Top Items:
Nate Mook / betanews.com:
Microsoft to Drop PDF Support in Office — Amid threats of a lawsuit from Adobe, Microsoft acknowledged Friday that it would remove support for saving files in PDF from Office 2007, as well as dropping its own rival format XPS from the productivity suite and Windows Vista.
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Declan McCullagh / CNET News.com:
DOJ, Net firms fail to agree on data retention — A meeting at the U.S. Justice Department on Friday to discuss forcing Internet providers to record Americans' online activities ended without reaching an agreement, according to multiple participants. — The meeting of about 15 industry representatives …
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Elise Ackerman / siliconvalley.com:
U.S. wants Web records — The U.S. Department of Justice has quietly told Google, Microsoft and other major Internet companies that it wants them to keep detailed records of where people go while surfing the Web for up to two years. — The proposal, which would require congressional approval …
Discussion:
interesting-people.org
Stephen Taylor:
Joe Volpe strongarms the Internet and erodes freedom of speech in Canada — Yesterday, a Joe Volpe parody site went up called YouthForVolpe.ca which lampooned the Liberal leadership candidate's drug money (ahem pharmaceutical donations) from children of Apotex execs.
Discussion:
Random Bytes, Michael Geist, Alec Saunders .LOG, ongoing, robhyndman.com and Larry Borsato
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Jane Taber / Globe and Mail:
Campaign gets tangled in website spoof — It was all the buzz in official Ottawa yesterday — a hilarious political whodunit in this age of websites, platforms and templates. — Overnight, someone built a website spoofing Liberal leadership candidate Joe Volpe and his acceptance of thousands …
Dan Mitchell / New York Times:
MySpace No Longer Their Space? — BRANDS, for teenagers, are fleeting things. — For big, slow-moving corporations, this presents a problem. When Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation acquired the community site MySpace nearly a year ago, the site was at the height of its popularity.
Discussion:
edublogs
Oliver / MobileCrunch:
Verizon Store Customer Service the Worst I've Seen — Having had occasion to visit the Verizon location near my office in Huntington Beach yesterday I was treated to a new low in customer service, even by the very low standards we've all come to associate with wireless carrier retail locations.
Declan McCullagh / CNET News.com:
Dotster named in massive cybersquatting suit — update A new federal lawsuit charges that Dotster, one of the largest domain name registrars, has unlawfully participated in a massive cybersquatting campaign targeting companies such as Cingular Wireless, Disney, Ikea, Google, Neiman Marcus, Playboy and Verizon.
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GigaLaw.com Daily News
John Markoff / New York Times:
Alan Kotok, 64, a Pioneer in Computer Video Games, Is Dead — Alan Kotok, a computer designer who helped create the first video game program as a member of a small group of M.I.T. students in the early 1960's, died at his home in Cambridge, Mass., on May 26. He was 64.
Discussion:
UMBC eBiquity Blog
Seth Godin / Seth's Blog:
How to get traffic for your blog — My friend Fred, a talented blogger, asked me for advice the other day. Here's a partial answer, with a few apologies to Swift: — Use lists. — Be topical... write posts that need to be read right now. — Learn enough to become the expert in your field.
Matt Richtel / New York Times:
Is Vonage Sinking or Coming Up for Air? — When the Internet telephone provider Vonage went public last week, it was meant to be a coming-out party for a technology that many see as the future of voice communications. It was also a chance at redemption for Jeffrey A. Citron …
Discussion:
IP Democracy
Mark Hachman / PC Magazine:
BellSouth Says It's Not Blocking MySpace — BellSouth customers filled the Technorati blog Thursday and Friday, complaining that they had not been able to access YouTube, which stores and plays back user-generated videos, and MySpace, a social networking site for teens.
Discussion:
Techdirt
Michael Sciannamea / The Wireless Report:
JetBlue wins wireless license auction bid to offer in-flight WiFi — The offering of WiFi services to passengers while in-flight is still not a given, but if the FAA and FCC ever come to some sort of consensus on the idea, then look for JetBlue Airways to quickly become one of the market leaders in this area.
Henry Blodget / Internet Outsider:
Time Warner Says Synergy Is BS. So Sell AOL. — According to the WSJ, Time Warner has abandoned all pretense of "synergy" between its various media divisions, the failed concept that was the sole justification for its merger with AOL. Without synergy—cooperation between divisions …
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Tim Ziegler / webmonkey.com:
Get Your Feet Wet with WordPress — Tim Ziegler builds websites in Texas with d2p. He wants to fabricate a giant bicycle-powered gyroscope. He hopes he's around when the robots all break free. — Over the last few years, WordPress has emerged as one of the best blogging tools available.
Discussion:
Burst Blog
Phone Scoop:
Sprint TV Phone Leaked On FCC — News Brief … The FCC today approved the Samsung SPH-M250. A label in the documents confirm this mystery phone is for Sprint. The phone is clearly a clamshell model with Bluetooth. After careful comparison of the test photos to Samsung models …
Discussion:
Engadget
Peter Norvig / Official Google Research Blog:
Extra, Extra - Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken — I remember vividly Jon Bentley's first Algorithms lecture at CMU, where he asked all of us incoming Ph.D. students to write a binary search, and then dissected one of our implementations in front of the class.