Stories related to: Internet

Yahoo CEO Terry Semel is out. In a surprise announcement, Yahoo said today that co-founder Jerry Yang will take over from Semel as CEO, who will step down immediately. The embattled Semel, who's been the target of recent shareholder ire, will stick around as non-executive chairman; Susan Decker, former head of advertising, is set to become Yahoo's new prez. More »

Documentarian Michael Moore has a feverishly anticipated takedown of the American health-care industry set to open in two weeks—but try telling that to the internet. Sicko went viral this weekend as cinematic hackers managed to post the two-hour film in its entirety on YouTube, probably from a pirated DVD. More »

Online auction powerhouse eBay broke a multi-million-dollar "keyword" advertising deal with Google, ostensibly after the search engine threw a party in Boston that crowded an eBay conference. But the boycott on search-driven spots also comes as Google's online payment feature Checkout elbows in on eBay-owned PayPal's territory. More »

Texas officials using ID information ceded by MySpace have nabbed seven sex offenders trolling the online networking site. Six were arrested for violating parole, which barred them from using the internet, and another had failed to register as a sex offender with the local police. The seven men had been convicted of assaulting kids as young as 4 years old. More »

Google promised to step up its privacy protection yesterday, after European officials rebuked the search giant for storing data that could reveal political opinions, religious beliefs, and sexual preferences. Google will limit the amount of time it retains user data to 18 months and will "radically design" its cookie system, reducing their expiration time from 30 years to as low as 2. More »

Investors railed yesterday against Yahoo Inc.'s management team in an unusually rowdy session of the search engine's annual shareholders' meeting. Angry investors interrogated CEO Terry Semel over his $107.5M paycheck and the company's slumping stock price, which fell 9% in the last year. A third of shareholders mutinied in protest, voting against the company's otherwise uncontroversial proposed slate of directors. More »

Google ranks dead last among Internet sites for protecting user privacy, a new study by watchdog group Privacy International concludes. In its 6-month analysis of top e-commerce, social networking, e-mail, and search sites, PI singled out Google for what it called a "entrenched hostility to privacy," citing fuzzy corporate practice around key issues such as how it handles its users' data. More »

Cutting ties with the Catholic Church is, in theory, a relatively simple matter known as "debaptism." More and more Italians who aren't worried about the Vatican's formal stance on what it calls "an act of apostasy, heresy or schism" are finding the documents they need online. Wired considers the digital angle on an ecclesiastical process. More »

A militant Islamic website says it will release a video showing the capture last month of three American soldiers. The video shows the kidnapping as well as the ID cards of the two soldiers who are still missing, says an organization that monitors militant websites. The third soldier was later found dead in the Euphrates River. More »

The vaunted arrest earlier this week of Robert Soloway, the "Spam King" from Seattle, won't do as much to stem the flood of  junk email as the feds want to think it will, says Andy Greenberg in Forbes. The clients who paid to use his 'zombie" computers to forward their marketing pitches will just find another spammer. More »

The feds arrested one of the world's worst spammers yesterday—a guy so prolific they claimed net-users worldwide would notice a drop in junkmail as a result of his detention. Robert Alan Soloway used infected "zombie" computers to send out millions of messages, and continued to do so even after Microsoft won a $7 million judgment against him in 2005, the AP reports. More »

Accused terrorist and viral Internet star Adam Gadahn resurfaced yesterday in a new video communique as "Azzam the American." Gadahn, 28, a California native who has become a major Al-Qaeda mouthpiece, appeared in widescreen format to promise that the group will continue its "defensive jihad" unless American troops are removed from every Muslim country. More »

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is entering the online political scene in a very significant way with a tool that will allow 60 million MySpace users to donate up to $500 to the presidential candidate of their choice, reports the Financial Times . News Corp. has yet to make a decision, reports an official, as to whether they will track the data on who gives what. More »

In the wake of what some are calling the first digital act of war—when hackers using as many as a million computers attacked Estonia's  web-based infrastructure—cyber security experts from all over Europe and the US are huddling to study how to prevent future disasters, reports the New York Times . More »

The FTC has initiated an antitrust probe into search behemoth Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of a major online ad company, sources tell the New York Times. Both competitors and privacy advocates are chafing at the proposed deal between Google, which stores users' search histories, and DoubleClick, which keeps track of their web use. More »

Google wants to know about you—all about you. The company's stated goal of "total information" extends to users' leisure time and even their careers, the Financial Times reports. The ultimate goal is to allow advertisers to target users so precisely that their ads fetch higher rates than more scattershot marketing. More »

Kevin Ham rules the shadowy Internet domain name market, having amassed an online real estate empire worth over $300 million, Business 2.0 reports. The doctor-turned-tech tycoon began buying and selling URLs in the nascent days of the web; today he trades hundreds of addresses a day, sometimes for as much as $350,000. More »

The digital divide is widening—between Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Websites, blogs and online video aren't the only areas where the GOP trails; fundraising numbers reported in the Washington Post tell a similar story. In the first quarter of 2007, the top three Democrats raked in $14 million online, more than twice the total for the top three Republicans. More »

Microsoft will plunk down $6 billion for aQuantive, a leading digital marketing agency. The $66.50 per share offer—nearly double aQuantive's closing price yesterday—comes on the heels of WPP's 24/7 Real Media purchase. It's Microsoft's biggest acquisition ever, reflecting its growing desperation to regain its status as a major player in the online advertising sphere. More »

Estonia is under cyberattack after removing a Soviet war memorial from its capital, reports the Guardian .  A barrage of mysterious spam assaults crippling government ministries, banks, corporations, political parties and news organizations has prompted NATO to deploy counter-cyberterrorism experts to the Baltic state, as officials cast a suspicious eye at Russia. More »