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Are you kidding?! — There's been a lot of conjecture and confusion today about Yahoo!'s commitment to being the world's best search engine-talk which anyone who's been following the evolution of Yahoo! Search would have realized is... just plain wrong. — While some people immediately realized this …
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Yahoo throws in the search towel — The Internet became less interesting today as Yahoo showed signs that it has given up in its battle with Google for best search engine. The company, while not abandoning its search, isn't expecting to make great inroads with it, either.
Discussion:
B.L. Ochman's weblog, Texas Venture Capital …, The Intuitive Life …, Somewhat Frank and Darwinian Web

Yahoo! Giving Up on Search? Hey, Wait Just A Gosh Darn Minute!

Netflix Continues Online DVD Dominance — Davis Freeberg is both a current shareholder and customer of Netflix. This post should not be construed as financial advice. — Netflix reported strong Q4 2005 earnings today and continued to show impressive subscriber growth for their DVD by mail business.
Discussion:
HD Beat
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Netflix Q4 2005 Earnings Conference Call Transcript (NFLX) — January 24th 2006, 5:00PM. — Executives: — Deborah Crawford, Director, Investor Relations — Reed Hastings, President and Chief Executive Officer — Barry McCarthy, Chief Financial Officer — Analysts:

Netflix Q4 2005 Results & Webcast Notes — Netflix has announced Q4 2005 financial results (click here to view the release). — In Q4 2005: … For 2005: … Davis Freeberg at Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection has written an excellent analysis of the news.

Disney buys Pixar — update Walt Disney announced Tuesday that it's paying $7.4 billion in stock to acquire Pixar Animation Studios—a deal that puts Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs on Disney's board of directors. — For the venerable animation giant, the move is a significant bet …
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Hacker guilty of taking over PCs for attacks — A 20-year-old Southern California hacker admitted Monday to surreptitiously seizing control of hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected computers, using the zombie network to serve pop-up ads and renting it to people who mounted attacks on Web sites and sent out spam.
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Botnet Hacker Pleads Guilty — Man could face 25 years in prison for selling botnets to spammers and adware distributors. — A computer hacker responsible for creating armies of computers to launch Internet-based attacks and selling those "botnets" to spammers and other miscreants pleaded guilty Monday …

Version of Google in China Won't Offer E-Mail or Blogs — SHANGHAI, Jan. 24 - Google is bringing a special version of its powerful search engine to China, leaving behind two of its most popular features in the United States. — In an effort to cope with China's increasingly pervasive Internet controls …
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Backlash as Google shores up great firewall of China — · US search engine agrees to government restrictions — · Firm admits inconsistency with its corporate ethics — Jonathan Watts in Jinan — Google, the world's biggest search engine, will team up with the world's biggest censor …

A Growing Web of Watchers Builds a Surveillance Society — IT is strangely fitting that President Bush's no-warrant wiretapping came to light during the season of holiday gift buying, much of which took place online. — As Washington huffed and puffed over a new erosion of privacy …

As Gadgets Get It Together, Media Makers Fall Behind — AMID the cacophony of the sprawling Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, the main action had little to do with electronics. Sure, booth after booth claimed to have the biggest TV screen, the smallest music player and the niftiest wireless gizmo.

Dan Gillmore's Start-Up Lessons — Dan Gillmore has a fascinating open letter about why Bayosphere, his citizen media start-up, has stopped spending VC money. It's a frank and insightful piece on the emerging citizen journalism trend and the trials and tribulations of running a start-up.
Discussion:
CyberJournalist.net, TechBeat, ZDNet.com, Newsome.Org, Darwinian Web and mathewingram.com/work

MPAA admits to unauthorized movie copying — What happens when an organization that is best known for inveighing against the unauthorized copying of movies gets caught doing exactly that? The Motion Picture Association of America was caught with its pants down, admitting to making unauthorized copies …

How-To: Build a practical HTPC — We've seen a lot of home theater PCs latelyand being in need of a new workstation, we decide to build one of our own. We started planning by looking around to seewhat others had done. It would be fun to own a HD capable 2TB box , but we're notgoing to drop $7,400.

1999 Is Calling. It Wants Its Hype Back — from the where-have-we-seen-this-before... dept. — There's been lots of talk about the possibility of "Bubble 2.0," which (so far) appears to be taking a lot of ideas from the original dot com bubble, and using dynamic HTML to make it look cooler (it moves! in a browser!).