If you love a celebrity getting all self-righteous on the world, especially the tech world, then here’s a big plate of Richard Dreyfuss for you.

He tsks-tsks all over the stage in this video of highlights from the 16th Annual Webby Awards, which took place last night in New York.

That includes calling out Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s “Eric” Brin — which I am assuming is a mutant mash-up of Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin — for some sort of clickety-click-clack Internet crimes against humanity.

Thankfully, there is a very lovely tribute to Apple legend Steve Jobs at the end that includes President Barack Obama.

Enjoy:

…you sit by a cesspool long enough, you are bound to get shit on you.

From a post on Digiday entitled “Confessions of a DSP Salesperson”

The company is the latest start-up to go after the content-sharing craze, fueled by Pinterest, which allows its members to “pin” images, videos and other objects to their pinboard.

In the same way, StyleSaint allows users to publish and share digital collages of clothing and apparel and to create “tear sheets,” using industry lingo. The collages are formed by pulling together photos and stories from around the Web.

What sets StyleStaint apart from Pinterest and other pure-play content-sharing sites is that this fall it will start designing and manufacturing its very own apparel brand based on the user-generated collections.

StyleSaint officially launched today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, but AllThingsD has the details on its funding round, which closed last year.

The company was founded by Allison Beal, who says she’s been obsessed with making “tear sheets” and “style books” since the age of 13. The other co-founders are CEO Brian Garrett, a veteran entrepreneur in the Los Angeles area, and Brian Weitman, who will be the company’s manufacturing partner and is the CEO of STC/QST and president of WTS Los Angeles, which produces Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s runway collection among other clothing lines.

Since Pinterest hit it big, raising $100 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, other sites have conveniently been claiming that they are like Pinterest but with an e-commerce twist.

Pinterest doesn’t actually sell anything directly to consumers, but it is widely known for driving major traffic to e-commerce sites. Other sites like OpenSky are trying to create the same sense of community by selling items that are sourced and shared by celebrities and other experts who add an editorial and recommendation-driven component to the site.

Joining StyleSaint’s advisory board is Brian Lee, founder of ShoeDazzle; Kate Ciepluch, former creative director of Shopbop; Irene Au, Google’s head of global design; Jimmy Yaffe, co-CEO of Fuel M+C; Brett Brewer, co-founder of Intermix Media; and Soraya Darabi, co-founder of Foodspotting.

Here’s a glimpse into the company’s style via its promo video:

The deal was a surprise when announced eight months ago but has been a looming reality in recent weeks as the companies received the regulatory nod in one jurisdiction after another.

Motorola said in a regulatory filing Monday that it expects the deal to close by Wednesday, but it looks like it will be sooner than that. S&P’s stock index unit said Monday afternoon that it expects the deal to close before the start of regular trading on Tuesday morning. S&P needs to know these things, of course, because Motorola is part of the S&P 500, at least until Thursday when it will be replaced by Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc.

Google was not immediately available for comment.

The deal’s closure was all but inevitable after Chinese antitrust authorities cleared it over the weekend. China was the last roadblock on Google’s eight-month road to regulatory approval, with the deal having already been approved by regulators in the European Union and the U.S. in February.

It’s a deal that has raised some hackles in the process, as Google could potentially play favorites with Motorola by giving early data on the Android operating system to Motorola, one of Google’s many licensed Android handset manufacturing partners. Ostensibly, companies like HTC, Samsung and LG could lose their competitive edge if Google were to give Moto the inside track.

But Google has vehemently denied any notions of favoritism since first announcing the acquisition, stressing that Motorola will continue to be run as a separate business.

That may be more likely after China’s blessing of the deal, considering that it was contingent upon Google keeping Android open to all partner manufacturers for the next five years. That’s especially helpful for Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE, both of which have placed big bets on Android.

At the initial acquisition announcement, Google said — and continues to maintain — that the buy was strictly a patent play, a move that in CEO Larry Page’s words would “enable [Google] to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.”

There’s no word just yet on when the phone will show up in retail stores.

“Sprint expects to begin shipping HTC EVO 4G LTE for arrival on or around Thursday, May 24, to customers who pre-ordered the device online from Sprint,” Sprint said in a statement. “We will provide details on the full national launch as soon as possible.”

Shipments of that product — and of AT&T’s HTC One X — have been held up by an exclusion order obtained by Apple against HTC. The order means that all HTC shipments have to be inspected by U.S. Customs before entering the country.

HTC said on Sunday that the products are starting to make their way through U.S. Customs.

But even a task that never ends has to have a beginning, and more often than not it goes something like this: What do I have that needs to be protected, and how well or not is it protected now? Sometimes the best thing to do is call in someone from the outside to look at it all with fresh eyes. And sometimes the answers can be shocking.

It’s the sort of thing that Rapid7, a fast-growing security firm based in Boston, specializes in. While some security firms are more the cops on the beat, hired to keep things in check based on established rules and policies, Rapid7 is one you call when you want to know how the bad guys will try — and try they will — to get through whatever security measures are already in place.

The firm also owns Metasploit, an open source service that’s essentially an early-warning system about new vulnerabilities. Twice in the last year, new research by Rapid7 — released to the wider world through Metasploit — has caught my attention: Once it was about Java, and the other item was about how the methods employed in Stuxnet could be used to create new ways to attack public infrastructure.

I recently had a chance to ask Rapid7 CEO Mike Tuchen some questions about his company and the interesting role it’s playing in trying to clear up a lot of ambiguity about IT security that so many CIOs find frustrating. My first question was to ask Tuchen to explain from a high level what Rapid7 does.

AllThingsD: Mike, the thing I always think of when I talk to security companies is that the scope of the problem is constantly moving. If I were to use a football metaphor, it would be that the goalposts are always changing. And yet there’s another metaphor that fits as well: That of a medical triage, because once you know you have problems, there’s the matter of determining which one to fix first. What does Rapid7 do to help companies sort all this out?

Tuchen: We think of the security market as breaking out into “front-end” and “back-end” activities. Front-end activities are the assessments we do to proactively answer questions like: What’s my security posture? Where am I strong, and where am I vulnerable? What should I do to become more secure? That’s where we fit. 

Back-end activities are the enforcement and remediation efforts to protect data or networks that typically act in real time in response to threats detected including firewalls, anti-virus applications and so on.

We’re finding that as the threats are constantly growing and changing, there’s a lot of interest in assessment. The reality is that we’re seeing a new breach on average of once per day for the last 18 months or so. So when things are moving that fast, who wouldn’t want to know where their weaknesses are and what are the most important things they need to do to lower the chance of a being one of those companies breached? Our customers are telling us that once they’ve done the assessment, they’re able to set their priorities for the next 12 to 24 months. If you haven’t done an assessment, there’s a good chance you’ll buy a back-end product that doesn’t solve all your problems because you never knew what all the problems were in the first place. That’s how budgets tend to spin out of control.

So one big question around security is around the shift to the cloud. There are still a lot of people who don’t trust systems they can’t touch, but with the cost savings, the shift is looking more real every day. What does that shift mean for you and for your clients?

The first question you have to ask is “what do I have?” It’s kind of self-evident: You can’t secure what you don’t know about. Cloud services can make this trickier by adding another question into the mix: “Where is it?” And it gets even dicier when you take into consideration all the virtual machines that can be turned on and off at will and moved from one physical machine to another. The boundaries get a lot less well-defined. So the first step is discovery: What do you have, where is it, and what controls are in place? 

The next step is determining what types of threats you’re likely to face and figuring out what’s working to head them off and what’s not. After that you put together a strategy for improvement. 

Generally speaking, the best approaches we’ve seen start with basic hardening techniques. You take some concrete actions that are designed to make it more costly and difficult for attackers to establish a beachhead on your systems. Next, you lock down the perimeter as tightly as possible, and train employees to recognize and resist social engineering attacks.

When it comes to assessing the security of cloud offerings and software-as-a-service applications, it’s a matter of getting comfortable with the security that the vendor has in place. Our own experience with this has been pretty bleak. It’s clear that the industry as a whole has work to do there. 

Like what?

Attackers have the advantage right now. Even the largest and most sophisticated companies are getting breached on a regular basis. I think there are three things that need to happen: We need to do a better job of information-sharing about risks, methods, and actors so that companies don’t have to start from scratch. We also need to make security simpler. Right now it’s way too complex, and there are too many products that target specific problems that tend to be important to only the biggest of companies. And even those companies can barely stitch them all together into a coherent solution. For everyone else in the world it’s pretty much impossible to do that.

We’re working on a lot of this. We run an annual conference called UNITED to bring together innovative defenders to share ideas. It stands for “Using New Ideas To Enhance Defense.” We’ve committed $100,000 to sponsor some projects we like to call the “Magnificent7” and there will be no strings attached to the funding.

Washington seems to have finally awakened to the wider IT security threats. We hear a lot of talk coming out of Congress about cybersecurity. What, if anything, do you expect to come out of these efforts?

There are two security bills, SOPA and CISPA, that have gained a fair amount of attention lately. SOPA focuses on the illegal downloading of music, videos, software and other counterfeit goods that affect a wide variety of industries. These are the low-hanging fruit when it comes to online crime.

CISPA focuses on sharing private sector consumer data with the government to protect national security interests. The intent with CISPA is to legally protect private companies when they share consumer information with government and law enforcement entities. This information would not be available to the public at large and is highly scrutinized by privacy advocates. The information would be used to try to protect the country’s critical infrastructure. But if it were to become law, it won’t change the status quo of organizations and consumers fending for themselves when it comes to information security.

Also if they’re passed, they only affect U.S. citizens. These laws will not prevent foreign entities from engaging in piracy or breaching U.S. corporate or civilian assets. Companies will still be under non-stop attacks from persistent adversaries.

You raised a big bunch of funding last fall with a $50 million investment led by TCV. What are you going to do with all that money?

We’ll use it for three major initiatives: First, we’re doubling down on expanding our existing engineering teams. We doubled the team in 2010, nearly doubled it in 2011, and plan to double it again in 2012. Second, we’re accelerating our international expansion. We just hired a regional VP for Europe and are expanding our European and Asia-Pacific operations with new offices in Amsterdam, Hong Kong and Sydney. Finally, we’re looking to acquire terrific companies with passionate teams that want to join forces with Rapid7 to change the security world.

You acquired the Metasploit Project in 2009. How has that deal worked out and what does it say about the companies you may yet acquire? What are your plans for future acquisitions?

Metasploit has been great for Rapid7. We first started thinking about Metasploit when Chad Loder, one of our co-founders, came up with the idea of integrating an existing product with Metasploit. We discussed it with HD Moore, the founder of Metasploit, and he was equally excited about the idea of integrating the products together. In a week or two we had a working prototype. Right then we realized that we’d found something special: A passionate, driven entrepreneur who shared a lot of our vision and values, a product that logically works together with our existing product, a huge and engaged community of expert security insiders and a business that was ready to be commercialized. We asked HD if he’d like to join forces with us, and he agreed. We were able to build a team around HD, and together we’ve built the Metasploit business into a leader in its category. 

In that case we learned that founder and team are critical. It also made it easier to build the rest of the team around HD from the bottom up. Now we’re actively looking for companies that play in markets that make sense for us, and products that have a solid foundation for the future. We haven’t yet found another opportunity that fits all of these areas.

I get that Rapid7 is growing; you’ve got an impressive list of customers that includes Anadarko Petroleum, Teradyne, Liz Claiborne and the U.S. Postal Service. Can you share some basic metric that shows how much you’re growing?

Our revenue for the last seven years is over 90 percent per year, and we’ve grown more than 70 percent in each of the last two years. And we have more than 2,000 customers. We’ve been lucky to be in a market where the demand is increasing because threats are escalating.

What’s notable about the product is it comes from Craig Walker, the founder and CEO of GrandCentral, which became Google Voice. Walker was also formerly CEO of Dialpad, which became Yahoo Voice.

The Uberconference interface doesn’t require PINs, as individual participants automatically authenticate when they dial in from their own phone numbers. Each participant can see a visual dashboard that shows who is speaking at any time, and can click on each person’s face to get a personal backgrounder based on public social media info.

One neat feature: You know how conference calls are frequently interrupted from background noise coming from one of the callers, but nobody knows who’s the culprit? Uberconference makes it simple for the conference organizer to identify and mute that person.

Uberconference is free, though users who sign up won’t necessarily get access immediately. It’s on the Web and in the U.S. at first, with iPhone and iPad apps coming. Premium services will include local dial-ins, outbound calls and larger conference groups, Walker said today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City.

It’s made by Firespotter Labs, which is Walker’s Google Ventures-funded incubator.

Here’s a funny video Firespotter made about the current state of conference calls:

Some investors waited until Monday morning to hear whether their Facebook trades were ever completed, while others remained in the dark.

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The consortium includes Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp., Bright House Networks LLC and Cox Communications Inc. Consumers will be able to access more than 50,000 Wi-Fi hot spots in the New York area, Los Angeles, Tampa, Orlando and Philadelphia. Most of the operators offer the service only as a perk to current broadband subscribers — but Time Warner Cable has offered a pay-as-you-go option for non-customers as well.

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That’s according to the latest data from the NPD Group’s retail tracking service. Sales of 3-D TVs in the U.S. grew 74 percent in units over last year, with 3-D TVs accounting for 11 percent of all flat-panel sales in the first quarter of 2012, the report says.

But despite the growth in sales, and the fact that some consumers are wowed by 3-D demos, “just 14 percent of consumers … say 3D is a ‘must have’ feature while 68 percent say it’s a ‘nice feature to have they may use in the future.’”

The obstacles to greater 3-D penetration are the usual suspects, NPD analyst Ben Arnold says. The overwhelming majority of consumers consider 3-D glasses a drawback to the technology, with glasses-free 3-D still far from being perfected; 14 percent say the lack of 3-D content is a deterrent (though that reason is weakening, as more content creators put out 3-D programs).

Cost is also a factor when it comes to newer, souped-up TVs. NPD says the average prices of 3-D TVs in April were 33 percent lower compared to April 2010, but a recent report from IHS iSuppli says that average prices of 3-D LCD TVs actually crept up a teeny bit from December 2011 to April of this year, to $2,492.

So why buy a 3-D TV if you’re not going to use it for 3-D? Well, for one thing, as noted here, “3-D” has been shifting from the main selling point in TV marketing schemes to an add-on feature that happens to be included in high-tech TV sets, so some consumers are buying 3-D-equipped TVs even if they’ve not totally bought into the tech.

And the underutilization of fancy TVs isn’t really a new thing: Turns out that 3-D engagement levels might be in line with some of the data we’ve seen surrounding “smart” TVs, or Internet-connected TVs. Despite the fact that Internet connectivity is often cited as an important factor for consumers making TV purchases, TechNewsDaily reported earlier this year that only half of all people who own Internet-ready TVs have actually gone online through their TVs.

(Image courtesy of Salminari on Flickr; thought bubble courtesy of AllThingsD)

That is the value of the annual pay package Mr. Cook was awarded when he was named Apple chief executive last August, about two months before Mr. Jobs died. Nearly all of the compensation stems from a grant of one million shares of restricted stock, valued at $376.2 million, based on Apple’s stock price at the time.

Mr. Cook’s 2011 compensation is the highest recorded in The Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO pay survey since at least 2006, when the Securities and Exchange Commission changed its rules for reporting executive pay.

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GitHub, which internally is primarily a Mac company, had last year introduced a similar Mac client, which is now widely used. The clients sync users’ code to the cloud, and are built to be simple in order to attract new and less-savvy users, Wanstrath said.

The bootstrapped San Francisco-based company has 1.6 million registered developers and hosts nearly three million projects. Where GitHub started as half open source, half private code, over time it has become much more about open source.

The Windows client is in part a move to make the tool more appealing to companies, many of which are still afraid to put their code in the cloud, Wanstrath said. Private repositories is where GitHub makes its money; open source project hosting is free.

GitHub did have a security hole exploited earlier this year; Wanstrath made assurances that the company has security as a top priority.

Ubisoft is releasing a free version of its popular Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon franchise on Facebook today, with the goal of attracting the same hardcore audience that will pay $60 for the console version coming out tomorrow.

In a teaser video, posted on YouTube, Ubisoft’s tagline is: “Finally, a gamer’s game on Facebook.”

Not many publishers have dared to release hardcore games on Facebook because of the technical limitations of Adobe Flash, but also because the platform is largely assumed to attract an audience of 40-year-old women — not exactly the hardcore demographic.

To date, companies such as San Francisco-based Kabam and Kixeye have carved out a niche serving these fanatics, who are small in numbers but tend to get pulled into the game and spend a lot in the free-to-play model.

Now Ubisoft is experimenting with the genre on the platform with the launch of Ghost Recon Commander, a companion title to Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier, which comes out tomorrow for Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation.

Creators of the Facebook version are promising to offer a multiplayer gaming experience that is similar to console play, while still being easy enough for a casual gamer to be interested.

“I wanted a place where you felt you could vacation and also blow it up,” said Brenda Garno Brathwaite, the co-founder of Loot Drop, which developed the game on Ubisoft’s behalf.

In practical terms, that means the Facebook game will have explosions and gunfire, but realistically, it will look and behave very differently from the console version, which will have superior game mechanics and graphics (benefiting from a much bigger budget).

The game is free to play and allows users to pay for additional virtual goods using Facebook Credits.

Still, if there’s anyone who can pull off a stunt like this, it’s Garno Brathwaite. Prior to founding Loot Drop, she worked as a creative director for two social media companies, Slide (acquired by Google) and Lolapps. Before that, she worked at a variety of companies, including Atari, Sir-Tech Software and Electronic Arts. What’s more, she’s a hardcore Ghost Recon fan, having racked up 170 hours of game play in the latest version of the console game.

Drawing from her experiences as a player and game maker, she believes that Ubisoft avoided aspects of social games that hardcore players hate while making it accessible to a large audience, including moms.

“I consider myself a hardcore player. I’m a 45-year-old mom that likes to blow my friends up,” she said.

Garno Brathwaite says the multiplayer social game uses traditional console play experiences by including true combat, including blowing stuff up and shooting other players, but also makes it accessible to players who don’t own a console.

Because of that, the game is slightly different. For starters, it is not a first-person shooter. Instead, the 2-D game is played from the viewpoint of an airplane, looking down at the players. Players form multiplayer alliances with real Facebook friends and then go on missions.

Another difference is that users can play for five minutes and walk away from their computer without exiting the game. If you did that in the console version, you’d be shot dead.

One part of the game that social gamers will recognize is a player’s base camp, where no combat happens. In base camp, the game play is more strategic. Players build buildings and manufacturer resources to bulk up on armor or other things that will allow them to do better in the field.

Here’s the teaser video for the game:

In a letter to Google chairman Eric Schmidt, European competition commissioner Joaquín Almunia outlined four specific antitrust concerns identified during the EC investigation.

The first: Google may be unfairly exploiting its market position by giving preferential treatment to its own services in its search results. The second: The company may have copied material from rivals’ Web sites. The third and fourth relate to search advertising and allegations that Google requires sites “to obtain all or most of their requirements of search advertisements from Google, thus shutting out competing providers of search advertising intermediation services.”

These are just preliminary conclusions, but because Google has been pushing for a settlement, Almunia is offering the company a chance to resolve them before the EC pushes ahead with what would inevitably be a protracted and unpleasant probe.

“I offer Google the possibility to come up in a matter of weeks with remedies,” Almunia said. “If Google comes up with an outline of remedies which are capable of addressing our concerns, I will instruct my staff to initiate the discussions in order to finalize a remedies package.”

Reached for comment, a Google spokesperson said the company has “only just started to look through the commission’s arguments.”

“We disagree with the conclusions, but we’re happy to discuss any concerns they might have,” the spokesperson said. “Competition on the Web has increased dramatically in the last two years since the commission started looking at this, and the competitive pressures Google faces are tremendous. Innovation online has never been greater.”

Zynga and LinkedIn were also down on the news, opening off around 2 percent and 5 percent, respectively.

After what many called out as a lackluster performance on its opening day, all eyes are on the company’s ticker this week to see how the shares perform going forward. Scores of financial analysts and armchair investors and much of the technology press expected an initial first-day “pop,” a jump of 10 percent to 20 percent or more for fast-moving retail flippers to make a quick buck.

But as Friday’s trading day came and went, and the stock closed only slightly higher than it debuted, many expected that Facebook shares would open off come Monday morning, especially since underwriters were no longer able to prop up the stock by dipping into the greenshoe like they did on Friday.

A great many argued that Facebook shares were priced perfectly, leaving no money on the table for retail investors to come in and sweep up in the first-day pop that so many had expected. Exercising the allotment option was the underwriters’ job, Fortune’s Dan Primack argued vehemently; first and foremost, Facebook was priced to get the most money it could for going public.

Here’s the thing: Like Benchmark Capital’s Bill Gurley reminds, Amazon’s debut saw the stock break issue and stay below its IPO price for months.

It then went on — over the long haul — to rise 1000x.

FB data by YCharts

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Today, AnchorFree announced that Goldman Sachs has made a $52 million Series C investment. Prior investors include RENN Capital. The investment brings its total capital raised to $63 million.

AnchorFree makes Hotspot Shield, a simple VPN tool that’s in use by some 60 million people around the world. It’s the creation of David Gorodyansky and Eugene Malobrodsky, who started the company in 2005 just after finishing college.

During the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt, the company recorded more than a million downloads of the product in a single night. It’s now in use in 190 countries. The point of the capital raise is simple: Push the number of users higher still. There are, after all, some 1.6 billion people using the Internet.

With the rise of so-called “crowdfunding,” game makers are finding fans online who are willing to pledge a few bucks toward a game they’d like to see produced.

The primary site where these connections are being made is Kickstarter, a three-year old company. Since Kickstarter got off the ground, the games category has garnered $29 million in pledges, according to the New York Times. Other popular categories include film/video, music and design.

Further, it was reported that 854 game developers successfully reached their fundraising goals, raising an average of $29,409 apiece.

Most impressively, three game companies have raised more than $1.5 million each since the beginning of this year: Double Fine raised $3.3 million from 87,000 backers; Wasteland 2 raised $2.9 million; and Shadowrun Returns secured $1.8 million.

Another site, Gambitious, which will be exclusively dedicated to helping game companies raise money, is preparing to launch on June 5 in Los Angeles as part of E3, the industry’s big annual conference.

The shift to nontraditional fundraising is now even catching the eye of megapublishers like Electronic Arts. Last week, EA said developers who crowdsourced funding will be able to sell their games on Origin at no cost for three months.

Origin is the company’s online game store, which allows users to download PC games electronically and counts up to 12 million users worldwide.

“The public support for crowdfunding creative game ideas coming from small developers today is nothing short of phenomenal,” said David DeMartini, EA’s SVP of Origin, in a release. “It’s also incredibly healthy for the gaming industry. Gamers around the world deserve a chance to play every great new game.”

EA doesn’t disclose how much it charges because it says fees can vary, but through this program, developers will now receive 100 percent of sales during the 90-day window plus any pre-sales that are generated before the title officially launches, a spokesman confirmed.

It’s unclear whether crowdfunding is a fad and consumers will tire of it quickly, and to be clear, not every company that requests money is able to get it.

But it pairs nicely with a broader trend in the industry that AllThingsD’s Eric Johnson wrote about last week. He explained that game developers are increasingly finding it advantageous to stay small, rejecting the notion that productions need big budgets in order to create blockbusters.

The evolution has been aided by the rise of three new distribution platforms, Apple’s App Store, Facebook and Valve’s Steam Store (and to a lesser extent, EA’s Origin, which is catching up). With these digital platforms, developers can reach customers without having to package up their software and sell it at retail, saving thousands of dollars.

With the crowdfunding phenomenon completely under way, Videogame Analyst and Consultant Scott Steinberg saw the opportunity to write an e-book on the subject called “Crowdfunding Your Business: A How-To Guide.” In the recently released book, he argues that crowdfunding helps developers identify projects that consumers are willing to pay for, before they’ve wasted the money and time on developing them.

He writes that by “requesting feedback or recruiting help from public donors via open calls for assistance — you can gauge demand for and create bankable products from day one.”