Valleywag
Sergey Brin
Sergey Brin
Recap
A week in which we sang the body electric
Sure, the English may have invented the national founding document, parliamentary democracy, the bicameral legislature and baited their bears to extinction with bulldogs. But who taught those bulldogs how to ride skateboards? Yanks from California. We just took one of the ten best fireworks displays from IAC's Vimeo and used Apple's genius Final Cut Pro to luma-key the footage over clips of skateboarding bulldogs found with Google search on YouTube. The audio quality isn't as good as it could be, but at least we're having more fun than evil foreigners — if not the olds.
America, Fuck Yeah
Mahalo enables Freedom of Speech
We hold these Truths to be self-evident: Wikipedia's Tyranny of the Mob sucks. Every time I run an item about Jimmy Wales, my page gets hacked. So what about Jason Calacanis's pursuit of happiness over at Mahalo? Former Uncov blogger and army of one Ted Dziuba has posted a step-by-step pictorial guide to practicing your First Amendment rights using the search index's new open editorial system. Try this on Wikipedia, and someone from the armed and unregulated Militia of Truth will likely kill your edits on sight. But on Mahalo, only Calacanis's paid mercenaries will bother to fix pages. At $10 an hour, there's no way they'll be able to keep up. Let freedom ring!
Your Privacy Is An Illusion
Pamphleteers at Google promise no privacy without representation
A few of the queen's subjects across the pond have taken issue with colonial incursions by Street View spies from Google. Privacy International will whinge to the United Kingdom's Information Commissioner if they don't get a prompt response from the Mountain View rebels about the company's privacy practices — all the activists have gotten so far is cheek: More »
cleantech
Steve Westly wants Akeena Solar to cash in on Gavin Newsom giveaway
Wealthy eBay co-founder Steve Westly, who campaigned for the Democratic Party's nomination to run against California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in the last gubernatorial election, has kept busy by investing in startups like Akeena Solar, and he's not just helping with venture capital. He's also using his campaign's email database to promote the company to San Franciscans, urging them to participate in Mayor Gavin Newsom's solar power rebate program — by buying products from Akeena Solar: More »
Clips
The Web's 10 best fireworks displays
A full half of our usual readership came to Valleywag on Christmas day last year. Even more showed up on New Year's Eve. We figure a good percentage of you will be stuck at the office today, too. So if you can't come out to see the Fourth of July fireworks tonight, we'll bring them to you, with the Web's 10 best fireworks videos. A surprising six come from IAC's Vimeo, proving that hosting expensive high-definition content is totally worth it at least once a year. All of them are guaranteed not to maim small children or start wildfires. More »
the olds
Olds take back Valleywag
Now that Valleywag's Straighty McStraights are out of the closet, it's time to stand up for another oppressed demographic: The Valley's middle-agers. No, not the professionally groomed gray-haired executives who hop between million-dollar gigs. I mean the kid-raising, house-owning, middle-managing people without whom none of the snotnose Web 2.0 brats would still have a job. I've been full-time at Valleywag three days, and the elder abuse is already insufferable. So: Send me your age-discrimination stories, your defamatory tales of underage "founders," your news items of interest to techies over 40. As for you Youngs, someone needs to tell you: Your code sucks, and we only keep John C. Dvorak around because he drives you insane.
Most Popular Stories
- Boing Boing's relationship with Violet Blue comes full circle (1,056 views, 6 comments)
- The Yahoo board members we'd most like to see fired (895 views)
- Neil Young to fix iTunes' sucky audio quality once and for all (852 views, 17 comments)
- Now we can breathe: Sarah Lacy has found a personal assistant (7 comments, 497 views)
- Wikimedia Foundation botches budget (7 comments, 406 views)
harassment
Debian death threats? Come on, send us the emails
"I was *shocked* to hear that one of our community has been the target of death threats as a thank you for her work," wrote Debian project leader Steve McIntyre, near the bottom of a long message about the results of a survey of Debian contributors. Now McIntyre tells The Register, "I have since discovered that several of our female developers and documenters were threatened. It was some kook in the U.S. who made quite a name from himself harassing women for supposedly destroying the free software movement." Valleywag would be happy to make the guy an even bigger name for himself. Got death threats? Send 'em in or just post in the comments.
clay felker
Blogging Old Media KILLS!
Forty years before Valleywag, a middle-aged man named Clay Felker took over a newspaper supplement and turned it into New York magazine, deliberately breaking the rules in order to bring back readers who were abandoning reading to watch more TV. Felker died Tuesday at age 82. The New York Times obituary — I'm sure they've been lovingly crafting it for years — is that rare article worth reading beyond the first 100 words. You think Perez Hilton's nuts? Read up on Felker's career.
More »
Caption Contest
Yahoo rents surf simulator for summer party
A faux-surfer bails on a compress-air wave at the summer party held on Yahoo's Sunnyvale campus yesterday. Have a better caption? The best one will become the new headline. Yesterday's winner: "Hotmail? Hot bride!" by sarahfu67. (Photo by Yodel Anecdotal)
Americans resign themselves to crappy Internet connections
If the latest study from Pew is any indication, most Americans have resigned themselves to what passes for broadband in the United States. 72 percent of cable and 62 percent of DSL subscribers are happy with their connection speeds, with only 24 percent demanding more bandwidth. Also, the digital divide is getting wider, with fewer lower-income households paying for cable or DSL plans. [GigaOm] (Photo by secretlondon123)
Overreactards
Q: Does Texas law now require PC repair techs to get a private investigator's license? A: Sometimes
Internet libertarians and Texas-haters are eagerly piling on a new Texas law that they claim requires all PC repair techs to obtain a private investigator's license. Infurating? Yes. True? Not really. The bill's author has spent the day sighing to reporters that the law amends existing occupations code by defining any vendor who performs investigate services on computer data to be a private investigator. Recovering your own hard drive data? No license required. Snooping your wife's email off her Mac? That's not tech support, it's private investigation. But don't let me stop you from railing against this Orwellian clusterfuck and its chilling effects and how goddammit, if we all carried firearms this never would have happened. The relevant section of the bill: More »
Startups
Will Ferrell promotes latest movie online with least funny clip ever
Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly made an appearance at IBeatYou, the online video competition site founded by basketball star Baron Davis and Jessica Alba baby daddy Cash Warren, to promote the comedy duo's new flick Step Brothers. Ferrell calls out Adam McKay, his production partner and cofounder of FunnyOrDie, another LA-based online video startup, to participate in the staring contest Ferrell kicks off with his costar. More »
Googleplex
Google retrenches in Dallas and Denver
This is not how the Google's story supposed to go: Google is closing offices in Dallas and Denver. The locations may well be duplicative — a Google Maps search shows three Dallas-area offices — but it doesn't fit the narrative of relentless, candy-colored expansion around the globe. What's next — overcharging employees for needlessly luxurious childcare? Oh, wait — that already happened.
copyfight
EMI sues Hi5 and VideoEgg for listening to EMI
Record label EMI may have tired of suing individual file sharers for copyright infringement. But a number of music-industry plaintiffs, all partners and subsidiaries of EMI, are suing social network Hi5 and advertising startup VideoEgg in New York Southern District Court for copyright infringement. According to the complaint [PDF]: More »
100-word version
Boing Boing's unapologetic eleventh-hour apologia
Boing Boing's readers, hopped up on free-speech rhetoric, continue to find the tech-culture blog's act of unpublishing unspeakable. Hoping to put the Internet's most enduring drama llama this month to bed, the Los Angeles Times rounded up four members of Boing Boing's staff yesterday for a late-night confab. The result is transcribed here and there, but for those about to launch into a three-day weekend, we salute you with only the most wonderful bits, perfect for around-the-barbeque reblogging. It is at once brilliant and brain-numbing in its inconclusiveness. But if the answer to bad speech is more speech, why not answer an act of unpublishing with more nonwords? More »
The real secret of Steve Jobs's success
Everyone likes to talk up Apple's innovative design. It's a much more attractive story than the real reason why Apple has come to dominate first the MP3 player market, and soon, the smartphone market: Ruthless haggling with suppliers to lock up crucial components, shutting out rivals. Apple is buying 50 million 8-gigabyte memory chips from Samsung — the kind used in its entry-level iPhone 3G — and Samsung is cutting off other customers as a result of tight supplies. [DigiTimes]
Politics
IBM's new antitrust muddle
European regulators are looking into whether IBM is unfairly dominating the mainframe market. What, is this 1968? IBM's purchase of Platform Solutions, a 36-person rival which made cheaper versions of IBM's mainframes, would normally be too small to rouse antitrust inquiries. But, amid accusations that IBM bought the firm to quash a rival, regulators are looking into it nonetheless. I'm actually disinclined to believe the conspiracy theories. IBM, under official antitrust oversight for decades, surely doesn't want to invite government officials back in. More »
Feature
Dell and Sony discover gold in the old
A relentless neophilia is Silicon Valley's signature characteristic. One must have a new iPhone, a new Twitter, a new electric car. You're either in beta or in the grave. That's why I'm intrigued by two decisions by Dell and Sony. Dell has figured out a way to wriggle around Microsoft's licensing rules and still sell its discontinued Windows XP operating system. Sony, meanwhile, is profitably selling its nine-year-old PlayStation 2 videogame console in markets like India. This just isn't done. More »
1:00 PM on Thu Jul 3 2008
By Owen Thomas
498 views,
1 comment
Latest by Shadowlayer: "That's exactly what Nintendo has done with the Wii" Yeah yeah, except that the Gamecube was $99 in 2004!, while the Wii is $250. Back when it was released almost 2 years ago iSupply did an analisys on the hardware and found more »
Good help is so hard to find
Web entrepreneuse Patricia Handschiegel, shown here with Valleywag editor Jackson West posing as her personal shopper, is looking for someone to serve as shrink, chef, personal assistant, filling-station attendant, agent, booker, and cheerleader. In other words, a boyfriend. [Patricia Handschiegel]
Catenfreude
I Can Has Cheezburger CEO allergic to cats
Consider this: Ben Huh runs a site that takes submissions of stupid cat pictures with pidgin English captions written across them. That site, I Can Has Cheezburger, pulls about 2.2 million pageviews a day. Like the HotOrNot guys — who sold their site for $10 million earlier this year — Huh is a lucky guy who's making bank off an obnoxiously simple idea. The delicious irony: According to the above excerpt from an interview Huh gave with Internet Superstar, he's completely allergic to cats. "If I pet a cat, which I can't resist, I immediately start crying. I get itchy in the face. I look like a diseased cheeseburger guy." Ben, we're oh so sorry to hear that. The full interview is embedded below. More »
sex trade
Yes, there's sex online after 50
The 50-and-up set form one of the fastest growing demographics of those looking for love online. That nugget of hope, care of former Match.com CEO Jim Safka, comes tucked into Newsweek's Sex & the Single Boomer. While the Youngs, who've been barely weaned off of cruising Facebook for casual sex, may eyeroll at Web 1.0 matchmaking, and the Olds themselves scoff at the profitability of Web-based matchmaking, it looks they're going at it as sure as the kids today, with their Twitter hookups and their 150-mile-radius locally sourced organic condoms. The real difference? Baby boomers got over talking about it decades ago. (Photo via foundphotos)
We Read Twitter So You Don't Have To
Now we can breathe: Sarah Lacy has found a personal assistant
So you know how in Sex and the City: The Movie, Carrie Bradshaw interviews, like, a bazillion young women trying to find a personal assistant before finally deciding on the sassy, "urban," but safe Jennifer Hudson? No? OK, well, if you saw the movie it was you'd know it was such an ordeal. And then you'd have sympathy for famous reporter and author Sarah Lacy — who, like Bradshaw, just found herself a personal assistant and sent a Twitter message about it last night. She writes:More »
Politics
