town of Bangalore has been transformed into a highly compressed version of Silicon Valley, only with worse housing and transportation problems.
RELATED:
Neha Singh / Reuters:   Eight small blasts hit Indian IT city of Bangalore
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.
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
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
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: MacBlogz
RELATED:
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
 
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 More Items: 
BBC:
Prisons to ban adult-rated games
Discussion: Joystiq and GamesIndustry.biz
Dan Goodin / The Register:
World's biggest ISPs drag feet on critical DNS patch
Jim Kerstetter / CNET News.com:
Report: MySpace could work with Amazon on music service
Discussion: TechCrunch
Stephen Shankland / Webware.com:
Users can automatically encrypt Gmail traffic
Holly Jackson / CNET News.com:
Software makers threaten to sue eBay over counterfeits
Discussion: Tech Daily Dose
Tom Magrino / ZDNet:
Scrabble-Scrabulous standoff spells L-A-W-S-U-I-T
James Quinn / Telegraph:
Thomson Reuters to venture into television
New York Times:
Microsoft Seeks an Ad Friend in Facebook
 Earlier Items: 
Svetlana Gladkova / Profy.Com:
Google's Begun Growing Very Fast
Discussion: Mashable!
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
Web 2.0 Asia:
A discouraging news for Korean open web movement
Discussion: open
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
Joe McDonald / Associated Press:
China says has more people surfing the Web than US
Computerworld:
Forrester: Windows Vista rejected like ‘new Coke’ by enterprises