Finance Matters

Archive for February 18th, 2010

Yahoo (YHOO) just posted two videos of Carol Bartz explaining why its now regulator-approved plan to outsource search to Microsoft does NOT mean the company is out of search.

In one, Carol says, “The alliance with Microsoft allows us to do an even better of search for our users. [It] allows them to feel really great when they’re searching on a Yahoo site.”

We get the distinct feeling these videos are as much aimed at disillusioned Yahoo engineers as Yahoo customers (who could probably not care less).

Watch:

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See Also:

• Innovators Use Bing
• Yahoo Tries To Convince World Its Search Business Isn’t Completely Toast
• LIVE: Yahoo SearchSpeak 2010

Who took down Joe Stack’s online manifesto?

The pilot who flew his small plane into an IRS office in Austin, Texas this morning wrote a suicide note on his former business domain http://embeddedart.com (pictured here).

But shortly after the site attracted national attention, a note from the hosting company, T35 Hosting, went up in place of the text at 2:30 pm:

This website has been taken offline due to the sensitive nature of the events that transpired in Texas this morning and in compliance with a request from the FBI. To see an archived version of the original letter, please go here: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2010/0218102stack1.html.

Problem is, the FBI doesn’t make such requests.

FBI spokesman Special Agent Eric Vasys in San Antonio tells us “the FBI does not request that sites remove language such as being reported to be authored by Mr. Stack. That’s not our area to do that.”

On the contrary, Vasys adds: “In similar investigations, requests are made that electronic records be maintained for investigative purposes and not be destroyed or erased.”

That contradicts what Alex Melen, who is listed as the president and founder of T35, noted in a forum post today that “The fbi requests were made over the phone.”

It’s not clear if the call was a hoax or if Melen is finding an excuse to shut down an overloaded server.

As he posted, the traffic was crippling:

Joe went over his bandwidth limits in just a few minutes today actually. I personally credited his account with an extra $500 of bandwidth to keep his site up. Even though it was just a text page, it was still close to 100kb in size, and when multiplied by over 10,000,000 hits (in the last 2 hours), that’s still enough to bring a server down and use hundreds of GB of bandwidth.

And this:

I’m not going to really comment on the event specifically.. but just wanted to say that Joe was a customer with us for a long time (over 6 years) and had never had any issues. Always paid his bills on time, always a good customer. I’m still really shocked by everything that happened.

Melen did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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See Also:

• The Insane Manifesto Of Austin Texas Crash Pilot Joseph Andrew Stack
• Austin Suicide Pilot Joseph Andrew Stack Planted Bomb At Airport, Bomb Squad Trying To Defuse
• Joseph Andrew Stack Revised His Death Letter 27 Times Before Settling On The Final Draft

From the Huffington Post:

The Pulitzer Prize Board has officially accepted The National Enquirer‘s submissions for breaking the John Edwards scandal, according to sources close to the board. In a historic move, the Pulitzer Board conceded that the self-proclaimed tabloid is qualified to compete with mainstream news outlets for journalism’s most prestigious prize. The Enquirer is in the running for the Pulitzer in two categories: “Investigative Reporting” and “National News Reporting” for The National Enquirer staff.

Read more at the Huffington Post.

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See Also:

• John Edwards: Yes, I Lied To You When I Was Apologizing For Lying To You
• Book On John Edwards Ensnares Late Texas Plaintiffs Attorney Fred Baron
• John Edwards May Finally Admit He’s The Father Of Rielle Hunter’s Baby

Apparently Joseph Andrew Stack had larger ambitions than ramming his plane into a government building.

NBC reports, via @breakingnews, that Stack also planted a bomb in a car at an airport, and that bomb squads are trying to defuse it.

Update: The good news is that the bomb is at the relatively minor Georgetown airport north of the city. Still, it’s a bomb.

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See Also:

• Pilot Intentionally Crashes Plane Into IRS, CIA, And FBI Complex In Austin, TX
• The Insane Manifesto Of Austin Texas Crash Pilot Joseph Andrew Stack
• EXCLUSIVE: Listen To The Voice Of Austin Texas Plane Crash Pilot Joseph Andrew Stack

A reporter at Style Weekly thought he was sending an email to his editor on Wednesday, in which he called a blind motivational speaker a “blind [expletive].”

But it turns out the reporter sent it to the blind man’s PR person instead, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports.

Whoops!

Reporter Chris Dovi told the Times-Dispatch he resorted to such language after he was incessantly bothered to cover the speaker’s upcoming presentation in Richmond.

But Style Weekly felt that excuse wasn’t good enough for a reporter who had covered “issues affecting people with disabilities.”

The publication fired Dovi immediately after the speaker’s PR rep issued a release with his mistake and a claim that his email “reveals society’s ongoing prejudice against the disabled,” according to the Times-Dispatch.

Dovi’s response?  “I shouldn’t have been flip.”

 

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See Also:

• New York Magazine’s Hugo Lindgren Quits For BusinessWeek
• It’s The Sex, Stupid
• See Ya Later, Jay Leno! NBC Airs His Final 10 p.m. Show