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9:30 PM ET, May 18, 2009

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Jim / craigslist blog:
An Apology Is In Order  —  Dear South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster,  —  Two days ago you accused craigslist, and me personally, of engaging in criminal acts, reiterating your previous threat to file unwarranted and unconstitutional charges against us that are clearly barred by federal law.
RELATED:
Justin Smith / Inside Facebook:
Facebook Launches OpenID Support - Users Can Now Login With Gmail Accounts  —  Last month, Facebook announced that users would soon be able to login to the site via OpenID.  Today, Facebook has officially become an OpenID relying party: users can now register for Facebook using their Gmail accounts …
RELATED:
Luke Shepard / Facebook Developers:
Facebook Supports OpenID for Automatic Login  —  In continuing with our efforts toward greater openness, we are excited to announce that Facebook is now an OpenID relying party.  We've been engaging with the OpenID community for a while now.  We'll be the largest relying party so far …
Discussion: Webmonkey and AppScout
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
The Dam Just Broke: Facebook Opens Up to OpenID
Discussion: The Real McCrea
Olga Kharif / Business Week:
Cheaper iPhone Plans from AT&T?  —  AT&T may offer lower-cost data plans for iPhones, which would attract new subscribers and force smartphone rivals to cut prices, too  —  Victor Lin wants an iPhone, but he's put off by the price.  The smartphone costs at least $199 up front …
RELATED:
Alexei Oreskovic / Reuters:
Twitter sees tools, not ads, for revenue  —  NEW YORK (Reuters) - Twitter is working on various ways to make money from its fast-growing microblogging service, but advertising is an option that is not currently being considered.  —  Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said on Monday that the company …
Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Supreme Court May Kill Sarbanes Oxley And Resurrect IPO Market!  —  One reason Silicon Valley is struggling is that there's no longer an IPO market.  This is making it difficult for VCs to exit investments, putting pressure on company valuations, making it harder to hire and retain people, driving companies to the London markets, etc.
Discussion: Clusterstock, Thanks:atul
RELATED:
Marcy Gordon / Associated Press:
Supreme Court to decide validity of anti-fraud law
Discussion: Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
Apple's Mac Decline Could Be Worse This Quarter  —  Updated with NPD Group estimates for Apple's April Mac shipments.  —  Apple (AAPL) could face its second straight quarter of year-over-year declines in its Mac business.  (And only its second negative quarter since 2003.)
Jim Dalrymple / CNET News:
Stanford's free iPhone course hits 1 million downloads  —  Stanford University on Monday said its free iPhone Application Programming course has been downloaded more than 1 million times since being uploaded to Apple's iTunes U—a learning-focused area of iTunes—seven weeks ago.
Connie Loizos / PE Hub Blog:
Peter Thiel On Valleywag; It's the “Silicon Valley Equivalent of Al Qaeda”  —  Peter Thiel is known for many things, from his hedge fund, Clarium Capital, to his venture capital firm, Founders Fund, to his role as the original CEO of PayPal — whose 2002 sale to eBay famously netted Thiel, then 34, roughly $60 million.
AppleInsider:
Series of YouTube videos show off Apple's Snow Leopard  —  A YouTube user going by the name ‘LeopardOctober’ has recently posted over a half dozen videos taken from recent pre-release builds of Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard operating system, showing off everything from QuickLook movie playback to the new QuickTime X interface.
Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Search Engine Wolfram Alpha Launches With Big Dreams And No Chance  —  Another next-generation search engine launches.  It looks more differentiated than the much-ado-about-nothing known as Cuil, but that's not saying much.  —  Our prediction: Wolfram Alpha (terrible name) …
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Yahoo Mobile Abandons Its Smartphone App To Focus On The iPhone  —  Score another one for the iPhone.  Yahoo is abandoning its mobile app for the Blackberry and other smartphones in order to focus more on its recently relaunched iPhone app.  For every other phone, it is concentrating …
Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:
Harvard prof tells judge that P2P filesharing is “fair use”  —  Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson is headed to federal court this summer to defend an accused file-swapper, and he plans to mount a novel defense: P2P sharing is simply “fair use.”  —  Wholesale copying of music on P2P networks is fair use.
Discussion: Techgeist and digg.com
Abbey Klaassen / AdAge:
In Mac vs. PC Battle, Microsoft Winning in Value Perception  —  View Has Shifted Dramatically Among Young Demo Since ‘Laptop Hunters’ Campaign  —  NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Apple may have some of the most interesting online ads we've seen in a while, but Microsoft's recent push to paint …
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
Hearst: Zombie Seattle Paper Doing Better Than the Original  —  I'm still on record predicting the demise of seattlepi.com-the online-only zombie version of the erstwhile Seattle Post-Intelligencer.  My gut is that even though the Hearst-owned site has an edit staff 80 percent smaller …
Mark Milian / L.A. Times Tech Blog:
Twitter creator Jack Dorsey on user retention, Facebook comparisons  —  Twitter creator Jack Dorsey says the service needs to do a better job of hooking new users.  Credit: carrotcreative via Flickr  —  The mastermind behind Twitter isn't denying that his website has a problem keeping new users.
Discussion: O'Reilly Radar, Thanks:atul
Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
Napster relaunching, again: $5 per month streaming plus five free downloads  —  Like subscription music services?  You know, like Microsoft's Zune Pass where you pay $14.99 monthly and keep up to 10 tracks each month forever.  Sure, renting music at $180 per year can be a drag for those stuck …
Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
Eric Schmidt's Commencement Address At Carnegie Mellon (Video)  —  Here's Google CEO Eric Schmidt's commencement address at Carnegie Mellon's 112th commencement ceremony, held yesterday.  (Via @CarnegieMellon)  —  Schmidt's talk to the audience, which he refers to as the ‘Facebook and Google generation’ …
Rich Miller / Data Center Knowledge:
Facebook: $20 Million a Year on Data Centers  —  A look at the fully-packed racks inside a Facebook data center facility.  —  Facebook appears to be spending $20 million to $25 million a year for the data center space that houses its servers, according to an analysis of the company's data center infrastructure.
Thanks:atul
Joseph Galante / Bloomberg:
Mint.com May Begin Selling Access to Anonymous Consumer Data  —  Mint Software Inc., an online service that helps consumers track every dime they spend, has a goal for its own pocketbook: boosting sales as much as 10-fold this year.  —  To fuel revenue, the company may start charging …
Joshua Topolsky / Engadget:
Slim PS3 update: mysterious Chinese firm issues a cease and desist... to Engadget  —  You know, one of these days, someone at one of these big companies is going to get this right.  If you send a cease and desist about “leaked” photos of a supposed device, you're basically saying, “Hey guys, those pictures are real.”
Ben Kuchera / Ars Technica:
Sims 3 leaked to torrent sites weeks before retail release  —  While EA may be backing off the practice of using invasive DRM in its games, piracy continues.  The newest casualty?  Sims 3 has leaked to the torrent sites two weeks before the game's release.
Amazon Web Services Blog:
New Features for Amazon EC2: Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch  —  We are working to make it even easier for you to build sophisticated, scalable, and robust web applications using AWS.  As soon as you launch some EC2 instances, you want visibility into resource utilization and overall performance.
Howard Lindzon:
Stocktwits Closes and A Round of Financing  —  We are happy to announce that True Ventures has invested in Stocktwits to help us build and Grow faster.  —  It is fun to be an entrepreneur and an investor in the web space and with True Ventures we get a partner with the same philosophies.
Stephanie Clifford / New York Times:
For Wired, a Revival Lacks Ads  —  Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, believes in logic the way Tina Brown believes in buzz.  He rarely approves a story idea unless the writer backs up the thesis with data.  The basis of his best-selling book “The Long Tail” …
Discussion: Boing Boing Gadgets and Gawker, Thanks:atul
Nate Lanxon / CNET News:
Google builds Street View trikes to map UK footpaths  —  To advance its Street View service this summer, Google is poised to unleash the unstoppable power of human legs.  —  Traditionally, the average road car finds it problematic to traverse the terrain of the British footpath.  But bicycles do not.
Greg Kumparak / MobileCrunch:
Apple Begins Stress Testing Push Notification Servers  —  And so it begins.  With WWDC and presumably the release of iPhone OS 3.0 just around the corner, Apple has deemed it time to begin stress-testing their Push Notification servers.  We just received a letter from a (very) trusted source …
 
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 More Items: 
Jeremy Wagstaff / loose wire blog:
Telling the Story in the Third Dimension
Discussion: Glass House
Wendy Davis / MediaPost:
NebuAd Shuts Down  —  Behavioral targeting company NebuAd …
Discussion: MediaMemo
Greg Kumparak / MobileCrunch:
Leaked: Nokia Bringing Maemo To Phones, Could Be Ad-Supported
Discussion: TechCrunch
Nick Gonzalez / TechCrunch:
The IAB Sets Some Standards For Social Ads
 Earlier Items: 
Orlando Sentinel:
Who are top Tweeters? UCF grads' site tells
Discussion: Etan on Tech
Ian Deitch / Associated Press:
Israeli intelligence issues Facebook warning
Leander Kahney / Cult of Mac:
Exclusive: Apple Is Building a New Helpdesk Operation: New Product …
Discussion: TheAppleBlog and Softpedia News
Jim Finkle / Reuters:
AT&T to offer cloud-based storage as a service
Discussion: Between the Lines and TechSpot
Teddy Wayne / New York Times:
Social Networks Eclipse E-Mail
Discussion: Sexy Widget and Internet Evolution