Chinese Woman Disrobes Online for Earthquake Donations

Steven Schwankert, IDG News Service

Known only by as "Xiaoyun," or "Little Cloud" in Mandarin, she has posted as many as 100 photos of herself in various poses ranging from clothed to in her underwear to seemingly naked.

However, she claims her motivation is not intended to publicize herself, but to keep eyes focused on her native province. "I am not from Shanghai, I'm from Sichuan, my hometown was hit by the recent earthquake. I have seen people from all over the country help Sichuan, and I am really happy. I hope everyone can continue donating for Sichuan, so I am posting some photos to encourage contributions."

Chinese bulletin board users have had mixed reactions to the photos. "What is with these post-90 girls, why don't they know anything about Marxist theory and work ethic? What do they hope to achieve taking everything off?" wrote one poster known as "First Light on South Street." "Post-90 girls" refers to young women born after 1990 who are often stereotyped for being materialistic and lacking morals.

"This just gets more and more crazy. I don't understand it," said a poster known as "pthxhy2008."

In May, police detained Gao Qianhui, a 21-year-old woman from Liaoning province, for making an online video of herself complaining about the lack of regular television programming during a three-day national mourning period. The mourning period commemorated the nearly 70,000 victims of the May 12 earthquake.

Xiaoyun is not the first person, in China or elsewhere, to use the Internet as a vehicle for self-promotion. In 2005, Shi Hengxia, better known as her online persona "Sister Lotus" ("Furong Jiejie" in Mandarin), achieved national notoriety for her blog posts and attempts at alluring photos. Chinese government regulators moved against her in 2006, keeping her off state-run television and asking Internet portals to keep her off of prominent positions on their sites.

One observer dismissed the woman's altruistic claims, saying she is just the latest person to be elevated to an Internet celebrity by posting racy photos of herself. But "the difference is perhaps that a lot more people in China seem to care," said Jeremy Goldkorn, editor of English-language media blog Danwei.org.

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MySpace revamping Web site to help boost usage

MySpace

Search capabilities are being improved, for instance, with results on other users, music, video, the general MySpace site and the Web at large sorted into separate tabs. The most relevant tab will be automatically highlighted, and searches on other users will include the ability to filter by location, gender or age and invite them to be friends.

The News Corp.-owned social-networking site also is updating its profile editor to make customization easier, while a new navigation bar provides easy access to messaging, friends and other community features from wherever users are, not just on the home page.

Tom Anderson, MySpace's co-founder and president, said the changes are part of an ongoing effort to shatter any perception that the site is only for teens and young adults. That meant finding ways to make it easier for the average Internet user to customize their personal profiles and find features like classifieds that might have gotten lost in the clutter.

"We felt like we reached a point where MySpace in its original incarnation had peaked in a way," Anderson said in an interview. "We were wondering how we can expand our market and appeal to new people. We looked at some of the reasons why someone might not use MySpace."

MySpace also plans to reduce the number of ads displayed in hopes of letting the higher-priced premium placements stand out.

The new features will begin to appear on MySpace Wednesday.

MySpace's leading rival, Facebook, also is undergoing a redesign.

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Ashanti's bloody videos spark protest

By Mariel Concepcion
13 minutes ago

Los Angeles

Led by civil-rights organization Project Islamic Hope and
its leader, Najee Ali, more than two dozen parents and
religious leaders gathered outside the West Coast
Universal/Motown offices on Tuesday (June 10) to voice their
displeasure with the videos.

One clip features a scorned lover, played by Ashanti, who
gets revenge on her cheating boyfriend by stabbing him to
death. Images include a murder scene with a bloody knife and
the boyfriend's body in a tub.

A separate promotional video includes a fake news reports
about a killing spree allegedly inspired by Ashanti's love
crime, as well as bloody walls with the words "black children
will die" smeared on them. Before the protest, the promo video
was viewable on TheWayThatILoveYou, but the site has since
been removed.

The site allowed visitors to send customized versions of
the promotional video called "Gotchagrams," with options to
input a friend's name, their "crime" and "weapon of choice."

"Following discussions with Ashanti, we have jointly
decided to remove the TheWayThatILoveYou website that hosts
the Gotchagram," reads a statement from Universal. "Ashanti and
her music have always been about self-empowerment and
addressing the issues that are most meaningful to her. We stand
by our artist and her creative choices."

"The Way That I Love You" is the first single from her new
album, "The Declaration," which debuts this week at No. 6 on
the Billboard 200.

Reuters/Billboard

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AT&T looking at charging heavy Internet users extra

By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology Writer
53 minutes ago

AT&T IncInternet provider

"A form of usage-based pricing for those customers who have abnormally high usage patterns is inevitable," spokesman Michael Coe said this week.

The top 5 percent of AT&T's DSL customers use 46 percent of the total bandwidth, Coe said. Overall bandwidth use on the network is surging, doubling every year and a half.

AT&T doesn't have any specific plans or fees to announce yet, Coe said.

Most cable companies have official or secret caps on the amount of data they allow subscribers to download every month. Time Warner Cable started a trial earlier this month in Beaumont, Texas, under which it will charge subscribers who go over their monthly bandwidth cap $1 per gigabyte.

Cable companies are at the forefront of usage-based pricing because neighbors share capacity on the local cable lines, and bandwidth hogs can slow down traffic for others. Phone companies have been less concerned about congestion because the phone lines they use to provide Internet service using DSL, or Digital Subscriber Line technology, aren't shared between neighbors, but AT&T is evidently concerned about congestion higher up in the network.

Those who mainly do Web surfing or e-mail use little data and have scant reason to pay attention to traffic caps. But those who download movies or TV, particularly in high definition, can hit the caps imposed by cable companies.

Download caps could put a crimp in the plans of services like Apple Inc.'s iTunes that use the Internet to deliver video. DVD-by-mail pioneer Netflix Inc. just launched a TV set-top box that receives an unlimited stream of Internet video to a TV set for as little as $8.99 per month.

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Yahoo ends all talks with Microsoft, shares plunge

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
55 minutes ago

Yahoo Inc.Microsoft CorpGoogle Inc

The news disclosed Thursday caused Yahoo shares to plunge 10 percent as investors abandoned hope that Microsoft would renew a nearly five-month quest to buy the Sunnyvale-based company.

While a stock sell-off is never welcome news for any company, Wall Street's disenchantment comes at a particularly bad time for Yahoo and its board of directors.

Yahoo is trying to fend off a shareholder mutiny led by activist investor Carl Icahn, who has vowed to replace the company's board because of the way the directors handled the Microsoft negotiations.

But Icahn has been hoping to engineer a sale to Microsoft, so some shareholders may be reluctant to support his attempted coup unless he can demonstrate his slate of directors has a better turnaround plan than the current board.

Icahn did not return phone calls seeking comment Thursday.

The fate of Yahoo's board is scheduled to be determined at the company's Aug. 1 annual meeting.

Yahoo tried to persuade Microsoft to revive its last takeover offer of $47.5 billion, or $33 per share, but the software maker wasn't willing to bid that much again, according to statements from the two companies.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer had withdrawn an oral offer of $33 per share after Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang asked for $37 per share in a May 3 meeting at a Seattle airport.

Shortly after that breakdown, Microsoft tried to convince Yahoo to sell its online search operations instead.

But Yahoo concluded that its search engine — the Internet's second most popular behind Google — was too important to sell piecemeal.

Yahoo said Microsoft "unequivocally" rejected the notion of buying the entire company in a meeting held Sunday.

Without explaining its logic, Microsoft said it believed a deal involving Yahoo's search engine would have been more valuable to Yahoo than if it had bought the entire company at $33 per share.

Yahoo now has to find a way to minimize the damage to its stock, which dropped $2.63, or 10.1 percent, to finish Thursday at $23.52.

With Microsoft apparently out of the picture, Yahoo is turning to Google for help.

Hoping to boost its revenue, Yahoo is expected to announce a deal that would allow Google to sell some of the ads displayed alongside the search results on its Web site.

In a two-week trial completed in April, Google demonstrated its technology could generate higher revenue than Yahoo's own system.

Both Yahoo and Google declined to comment on a possible deal late Thursday.

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Mozilla Ready to Launch Firefox 3 into Browser Wars

Jennifer LeClaire, newsfactor
1 hour, 4 minutes ago

public domainMicrosoft's Internet Explorer

Firefox already has more than 18 percent of the global market, according to Net Applications. With the release of Firefox 3, Mozilla could see a boost in downloads and market share. Microsoft's next version of Internet Explorer won't come to market until later this year.

"Firefox 3 is a very nice browser. It's still going to have to go up against Internet Explorer {Windows] and Safari [Mac], which have the home court advantage on their operating systems," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at JupiterResearch. "It shows that the browser market is anything but stagnant."

A Focus on Security

Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform. Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 15,000 updates, including some major re-architecting for improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. The result, Mozilla said, is a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot more under the hood to offer Web-site and Firefox add-on developers.

Mozilla begins with a focus on security. Users can click a Web site's favicon [icon] in the location bar to see who owns the site and to check if the connection is secure. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand, Mozilla said. When a site uses Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, the site's favicon will turn green and show the name of the company.

Firefox 3 also has malware protection to warn users when they arrive at sites known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or the like. And a new Web Forgery Protection service blocks the content of pages suspected as Web forgeries. New SSL error pages, Mozilla said, are clearer and stricter, and Firefox automatically disables old and insecure add-on and plug-in versions.

Add-ons that provide updates in an insecure manner will also be disabled. Firefox will inform antivirus software when downloading executables and the browser respects the Vista parental control setting for disabling file downloads.

Easier, More Personal

Mozilla also concentrated on making Firefox easier to use and more personalized. In terms of password management, that means an information bar replaces the old password dialog so users can save passwords after a successful login. The add-on whitelist has been removed, making it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer clicks. And a new download manager aims to makes it much easier to locate downloaded files. Users can also see and search the Web site where a file came from.

Firefox 3 allows users to add bookmarks from the location bar with a single click and associate keywords with bookmarks to sort them. Web applications, such as a favorite Webmail provider, can now be used instead of desktop applications to handle Web-site mail links. The Add-ons Manager can be used to download and install a Firefox customization from the thousands of add-ons available from Mozilla's Web site.

Gartenberg expects the competition to dominate browsing will continue. Even now, Microsoft is working on the release of IE 8 and Apple is seeding Safari 4. "Clearly, Web browsers are still very important, as important as they were 10 years ago, but just in a different way," he said. "The bottom line is no one is actually paying for a browser any more. A browser is free. It's something you give away in order to make money elsewhere."

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Google CEO: We Don't Know How To Monetize YouTube

Richard Koman, newsfactor
1 hour, 13 minutes ago

Ken AulettaGoogleCEO Eric SchmidtYouTube

In an event at Syracuse University's Newhouse School, Schmidt said it "seemed obvious" that owning YouTube should generate "significant amounts of money" for Google, but that has proven harder than expected. In any case, monetization is not Google's primary concern with YouTube at this point, as YouTube could lead to "the creation of a whole new industry."

And there are two facts on Google's side: "We know people are watching it" and "We have the luxury of time to invest."

Google's Goal: 'Change the World'

Google's goals are loftier than monetizing its products. "The goal of the company isn't to monetize everything. The goal is to change the world. We start from the perspective of what problems we do have," Schmidt said.

For instance, Google.org, the company's philanthropic arm, is devoted to causes such as renewable energy and preventing disease.

A Plan for Monetizing YouTube

Having said all that, Schmidt announced that 2008 is the year for YouTube to move into a profit center for Google. "In January or February, we had a big meeting" where Schmidt called on executives to move into moneymaking. "We have a revenue plan, a usage plan, a scale plan, a bandwidth plan," he said, noting that YouTube "is now the majority of outbound bandwidth. We had to retool the network."

Schmidt also emphasized Google's opposition to a combination of Microsoft and Yahoo. Microsoft's bid to take over Yahoo has failed, but Redmond is still seeking a strategic relationship between the companies. "We think an independent Yahoo is better for competition, for innovation and so forth," Schmidt said.

He acknowledged that Google has been seeking its own partnership deal with Yahoo, but said that shouldn't impact any dealings between Microsoft and Yahoo. "It would seem to me that the decision is up to Yahoo, not to Google," Schmidt said.

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