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Methinks you are the clueless one here. The important part is indeed that Bing is essentially using Google results to boost its own accuracy.

No, not at all. They are using actual user behavior as a signal to boost accuracy. If the user select to click on the link Google says is the least relevant one, Bing will connect that page the user choose with the query, despite Google in effect recommending otherwise. And it has nothing to do with Google being the service on the page at that time, they are looking at actual user behaviour across services through this toolbar. You can discuss if they should do this, for several reasons, but the copy-allegation from Google is clearly wilfully put out there to create this smoke screen overreaction. Which make it look like Google actually are becoming nervous about having a competitor with now close to 1/3rd of US queries and growing. Until now Google have not had to deal with a real competitor to their search dominance.

From wikipedia: "On August 2, 2010, Xfire was acquired by Titan Gaming"
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/02/exclusive-titan-gaming-takes-xfire-off-viacoms-hands/

My weekly gaming group still uses Xfire exclusively (the persistent group voice chat is very good).

It's pretty much the same concept as buying a gift voucher for a store. If Zynga will honour their agreement, and the customer thinks it's worth the money, I don't see what the big deal is.

Right... IF

IF the financial world would have honoured their agreement and would have not wrap toxic mortgages in triple-A bonds to be sold to customers that thought the triple-A rating is real, then we wouldn't have spoken now about world economic crisis.

IF the same financial world suddenly see Zynga-and-friends as a way to get around regulations and escape in an "unregulated virtual world", given that your salary in the bank and pension-funds is as "virtual" as the Zynga-dollars, what is going to happen them (your salary, savings and pension-fund) when "game" gets abused?
You think Zynga (the creator of ScamVille) will have any care about their "virtual economy" as long as they are profiting?... in a real-world in which other "virtual mints" compete for the "customer share"? You think the govts will bail-out again if the Zynga economy crashes and bury under the rubles a good chuck of real world "virtual-money"?

Since it already started, it scares the 5#!t out of me to see that a real-world judge protects them!

I remember the comparisons of Theora Vs "H.264" and the only one even remotely favorable for Theora was actually underhandedly using H.263 for most of the comparisons. If you need a citation beyond the one I just gave, notice how this page never mentions the fact that that is H.263, but instead propagandizes that it is H.264 in their comparison images (directly copied from the first citation, which does at least honestly note that it is H.263)

Sorry. H.264 is miles ahead of Theora, *especially* at low bit rates, as you can see here, take note of the 486Kbit still images halfway down. On the left is 1Mbit Theora, on the right is 486Kbit Theora, and in the middle are the best images... 486Kbit H.264

At the very least it can be entertaining.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/01/bing-google-fight/

Apple never ran out and hired a billion people to write apps - yet they have more.

Sure, it wasn't Apple directly, they were definitely involved: http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/06/kleiner-perkins-anounces-100-millioin-ifund-for-iphone-applications/

That said, I do agree that Google needs to step up to the plate and curate their Market, if only to prevent Amazon from stealing all the thunder with their own appstore.

If you can't identify an Apple fanboy, chances are that you are one.

Here are two of the most-well-known ones:
http://techcrunch.com/author/tcparislemon/
http://daringfireball.net/

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/11/android-ice-cream-sandwich/ Andy Rubin confirmed it as Ice Cream Sandwich, 2.4.

If you read the article, the big boys have no problem with this

Word on the street is Zynga spent months fighting it, and threatened to leave facebook entirely -- that's why they launched http://www.farmville.com/ Of course, both Zynga and Facebook would take a huge profit hit without each other, so the odds of a divorce were always slim.

In fact, here's some evidence that the fight was bitter indeed

Everyone has a problem with someone taking 30% of the revenue. Lord knows Zynga's other payment processors never charged that much.

If we are just talking about photos, there are even more options. A Flickr Pro subscription allows unlimited photos for $25/yr with (optional) sharing of photos.

Until Yahoo kills the service and deletes all your data.

But I'm sure they'd never kill Flickr the way they killed
Yahoo Photos and
Yahoo Video
and deleted everyone's data, right?

Yahoo happily deleted dead people's personal webpages which cost them nothing in terms of bandwidth or processing power.
Most of pages were lame but they were still someone's page.

Until Yahoo kills the service and deletes all your data. But I'm sure they'd never kill Flickr the way they killed Yahoo Photos and Yahoo Video and deleted everyone's data, right?

Well of course this could (and eventually probably will happen), but there's nowhere absolutely safe for a physical copy either. Best to have at least one of each in my opinion. The odds of your house getting broken into or catching on fire or your backup HD just plain dying - not an everyday event but certainly well within the realm of reasonable threat. The odds of Flickr being shut down without notice or mistakenly deleting your account - also possible. The odds of both of those happening the same week? Comfortably low, IMHO.

If we are just talking about photos, there are even more options. A Flickr Pro subscription allows unlimited photos for $25/yr with (optional) sharing of photos.

Until Yahoo kills the service and deletes all your data. But I'm sure they'd never kill Flickr the way they killed Yahoo Photos and Yahoo Video and deleted everyone's data, right?

I have recently changed my default search engine in Chromium to Yahoo because of Google's annoying Instant Preview "feature" that can't be turned-off.

You can turn off Google Instant using the Settings link.
(and Yahoo search is powered by Bing now)

Hey joker, read this: http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/18/apple-q4-2010-earnings/

You're either screwing with everyone in order to aid in lowering the price share and buy... or if you're for real, you my friend, is where my profits are coming from.

Thank ya!

Did you ever stop to consider that no one is suing these folks because they had no one with money behind it? Google is hardly starving in that regard. It makes WebM a very attractive target now that it has deep pockets behind it, which may be what folks have been waiting on all along.

I still fail to see how removing support for an industry standard codec is good for end users. All this will do is strengthen Flash, which is completely proprietary, which they failed to remove. The fans claim that doing so is the wrong time because Flash is so prevelent on the Web. I hate to break it to them but H.264 is the most popular video format on the web as most flash utilizes it under the covers as well.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/01/h-264-66-percent-web-video/

Why keep flash? This is pure politics.

I already have H.264 support bought and paid for, and now my favorite browser wont' support it, which leaves me with the chore of finding another browser. Google could have simply used the OS support if it's there but they also took that choice away as well (all for my own good I'm sure...)

Google is above reproach these days and the fans are just stumbling over themselves to defend this action claiming it promptes FOSS when all it will do is line Google's pockets in the end. If they were all about FOSS they would have removed Flash support from Chrome as well (it's still bundled in and will continue to be since there has been no mention of removing it).

http://www.osnews.com/story/23081/Google_To_Bundle_Flash_with_Chrome_Yup

H.264 is competely free to use when it's not used for profit. It's an excellent quality codec with a huge hardware supported base. All irrelevant and again for our own good apparently.

Google has become just as frightening if not more so than Microsoft ever was. Microsoft was at least up front with it's MS brand Evil. Google has found that a little good PR goes a long way when the end result still sends money back to the company coffers. They have become wrapped around far too much of the internet in a way that should scare the hell out of folks, but no one pays any attention because they offer 'free' services. I have to wonder when it will come back and bite us in the ass.

This appears to be more about Google's pissing match with Apple and less about FOSS. I just wish Google had picked a better bed mate than Adobe.

The funny thing is that in the case of both Microsoft and Apple is that a browser plugin is entirely unnecessary.

It's not actually a plugin in the narrow sense of the word - they're using standard extensibility points for codecs in both IE and Safari. Read the "Update" part in the original article.

It's not a browser plugin in the same way as Flash, or that recent Microsoft thingy to play H.264 in Firefox. It's just codecs. Quote:

The HTML tag specification actually provides a capability known as canPlayType. Web developers use this capability to see which codecs are supported by the particular browser and it is completely transparent to them whether the codec was shipped natively in the browser or later installed by an end user. Safari and IE9 provide a way for users to install support for additional codecs via this capability. So basically web page developers still write their site based on the standards and all this “plug-in” does is add a capability to the browser in the context of what is permitted by the standard.

So basically it's just a QuickTime filter for Safari, and whatever IE uses (DirectShow?) for IE.

seriously? google will not ship h264 with chrome due to 'lack of openess' but will happily include flash with chrome (which, incidentally has no problems playing h264 videos - what do you think iplayer, youtube, etc. are serving?) ? hypocritical much?

I guess you never used AOL and saw all the ads and shit. I guess you don't know that AOL sold plenty of personal info to advertisers not even counting leaks. If you don't want the AOL of today to sell your personal information you must opt out.

I don't know if it was legal obligations or what

Apple probably wasn't willing to concede control of iOS to Verizon. Now that iOS is a hit, Apple has bargaining power to retain control of the platform.

Android, however, is very much under the control of the carriers.

First to market they are not. PayPal has had this same functionality for almost a year now: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/15/paypal-iphone-app-bump/ - Copycatting, not innovating.

Well that is may be because that among publicly traded companies, Apple is second only to Exxon-Mobile in Market Cap, and is ahead of both MS and Google.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/03/apple-300-billion/

When you have $300 billion in market cap the possibility ALWAYS exists that what you do can be a game changer.

I find Blekko.com to be decent.

Quoted from a techcrunch article

In addition to providing regular search capabilities like Google’s, Blekko allows you to define what it calls “slashtags” and filter the information you retrieve according to your own criteria. Slashtags are mostly human-curated sets of websites built around a specific topic, such as health, finance, sports, tech, and colleges. So if you are looking for information about swine flu, you can add “/health” to your query and search only the top 70 or so relevant health sites rather than tens of thousands spam sites. Blekko crowdsources the editorial judgment for what should and should not be in a slashtag, as Wikipedia does. One Blekko user created a slashtag for 2100 college websites. So anyone can do a targeted search for all the schools offering courses in molecular biology, for example. Most searches are like this—they can be restricted to a few thousand relevant sites. The results become much more relevant and trustworthy when you can filter out all the garbage.

Since we do not have that problem today why are you seeking to "solve" it?

We Don't?

Many ISPs and other companies have been rattling about wanting to do pretty much everything that the concept of Net Neutrality is against for years. Up until 2005, Net Neutrality was pretty much law. It was a Supreme Court case that undid it.

As another example, maybe you remember in 2006 when AOL blocked all emails that mentioned www.dearaol.com.

While what the FCC passed as "Net Neutrality" was not in fact Net Neutrality in anything but name, do not claim that it is solving an "imaginary" problem because that is outright wrong.

And in other news, Apple TV is selling like hot cakes

Selling a million devices versus the sum total of TVs sold is actually very disappointing.

And in other news, Apple TV is selling like hot cakes. It just shows, like always before, that casual people don't really care about the geeky things those devices can offer. The older I get the more I can side with them too - when I was a teenager I had lots of energy and motivation to play around with computers and other technical stuff I had. Then I got a job, a girlfriend, went to travel the world and saw how much you're giving up by spending so much time with that. In the end, it's not really even that interesting.

Now I also just want devices that work great. I don't really have any desire to play around with them, apart from the occasional configuration to make things smoother for me. But there is a limit for that, and I'm not gonna spend hours and days coding something to accomplish it. This is also why general population will never turn to use Linux if something doesn't change, and can you really blame them?

Apple TV selling a million times over the course of 4 months sounds very disappointing to me.

And in other news, Apple TV is selling like hot cakes. It just shows, like always before, that casual people don't really care about the geeky things those devices can offer. The older I get the more I can side with them too - when I was a teenager I had lots of energy and motivation to play around with computers and other technical stuff I had. Then I got a job, a girlfriend, went to travel the world and saw how much you're giving up by spending so much time with that. In the end, it's not really even that interesting.

Now I also just want devices that work great. I don't really have any desire to play around with them, apart from the occasional configuration to make things smoother for me. But there is a limit for that, and I'm not gonna spend hours and days coding something to accomplish it. This is also why general population will never turn to use Linux if something doesn't change, and can you really blame them?

What happened to the Nexus One? is it even getting Gingerbread?

Yes
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/07/android-gingerbread-nexus-one/

Oh it turns out that they're looking to sell it anyway:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/17/yahoo-trying-to-sell-del-icio-us-not-to-shut-it-down/

As usual Slashdot gets it just a bit wrong.

Curious this comes just a couple days after RMS warned us about the dangers of entrusting others with our personal or corporate data: http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/14/stallman-cloud-computing-careless-computing/

Tech Crunch and All Things D. Sounds like the Yahoo folks aren't too happy about the word leaking out - "whoever it is, gone!

With Yahoo shutting down Del.icio.us, where will we bookmark things such as these delicious Christmas Lights ... HO-HO-HO! ;-)

Facebook allows you to download almost all of the content from your profile, including messages and photos so this is less of a problem now.

it seems that donations to wikileaks are still being processed by this startup: http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/12/08/wikileaks-continues-to-fund-itself-via-tech-startup-flattr/

I would think that there is no reason Kindle should continue with their format otherwise they are bound to lose.

"To badly paraphrase an old American anti-drug commercial, "Eric Schmidt, Microsoft learned it by watching you!"

Microsoft was similarly appalled by this kind of behavior a decade ago when Eric Schmidt (at Novell and Sun) and other Microsoft competitors funded some shadowy organizations like ProComp, CCIA, and ECIS to run backdoor lobbying campaigns against Microsoft. They even funded the EXACT SAME LAWYER, Gary Reback, to fly around the United States and Europe lobbying antitrust bodies to file suits against Microsoft.

After years of battling these kinds of tactics, Microsoft learned the most important lesson about them: they work. If you want to voice your moral outrage at these tactics, however, you'd be better served by targeting the teacher, not the student." by some commenter of a webpage.

The owner of Foundem.co.uk who is going after Google is the same guy who lobbied to bring antitrust against Microsoft, but all the comment section posters and news organizations avoided this fact, causing comment section posters to think this guy didn't have a valid point because he must have been funded by Microsoft (which I think even if he was funded by Microsoft this is irrelevant since he WENT AFTER Microsoft). Foundem is a vertical search engine, it was down ranked because it competes with Google not because it's a spammy site (like all domain-name parked websites Google makes money off from advertisements). Go look for yourself, it's just another eBay.

Say you don't care about any of that:
"Today we have zero market share in Chrome OS because it is not shipping. Imagine a scenario where we got to 80% market share with a free product, which I think is unlikely. Let's say we go into the evil room and decide to start charging. A competitor would be able to take the code that we had and continue to offer our business model, while our new business model runs us into the ground. That is why open source provides a protection." Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google
http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/07/schmidt-we-have-not-yet-found-the-evil-room/

Emphasis mine. First of all, collecting personal information is a cost, just like advertisements, so it is by definition NOT free. Second, when did charging for something make you evil? Why is giving us "free" stuff, or shoving it in our face (you can't escape YouTube etc.) and laughing all the way to the bank, hoping people lose their jobs (Chrome OS engineer said this) and bullying competitors (Skyhook Vs Andy Rubin Head of Android) better than paying for something legitimately and not lying to our faces with false advertising? We know the answer, it's not. I love Schmidt's definition of "evil"

Oh and off topic: Google paid developers to port their iPhone apps to Android, but every news organisation has glossed over this fact and making out Microsoft is desperate with Window Phone 7. There's nothing unethical about paying developers to port application to your platform.

For the record, I hate Microsoft and run Ubuntu 10.10.

"Question: Why exactly would you WANT this?"

Seriously? I guess you're serious, but this comes from the "why do I want a color screen/camera/internet/touchscreen on my phone" crowd.

Here's a shocker: people play games on their phones. Angry Birds has been purchased by 6.5 million people. That's a lot, and that's not even a good game. EA makes iPhone games like SimCity, Need for Speed, Spore and Command and Conquer Red Alert. Square Enix makes a little game called Final Fantasy. Yes, that Final Fantasy. the real final fantasy. Even small developers are making a million dollars a month off iPhone games.

Sony has no choice: iPhone had 19% of the portable software revenue in 2009 compared to the PSP's 11%. That's amazing for a device that was only 2 years old at the time, that's triple the 5% the iPhone had in 2008.

As for batteries running dead... well, that happens. You can run down your battery watching Youtube videos or constantly checking Facebook. The "think about the battery!" excuse is played out, people said the same thing when they added color screens to phones and again when cameras were added and again when giant LCD touchscreens were added. If you don't like it, don't buy a smartphone or buy a case that charges the phone.

That's ironic.
1) There's good evidence the CIA *are* behind it.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27005.htm

2) Elected officials (Joe Liberman) took credit for it
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/01/amazon/
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/12/how_lieberman_got_amazon_to_drop_wikileaks.php

Google already sunk a lot of money in the case

And, essentially, won.

which they should want to recover from the plaintiff's efforts at harassing Google

No, they shouldn't. Sunk costs are gone. Making decisions based on trying to redeem sunk costs is bad decision-making.

Further, by winning -- and in an appellate decision, as the Borings unsuccessfully appealed the dismissal of the other claims they filed in this case besides the trespassing claim -- on all the other charges, they've won about as much as they could hope too from their legal expenditures in this case.

At any rate, its irrelevant. While TFS and even TFA don't make this clear, the source article linked in TFA notes that this was a consent decree, meaning the parties agreed to the judgement (after the Boring's failed in their appeal of the dismissal of the claims other than trespassing that they filed, and failed in their attempt to get the Supreme Court to hear a further appeal after they lost at the appellate level), and so there is nothing for Google to appeal.

Our current commander-in-chief is the guy that signed the previous warrant-less wiretap pardon. Link

This is a democracy. You people voted for it all, now bend over and take it.

Yes in the beginning users had options, now Google has massive market share and not many alternatives out there. Users are locked in and Google is expanding into new verticals highlighted by recent moves into Fashion, and Travel (amongst others). When growth in display ads are not meeting quotas, Google has to look into taking over new markets and easy to reach search verticals. Makes it very dangerous for freedom of information if Google is also plugging its own products.

Am I hallucinating or was something similar from Apple - for a rear-mounted clickwheel - mentioned on this very site a year or two back?

Here and Here.

As if the patent wars aren't already at full-pitch.

I'll take that bet:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/09/google-automated-cars/

In all seriousness, this is vindication for Apple's integrated model. It's been pointed out for a while now that the Android experience is under control of the carriers, which is why they like Android so much. With iOS, you can get your updates directly from Apple the moment you connect your device to iTunes.

This could be just the beginning of the same kind of security headaches that Microsoft endured for years with Windows. The hassle isn't just responding to vulnerabilities; it's also getting those updates installed on people's devices in the first place. From the article:

Google has developed a fix for this flaw and has stated they will fix it in a maintenance release for the upcoming Gingerbread (2.3) release. That's great, but means even the most modern of devices will be exposed to attack for a month or more and older Android phones may be vulnerable in perpetuity. Apple and RIM do not face these types of issues because they have a limited selection of hardware shipping and provide OS updates only for devices they manufacture.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/01/lars-rasmussen-why-i-quit_n_776807.html
http://gizmodo.com/5690405/facebook-email
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/29/rasmussen-facebook-google/
http://www.google.com/

This predates MMO games. Pokemon ("Gotta Catch 'Em All") produced the same mindset. There were predecessors to Pokemon, but it was the first one to get huge. Arguably, Wizards of the Coast introduced this genre with "Magic, the Gathering" in 1990. Collectable cards have been around for about a century, but they were usually tied to real-world sports. Wizards of the Coast detached them from that world and made then stand alone.

Wizards of the Coast, however, managed not to be slimeballs. Zynga (Farmville, Mafia Wars, etc.) has a slimy history.

What Facebook are trying to trademark is the use of the word "face" in electronic applications (Telecommunication as an alternative word for "online") offering social (i.e. facebook like) applications. This make a lot of sense. Just like many other generic terms used in a non trivial way. the word "face" is not descriptive in the way that "myface" describes (literally) an application where people may comment and interact socially. This is why also Apple's FaceTime will not breach the trademark, as it is using the word face literally (enabling the other side of the conversation to see your face) and not referring to the word Face in the non-dictionary meaning of it, which is attributed to facebook's phenomena (namely social networking). This doesn't give facebook the rights for the use of the word face for a face recognition software, or for other non related use. I personally agree that facebook should get the rights for the usage of the word face in the "social network" meaning, as they created this meaning, and protect them from people launching services named faceXXX or XXXface that may indicate relationship to facebook. This is just like caterpillar trademarking the word "cat" for construction and manufacturing equipment (but not getting rights for CatFeeder, or LolCats).

It's fine as long as you buy the carriers' respective rip-off box products, microcells that utilize your internet connection, and relieve their towers of actually having to provide you the wireless service you paid for.

All while still billing you the same rate for "wireless" air time and cell phone data, even though your own wired internet connection has to be used to feed the backhaul for these microsite devices.

So you pay up front for the privilege of running a microsite, to make up for the carriers' crappy networks, and you don't get any discount against cell phone costs for using your own cell tower

Now... if you are the carrier in this very lucrative situation, why the hell would you want to improve your network, or let people run boosters?

It will cut into your bottom line... that is, unless the competition is perceived as improving and having a much better network.

The "competition" factor is easily excluded by making exclusive deals with cell phone manufacturers and offering features people will drool over. People will tolerate your network if it seems to work at all, just to get those fancy devices that you have locked into your network exclusively, through deals with third parties.

Just more evidence that consumers have become sheep.

I liked this comment and quoted it on techcrunch, hope you don't mind. http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/15/facebook-messaging/

Original announcement of the project:

http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/21/we-want-a-dead-simple-web-tablet-help-us-build-it/

Prototype A:

http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/30/update-on-the-techcrunch-tablet-prototype-a/

Prototype B:

http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/19/techcrunch-tablet-update-prototype-b/

After this, the story gets murky. According to Arrington, his "partners" (Rathakrishnan - Fusion Garage) changed their mind and decided that they wanted to cut him out of the project. Who knows what really happened.

Some commentary here: http://gawker.com/5415320/the-sad-premature-death-of-the-techcrunch-tablet

and here

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/TechCrunch-CrunchPad-Dead-Chandra-Rathakrishnan,9174.html

Original announcement of the project:

http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/21/we-want-a-dead-simple-web-tablet-help-us-build-it/

Prototype A:

http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/30/update-on-the-techcrunch-tablet-prototype-a/

Prototype B:

http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/19/techcrunch-tablet-update-prototype-b/

After this, the story gets murky. According to Arrington, his "partners" (Rathakrishnan - Fusion Garage) changed their mind and decided that they wanted to cut him out of the project. Who knows what really happened.

Some commentary here: http://gawker.com/5415320/the-sad-premature-death-of-the-techcrunch-tablet

and here

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/TechCrunch-CrunchPad-Dead-Chandra-Rathakrishnan,9174.html

Original announcement of the project:

http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/21/we-want-a-dead-simple-web-tablet-help-us-build-it/

Prototype A:

http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/30/update-on-the-techcrunch-tablet-prototype-a/

Prototype B:

http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/19/techcrunch-tablet-update-prototype-b/

After this, the story gets murky. According to Arrington, his "partners" (Rathakrishnan - Fusion Garage) changed their mind and decided that they wanted to cut him out of the project. Who knows what really happened.

Some commentary here: http://gawker.com/5415320/the-sad-premature-death-of-the-techcrunch-tablet

and here

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/TechCrunch-CrunchPad-Dead-Chandra-Rathakrishnan,9174.html