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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.
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Guardian Unlimited, Startup Meme, Ryan Stewart, FierceMobileContent, localmobilesearch.net, P2P Blog and Out of the Box
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Reports: AOL cuts XDrive, Pictures, some blogs — AOL is scrapping some online destinations but will push others harder in an attempt to improve its finances, according to media reports. — Among those to be shuttered are Bluestring, a site to share videos, music, and photos; Xdrive …
Discussion:
TechCrunch


More AOL Cost-Cutting: Dumping Properties; Cutting Back On Blogs (TWX)
Discussion:
AppScout

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 …
Discussion:
Guardian Unlimited, Network World, Computerworld, AppScout, Threat Level, The Register, Switched, Computerworld Blogs, Zero Day, TechWeb, Spyware Sucks and Security Watch
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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 …

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.

Escaped ‘spam king’ allegedly kills self, family — A convicted spammer who escaped from prison was found dead Thursday night, along with his wife and 3-year-old daughter. — Eddie Davidson, dubbed a “spam king,” was sentenced to 21 months in prison in April after pleading guilty …


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.
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Infinite Loop, Gadget Lab, Engadget, Boy Genius Report, iLounge, Gizmodo, CrunchGear, O'Grady's PowerPage, Insanely Great Mac and MacBlogz
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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 …
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TeleRead
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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 …

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.
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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 …


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 …


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

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 …

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.
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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 …
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Mashable!