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4:35 AM ET, January 21, 2009

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Jason Kottke / kottke.org:
The country's new robots.txt file  —  Here's a small and nerdy measure of the huge change in the executive branch of the US government today.  Here's the robots.txt file from whitehouse.gov yesterday: … And it goes on like that for almost 2400 lines!  Here's the new Obamafied robots.txt file:
RELATED:
The White House:
Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov  —  Welcome to the new WhiteHouse.gov. I'm Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media for the White House and one of the people who will be contributing to the blog.  —  A short time ago, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States …
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
Despite Inauguration, Google & Others Still Think It's President Bush …
Discussion: Tech Daily Dose
Anthony Ha / VentureBeat:
WhiteHouse.gov takes a page from Twitter's playbook
Discussion: MediaShift, louisgray.com and SheGeeks
Spencer Spinnell / Traditional Media:
Turning the page on Print Ads  —  Labels: Announcements, Google Print Ads  —  In the last few months, we've been taking a long, hard look at all the things we are doing to ensure we are investing our resources in the projects that will have the biggest impact for our users and partners.
RELATED:
Sam Diaz / Between the Lines:   Google can't save newspapers; smart to dump print-ad project
MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
Pictures: President Obama's inauguration, as seen from space  —  The other day I wrote about how the GeoEye-1 satellite would be taking images of President Obama's inauguration from 423 miles up — in space.  This could only have worked on a clear day so clouds didn't block the view.
Caroline McCarthy / The Social:
Inauguration Day, by the numbers  —  Updated at 2:53 p.m. PST to add statistics from the New York Times.  —  From what early numbers are indicating, the historic swearing-in of President Barack Obama was not the biggest traffic day for the Internet.  But for many social networks and digital-media sites …
RELATED:
Eric Krangel / Silicon Alley Insider:
Obama Inauguration 5th Most Watched Net Event Ever
Discussion: L.A. Times Tech Blog and NewTeeVee
Brian Krebs / Security Fix:
Payment Processor Breach May Be Largest Ever  —  A data breach last year at Princeton, N.J., payment processor Heartland Payment Systems may have compromised tens of millions of credit and debit card transactions, the company said today.  —  If accurate, such figures may make the Heartland incident …
RELATED:
Joel Hruska / Ars Technica:
Malware infestation responsible for credit card data breach
Discussion: Zero Day
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
Word Cloud Analysis of Obama's Inaugural Speech Compared to Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Lincoln's  —  Barack Obama was just sworn in as President of the US and though he stumbled in repeating his oath, the speech that followed was delivered flawlessly and was widely praised around the web.
Heather Dougherty / Hitwise Intelligence:
Twitter catches up to Digg  —  Twitter has become a popular pastime for many who like to update their daily thoughts and activates, as well as for the voyeurs who just enjoy reading the tweets.  Last week, the market share of visits to Twitter surpassed Digg for the first time since launch and was ranked #84 …
RELATED:
Daniel Terdiman / CNET News:
Hitwise: Twitter surpasses Digg's market share
Discussion: Gawker
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
Apple iPhone Sales Drop 24% In U.S. During Q4 — Survey (AAPL)  —  Apple's (AAPL) iPhone sales dropped significantly in the Christmas quarter from the September quarter, when the iPhone 3G was first released, according to results of a new survey published by Morgan Stanley.
RELATED:
Aidan Malley / AppleInsider:   Apple's iPhone may have outsold Android nearly 6-to-1
Daniel Shen / DigiTimes:
Microsoft expected to deliver Windows Mobile 6.5 OS to handset makers in mid-2009, say sources  —  Microsoft is expected to start delivering its Windows Mobile 6.5 OS (operating system) to handset makers in mid-2009 following the expected debut of the new mobile OS in the upcoming Mobile World Congress …
Alex Pham / L.A. Times Tech Blog:
Linden Lab acquires Xtreet and OnRez, brokers of virtual goods for Second Life  —  Is the real economy dragging you down?  Hop into Second Life, where the virtual world's gross domestic product jumped 54% in the fourth quarter!  —  Residents of Second Life traded $100.8 million worth …
Discussion: Digits, VentureBeat and New World Notes
Ian King / Bloomberg:
Intel Raises Possibility of a Loss in First Quarter, Ending 21-Year Streak  —  Jan. 20 (Bloomberg) — Intel Corp., the world's largest chipmaker, raised the possibility of reporting a loss this quarter, ending its more than 21-year run of profitability.  —  “We are not going to wake …
Discussion: Tech Trader Daily
mediadonis.net:
The Hyves Hype!  —  It really sounds strange, but mysteriously it just works...  At the moment, it's possible to check if a domain got penalized for selling links (or lost pagerank due any other kind of malicious activity).  —  The only thing you gotta do is put “hyves” as a subdomain in front of the domain to be checked.
Aza Raskin / Mozilla Labs:
Test Pilot: Vision  —  How many tabs does an average user use at a time?  How about novice users?  How often is the stop button pressed?  How many times do people open a new tab to perform a search?  —  There are hundreds of questions like these whose answers would help quantitatively inform the design process of Firefox.
Joseph Tartakoff / The Microsoft Blog:
Microsoft considers moving 30 percent of vendors off-site  —  One page in an internal Microsoft PowerPoint presentation reviewed by the Seattle P-I shows that Microsoft executives have considered a plan to either move 30 percent of Microsoft's vendors who work on campus off of Microsoft properties …
Frederic Lardinois / ReadWriteWeb:
Real-Time News: PubSub Gets Ready for a Comeback  —  In 2002, PubSub released an interesting and useful product that provided a real-time search engine for RSS feeds, flight information, Usenet posts, and even earthquake updates.  Sadly, PubSub closed its doors in 2007 and its assets were bought by Something Simpler.
Discussion: broadstuff
Apple:
iWork '09: Serial number not required for installation of retail boxes  —  iWork '09 retail boxes no longer come with a serial number.  Install iWork '09 from the enclosed disc and you're ready to go.  —  Products Affected  —  iWork '09  —  Though retail versions of iWork '09 no longer come …
Eric Savitz / Tech Trader Daily:
Microsoft Sells Entire Comcast Stake  —  Microsoft (MSFT) disclosed in an SEC filing on Friday that it has sold its entire 7.3% stake in Comcast (CMCSA) Class A common stock.  Microsoft had owned 150,935,575 shares.  —  In a research note this morning, Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffett notes …
Stephen Shankland / CNET News:
Google search helps provide inauguration subtext  —  Itzhak Perlman?  Isabel Toledo?  Simple Gifts?  Huh?  —  During Tuesday's inauguration of President Barack Obama, people curious about unfamiliar references used Google to supply the footnotes for the ceremony.
Discussion: Technologizer
Richard Waters / blogs.ft.com:
Microsoft's money backs an IBM adversary - again  —  Whenever a significant legal challenge is filed against IBM, it seems you don't have to scratch the surface much to find Microsoft lurking somewhere in the background.  —  Take the complaint that has just been filed with the European Commission against IBM's mainframe monopoly.
Discussion: Ars Technica
Raju Vegesna / Zoho Blogs:
Google Notebook Import, New Zoho Notebook Plug-in & more...  After we rolled out an update last week with several enhancements to Zoho Notebook, we got several requests from users asking us to further enhance the app with some specific features.  We now updated Zoho Notebook with some of these new features …
Gavin Steacy / Tom's Hardware Guide:
Seagate's Update Bricking Working HDDs  —  Seagate recently released a preventative firmware update for Barracuda 7200.11 drives affected by a faulty firmware which caused the drive to lock up and fail to be detected by the BIOS.  Unfortunately, the updating process has not gone smoothly for many people …
Dan Goodin / The Register:
New OS X research warns of stealthier Mac attacks  —  In-memory code injection covers tracks  —  A computer security researcher has discovered a new way to inject hostile code directly into the memory of machines running Apple's OS X operating system, a technique that makes it significantly harder …
 
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 More Items: 
Kevin C. Tofel / jkOnTheRun:
ASUS Bringing Phoenix HyperSpace into Next Gen Notebooks: Who Pays?
Discussion: Engadget
Urmee Khan / Telegraph:
Google boss denies ‘screwing’ music industry and defends YouTube in Warner row
Discussion: Beyond Search
Enigmax / TorrentFreak:
Sweden Considers Police Action Against File-Sharers
Mike Tedesco / Mac Mojo:
Entourage for Exchange Web Services Beta is Live!
Matthew Lasar / Ars Technica:
FCC wants big fines for cable giants over channel switching
 Earlier Items: 
Randall C. Kennedy / PC World:
What Will Become of Windows Vista?
Discussion: Smalltalk Tidbits …
InfoWorld:
Eclipse PHP upgrade tackles object-oriented programming
Discussion: The Register
Tom Espiner / CNET News:
IBM to buy Chinese e-mail company
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
An Outsider Gets A Peek Behind The Scenes Of The Music Industry's …
Tony Ruscoe / Google Blogoscoped:
Google Web Drive and “Cosmo” Discussed in Deleted Document
Andy M. Zaky / Bullish Cross:
How the iPhone and Poor Apple Management have contributed to the Downfall of Apple
Discussion: Apple 2.0, Voices and The Apple Core
 

 
From Mediagazer:

Mandy Dalugdug / Music Business Worldwide:
UMG, ABKCO, and Concord sue Believe and its subsidiary TuneCore for $500M+, alleging Believe built its business via “industrial-scale copyright infringement”

Christopher Palmeri / Bloomberg:
Sources: Shari Redstone does not plan to stay on the board of Paramount Global after the company completes its planned merger with Skydance Media

William Earl / Variety:
Heretic's directors say they put a message in the credits that “no generative AI was used in the making of this film” to warn Hollywood about the danger of AI

 
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