An anonymous reader writes "The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the new online media strategy being rolled out by CBS. Just over a year ago they rolled out their 'Innertube' service on the CBS website. The streaming video offering allowed viewers to watch sports and reruns directly on the web, but required potential consumers to view the video on CBS.com. That didn't work, even a little bit. So, they've learned their lesson: 'The company plans to pursue a drastically revised strategy that involves syndicating its entertainment, news and sports video to as much of the Web as possible. It represents a stark departure for the TV industry. Most of CBS's major competitors, including Walt Disney Co.'s ABC, General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal and News Corp.'s Fox, are to some degree all betting that they can build their own Internet video portals. Starting this week, an expanded menu of CBS's video content will be available for free to consumers on as many as 10 different Web sites ranging from Time Warner Inc.'s AOL to Joost Inc., a buzzy online video service that is just rolling out. The company calls its new venture the CBS Interactive Audience Network.' This new push is tied into a new advertising strategy, which is covered in-depth in the article."

theodp writes "Forget the Summer of Code. If you've got a hot idea for a start-up, Newsweek says Y-Combinator, the boot camp where Silicon Valley meets 'American Idol', is the place you should be. 'Some critics scoff that Y Combinator's investment is peanuts for that amount of equity. But the opportunity is unparalleled -- total immersion into Silicon Valley start-up culture, advice from Graham and a fast track to the top angel investors and venture-capital funds. When Graham calls the winners, the founders have only five minutes to accept. "If people turn us down," he says, "as far as we're concerned they've failed an IQ test."'" We've previously discussed the program on the site, just over a year ago.

theodp writes "In an e-mail worthy of the Dilbert Hall of Fame, IBM execs responded to Robert X. Cringely's Project LEAN layoff rumors, reassuring employees by pointing out that they've already wiped out too many U.S. jobs to be able to lay off another 150,000. Big Blue's employment peaked around 1985, when it had about 405,000 workers who were acclimated to a long tradition of lifetime employment. IBM puts its current global workforce at 355,766, with a 'regular U.S. population' of less than 130,000."

BondGamer writes "Many ICQ users woke up and found their ICQ numbers were no longer working. There is a topic on the ICQ support with more than 1,500 replies. There are pages upon pages of other topics asking what happened. As of yet, there has been no official response from AOL about what has happened."

theodp writes "Amazon will pay an undisclosed amount to IBM to settle a long-running patent feud, and the two companies have agreed to a long-term patent cross-licensing agreement. Information Week wonders if an insurance dispute prompted Amazon's settlement, noting that Atlantic Mutual sued Amazon back in March to escape any obligation to reimburse the e-tailer should it lose the case brought by IBM. Amazon had relied on Atlantic Mutual's backing in an earlier legal battle it waged against tiny InTouch. 'Amazon, whose chief executive, Jeff Bezos, is a vocal advocate of patent reform, has had numerous patent issues in the past. In 2005, the technology used in its 1-Click checkout system came under scrutiny as potentially infringing upon a similar product made by a small Virginia-based company called IPXL Holdings. Meanwhile, the US patent system itself is experiencing growing pains as Congress continues to explore the possibility of updating it to better serve the needs of the 21st-century business world.'"

moogoogaipan writes "After a few days thinking about the quickest way to bring my website back to the internet users, I am still stuck at DNS. From experience, even if I set the TTL for my DNS zone file as low as 5 minutes, there are still DNS servers out there won't update until a few days later (Yeah. I'm looking at you, AOL). Here is my situation. Say that I have my web servers and database servers at a remote backup location, ready to serve. If we get hit by an earthquake at our main location, what can I do in a few hours to get everyone to go to our backup location?"

theodp writes "The NY Times reports that three CNET journalists whose records, as well as those of their relatives, were scrutinized by pretexting investigators working for HP intend to sue the company for invasion of privacy. HP, who paid $14.5M to settle a lawsuit filed by the CA attorney general in connection with the spying, reportedly offered each reporter $10,000, roughly enough to cover legal bills. The CNET reporters have been banned from covering HP or its see-no-evil CEO, who BTW was rewarded with $20.33M in 2006 despite skipping his reading assignments."

An anonymous reader writes "AOL.com users may think they have up to sixteen characters to use as a password, but they'd be wrong, thanks to this security artifact detailed by The Washington Post's Security Fix blog: "Well, it turns out that when someone signs up for an AOL.com account, the user appears to be allowed to enter up to a 16-character password. AOL's system, however, doesn't read past the first eight characters." This means that a user who uses "password123" or any other obvious eight-character password with random numbers on the end is in effect using just that lame eight-character password."

theodp writes "eBay CEO Meg Whitman will accept a special Webby Lifetime Achievement Award next month on behalf of the eBay Community, which has 'permanently changed the way people connect, discover and interact with each other.' Perhaps by then, people will have forgotten how eBay enabled buyer 'Blazers5505' to hook up with sellers like 'oneclickshooting' just weeks before the worst mass shooting in modern US history, prompting eBay to issue a gun-parts-don't-kill-students-guns-and-ammo-do statement that showed little evidence of its celebrated commitment to social consciousness. CEO Whitman, who received $11.1M last year for her leadership efforts, has kept a low profile since tooting eBay's trust-and-safety horn for Wall Street analysts two days after the Va. Tech rampage."

modi123 asks: "It's getting close to the middle of the year and I am looking for a developer conference or two, so that I can fill my educational quota. TechEd in Orlando is out (I was the last yell 'not it' and I have to remain behind to man the system), my boss won't allow me to travel to TechEd Euro in Barcelona, and I am at a loss on where to go. My areas of expertise are VB.NET, MSSQL, and application development, while I dabble in AI, info sec, and GUI development. Do you have any suggestions where I can go? Side note, I keep hearing about this 'defcon' thing — would that benefit an app developer, or is that mainly an overblown info sec experience?"

Freaky_Friday wrote with a link to an InfoWorld article about a teenage kid accessing customer information at AOL. The alleged criminal trespass began late last year, and extended up through early April. According to the article, the guy used some 'off-the-shelf' hacking software he downloaded online to gain access to, and then transmit information from, AOL's systems. "The complaint states that Nieves admitted to investigators that he committed the alleged acts because AOL took away his accounts. 'I accessed their internal accounts and their network and used it to try to get my accounts back,' the defendant is quoted as saying in the complaint. He also admitted to posting photos of his exploits in a photo Web site, according to the complaint ... If the defendant was honest about his motivation in his reported confession, it's safe to assume that he wasn't interested in stealing data for financial gain, [Managing director of technology at FTI Consulting Mark] Rasch said. Still, it'll be interesting to find out what steps AOL is taking if customer data was in fact compromised, he said."

theodp writes "The expansion of Dell's Plant a Tree for Me program into Second Life has the Silicon Valley Sleuth wondering if this represents a new low in Earth Day marketing tie-ins. You may wonder, too, after reading Dell's invitation to its Earth Day Party at Dell Island in SL ('get your own tree sapling to plant in Second Life!')."

theodp writes "ZDNet reports that as Jeff Bezos tap-danced out of a cringe moment at Web 2.0 Expo prompted by Tim O'Reilly's questioning of why Amazon couldn't get along with Alexaholic (now Statsaholic), Amazon had already filed a lawsuit to legally spank the tiny company into oblivion."

Craig Sender writes to tell us that PC World has compiled a list of the 20 most annoying tech products of all time. Topping the list was AOL's ubiquitous free trial CD's. "This list hardly covers every annoying tech product ever made. But where did this list of 20 come from? [PC World Readers] picked the worst ones by voting in our Annoyances Poll, and you'll see your Top 10 most annoying products flagged with icons. Just for fun, we've added 10 more products that didn't get enough votes from you in our poll but that we found particularly irksome."

theodp writes "Six years ago, Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly urged the masses to give-patent-reform-a-chance as Richard Stallman called for an Amazon boycott. On Monday, the pair will reunite to kick off O'Reilly's new Amazon-sponsored Web 2.0 Expo with A Conversation with Jeff Bezos. Be interesting if the conversation turned to Amazon's ongoing battle against an actor's effort to topple Bezos' 1-Click patent, which The Register notes included dumping 58 lbs. of paperwork on the patent examiner, including dozens of articles from the oh-so-Web-2.0 Wikipedia, which the USPTO had already deemed an un acceptable source of information ('From a legal point of view, a Wiki citation is toilet paper,' quipped patent expert Greg Aharonian)."

theodp writes "Reacting to an actor's do-it-yourself legal effort that triggered a reexam of Amazon.com's 1-Click patent, attorneys for Amazon have fired back, deluging the USPTO with documents to review, including Wikipedia articles. With the latest batch, Amazon's high-priced law firm even requested that USTPO examiners review an archived page of Norm Quotes (yes, Norm from Cheers) and rule that it does not invalidate CEO Jeff Bezos' 1-Click patent."

hotgist writes "America's top four Internet companies, Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft's MSN, promise they will protect the personal information of people who use their online services to search, shop and socialize. But a close read of their privacy policies reveals as much exposure as protection. The massive amounts of data these companies collect, which can include records of the searches you make, the health problems you research and the investments you monitor, can be requested by government investigators and subpoenaed by your legal adversaries. But this same information is generally not available to you."

theodp writes "In a world where nastiness online can erupt and go global overnight, BusinessWeek finds Corporate America woefully unprepared and offers suggestions for how to cope, including shelling out $10,000 to companies like ReputationDefender.com to promote the info you want and suppress the news you don't. And in what must be a sign of the Apocalypse, BW holds Slashdot's moderation system up as a model for maintaining civility in message boards."

An anonymous reader writes "Announced on the Gaim mailing lists earlier today, the Gaim project is being renamed. This follows a lengthy and, unfortunately, secret legal process with AOL, which also prevented any code releases except betas. The project will now be known as Pidgin IM. Development is being migrated off of sourceforge.net as well and is now being hosted on developer.pidgin.im"

theodp writes "Debunking claims to the contrary, a new study from Duke University asserts that it is purely cost savings, and not the education of Indian and Chinese workers, or a shortage of American engineers that has caused offshore outsourcing. 'The key advantage of hiring Chinese entry-level engineers was cost savings, whereas a few respondents cited strong education or training and a willingness to work long hours. Similarly, cost savings were cited as a major advantage of hiring Indian entry-level engineers, whereas other advantages were technical knowledge, English language skills, strong education or training, ability to learn quickly, and a strong work ethic.' The article goes on to point out that despite this, outsourcing will continue to be a problem for US workers in coming decades; new elements of traditional corporations like R&D may in fact be next on the outsourcing chopping block."