If one of the neighbours I don't really like would have plans to sell his house to be turned into a club, I would make him an offer twice the value of his house. This way, even if he wouldn't sell to me, he would probably ask more from its other buyer, and the whole deal may go down the drain for them. This is not really nice, but it's not really illegal either, and according to the last rumors, Microsoft may be doing something similar with their bid to buy Yahoo...

Microsoft, bluffing? Well, that wouldn't be their first time, and this time, even if they were serious, it seems the situation turned upside-down. According to analysts, while Microsoft's shares are slowly losing value, Yahoo is going right up. In the week that passed since they announced the bid, Microsoft's share price went down, so they may add some additional outstanding shares to the offer.But, what deal was trying to pull off Yahoo, in case Microsoft is really bluffing?

Global Equities Research's Trip Chowdhry thinks Amazon was on the way of buying Yahoo, and Microsoft's offer pushed up Yahoo's value just in time to fend off Amazon. Could this be true? We'll leave it in the "rumors" category for now, but it's something we may need to remember one day, because if it doesn't happen this month, or this year, one day such a thing may happen.

In my opinion, Yahoo must survive as a standalone company. They can pull it off, I am sure of that, but we first must see the official statement saying Microsoft's bid was rejected, and then... time will tell, as usual!

Cagliari Corporation is a company known for their trueSpace all-in-one 3D modeling, animation, and rendering software, with over 20 years of experience in the field. Their flagship product, trueSpace, was introduced to the Windows platform back in 1994, when version 1.0 became available, after previous releases for other platforms, but this is all history now, because Microsoft just bought the company...

Well, maybe Yahoo won't accept their bid, but since Microsoft got out on a shopping spree, they can't get back with empty pockets. To be honest, I wasn't expecting to see trueSpace's creators sell out anytime soon, but that's life, so let's see why did this happen and what should we expect in the future, shall we?

According to Roman Ormandy, Cagliari's CEO and founder, their development team will work with the Virtual Earth group, to improve Microsoft's Virtual Earth mapping system, while the company will become one of Microsoft's wholly owned subsidiaries.

"Now we will have more resources to rely on, larger market to consider and I hope more fun doing that.", concluded Ormandy, while Microsoft didn't make any additional comments yet, but I hope only one thing, that they won't drop trueSpace in favor of Virtual Earth 3D, especially since they are two different products, each with its own market.

Do you like to feel like someone is watching you all the time? Would you sleep well, if you were to know that even your dreams are carefully recorded and analyzed? I am not talking about paranoia here, because if RIAA manages to turn their crazy thoughts into reality, things could become worse with every new idea they may have, and all for "preventing piracy"!


This was supposed to be a free world, but RIAA's president Carry Sherman would support filters and spyware-like programs "to prevent piracy", even though they would break the private space of many people that don't have a single bit of pirated information on their computers.

According to Sherman, solutions for preventing piracy are just around the corner, and "Filtering is one of them. It isn't perfect but it works and has lots of advantages.". Really? So what about privacy? Obviously, he also said filtering could only be targeted towards coprighted works, and operate anonymously and automatically. Still not good enough for me...

I won't get into the matter any further for now, but I would like to ask one question - if this automatic and anonymous system is broken, and the filter is not working as supposed to at that time, who's going to be held responsible for people having their private data exposed?

Not so long ago, we were talking about Yahoo's plans regarding OpenID, and now, I just found out that a bunch of major IT companies have joined the OpenID Foundation, as board members. Since this gathering is something you don't get to see every day, this topic deserves our undivided attention, because there are exactly five huge companies together, companies that even these days are fighting one another on various battlefields, and it's good to see that OpenID managed to bring them together, somehow...

It's good to see Google, Microsoft and Yahoo together, especially being given the latest events related to them. Apart from the three giants above, the OpenID Foundation announced that IBM and VeriSign have also joined the board. We all must admit it's an impressive evolution, from a foundation started by six community members back in 2006 to this point, but let's see some more numbers now, shall we?

In early 2006, the number of OpenID-enabled URLs was smaller than 20 million, and there were only about 500 websites where people could use them. As we speak, the number of OpenIDs exceeded 250 millions already, and the number of websites accepting them as login IDs passed by 10,000 and keeps growing with each day. Now, that's what I call "healthy growth"!

These being said, it's only a matter of time until OpenID becomes as popular as Google, because just as finding what you're looking for saves faster helps, using a single ID to log on to any site you can think of allows you save time, but it's not limited to that. OpenID is much more than just saving time, and I am sure that what we have at this time is only the dawn of a new era...

Just as Microsoft's offer to buy them wasn't enough, Yahoo also gets cornered by hackers. It's not cute, and it's also completely wrong what's happening, but that's life. After all, Yahoo may take advantage of the whole media exposure it gets these days, regardless this hacking issue. Well, before drawing the conclusions, I think it's better to find out more about Yahoo's latest flaw, don't you agree?


According to the guys at Symantec, an exploit for Yahoo! Music Jukebox was released yesterday, and their honeypots picked up people using this flaw. The good part is that all detected exploits are copies of the public one, but, according to the same source "it won’t take long before the exploit is wrapped in an encoder in an attempt to make detection more difficult, however".

It seems all problems Yahoo has with these exploits are due to ActiveX bugs (well, since this is a technology coming from Microsoft, I finally found one good reason for Yahoo to accept their offer - ActiveX and IE-related bugs may be fixed faster than now...or maybe not!), and an attacker can install various programs on the target machine, by using them.

Yahoo didn't comment on this issue yet, and I am sure they have more important problems to think about now. Anyway, as soon as we find out more about this topic...we'll be there to give you all the info we get!