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Washington Post:
AT& T Completes BellSouth Takeover — The Federal Communications Commission yesterday overcame a seven-month deadlock and approved AT&T's $85 billion purchase of BellSouth, creating a new corporate giant that will stand astride the telecommunications industry like none other in the generation since …
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Tkarr / Save the Internet Blog:
AT&T Yields to Neutrality, Paves Path to Congress — In a striking victory for Internet freedom advocates, AT&T officials agreed on Thursday night to adhere to strict Network Neutrality conditions if allowed to complete their $85 billion merger with BellSouth which was approved today.
Marguerite Reardon / CNET News.com:
FCC approves AT&T-BellSouth merger — update The Federal Communications Commission approved the roughly $86 billion megamerger between AT&T and BellSouth on Friday, ending a partisan standoff. — The commission, which had been split between Democrats and Republicans for months on what …
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Google's Tipping Point — Taken in a vacuum, a fairly trivial thing happened a few days ago. The co-founder of Firefox, Blake Ross, wrote a post criticizing Google called "Tip: Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose". He takes issue with a new Google search feature that promotes certain …
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CenterNetworks, Webware.com, Mark Evans, Feedonomics, VCMike's Blog, CNET News.com and Monkey Bites
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Matt Cutts / Gadgets, Google, and SEO:
My thoughts on recent Google tips — I wanted to talk about Blake Ross' post entitled "Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose". I agree with much of what he says. There's a continuum to showing tips. Toward the "hawk" side of the spectrum is the notion that a company can show whatever reasonable content …
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Digital Markets, Scripting News, Search Engine Land, SmugBlog, Ars Technica and Slashdot
New York Times:
Apple Panel on Options Backs Chief — Apple Computer said Friday that a special committee of its board had found that its chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, was not responsible for improper dating of stock options at the company. To account for the backdating, Apple restated its financial reporting …
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Associated Press:
NASA's vision lost on Web generation — CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) — Young Americans have high levels of apathy about NASA's new vision of sending astronauts back to the moon by 2017 and eventually on to Mars, recent surveys show. — Concerned about this lack of interest …
Google Blogoscoped:
AdSense Blacklist to Increase Revenue — Oliver Gassner pointed me to AdsBlacklist.com, a service which generates a list of URLs based on a URL and a set of keywords you provide. You can then copy & paste this list into your Google AdSense competitive ad filter* to (supposedly) …
Wired News:
Wild Predictions for a Wired 2007 — Here are some predictions for 2007: — Google Stock Hits $1,000 per Share — Internet Traffic Doubles ... to 5,000 petabits per day by the end of 2007. And 80 percent of it is peer-to-peer file sharing, mostly Skype video and BitTorrent.
Major Nelson / Xbox Live's Major Nelson:
Top Xbox Live Games of 2006 — Here are the top games for 2006, based on Xbox Live connectivity. — The following rankings are based on data collected from 1/1/06 - 12/29/06: — 2006 Top Xbox 360 Titles (UU's) — 1 — Gears of War — 2 — Hexic HD — 3 — Call of Duty 2
Sion Touhig / The Register:
How the anti-copyright lobby makes big business richer — Comment We're continually being told the Internet empowers the individual. But speaking as an individual creative worker myself, I'd argue that all this Utopian revolution has achieved so far in my sector is to disempower individuals …
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Stephen Shankland / CNET News.com:
Virtual reality to get its own network? — A nonprofit group says it plans to build a network called Neuronet purely to support virtual-reality game and business applications. — Neuronet, which is planned to be separate from the Internet, "will evolve into the world's first public network capable …
Chris Ziegler / Engadget:
Meet your shiny new 2007 HTCs — If the X7500 "Athena" somehow managed to fail to attract your attention and you found the Vox, Libra, Love, and Cavailer positively forgettable, first verify that you have a pulse (because we really don't think that's normal) then check this out …
Pete Mortensen / Cult of Mac:
Ten Questions Apple Must Answer in 2007 — We're down to the last two-and-a-half days of 2006, and Apple CEO Steve Jobs is 11 days from taking the wraps off a shiny new product line at MacWorld San Francisco. Other former Apple figures might be a few weeks from being indicted.
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Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
Q&A With Jimmy Wales On Search Wikia — News came out earlier this week that Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales had a new project in mind, to build a community-driven "Google-killer" search engine. I've just finished talking with Jimmy about his plans. Here's a rundown on his vision …
Pathfinder Linden / Official Linden Blog:
Details on Asset Server Issue — Thursday morning, Linden Lab operations did short-notice maintenance on the cluster of machines that we refer to as the "asset server." During this downtime, we replaced a bad battery in one of the nodes in the cluster. To do this, we removed the node …
Reuters:
Typo takes tourist 13,000 km out … BERLIN, Germany (Reuters) — A 21-year-old German tourist who wanted to visit his girlfriend in the Australian metropolis Sydney landed 13,000 kilometers (8,077 miles) away near Sidney, Montana, after mistyping his destination on a flight booking Web site.
Carlo / Techdirt:
Only This Week Is It News That CAN SPAM Doesn't Work — from the politics-as-usual dept — As you might expect, news has been a tad slow this week. Slow enough, apparently, that the fact that the CAN SPAM law has done nothing to stop spam is regarded as news.
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