Now I know you do not have it in you to stand up and admit what you did, so I will now make you my “hobby.” Ask around you will find out that I like to work on my hobbies.

– In an open letter to employees, Cisco VP of Services (and former CIA operations officer) Mike Quinn issues a warning to the anonymous leaker of an internal company memo on Cisco’s contract dealings with the California State University system.

At Yahoo’s Friday regular weekly FYI meeting for employees, one of the topics for its Q&A moderation system that got read in front of the crowd was that there should be a “shout-out” to recently promoted general counsel Ron Bell for his new hardline public stance against leaks at the company.

It was a reference to an internal memo that the longtime Yahoo lawyer sent last week to all employees, titled “Leaks Uncool,” in response to the umpteenth company missive that had somehow gotten out into the wild.

The particular memo that got Bell in a huff was one CEO Marissa Mayer sent out to staffers last week, related to the closing of the sale of part of Yahoo’s stake in China’s Alibaba Group. It was quickly published by Business Insider.

That the exact same wording was in a public press release sent out moments later, or — more to the point — that the detailed news of the transaction’s culmination had already been reported by me here a week before, seems not to have mattered to Bell.

Also off-limits for sharing, or else, he warned: Internal presentations and emails, confidential product and business plans, and revenue projections.

“It’s never OK to share information in an internal memo EVEN if the company issues public communications about the same subject,” tsk-tsked Bell, who reminded staff of Yahoo’s Code of Ethics. “We will fire employees who leak company confidential information and we will avail ourselves of all other legal remedies to protect those confidences.”

Jeepers, I better lob a call in to Ally McBeal, stat!

(Hypocrite alert: It’s also kind of fascinating, since that would also put at least one of Yahoo’s current and most active board members in the line of Bell’s fire, too, noted several sources, given previous reliance on encouraging leaking at the company.)

More ominously, Bell also dangled the possibility of jail time, tossing in the memo that employees making disclosures could be a “criminal offense.”

Wrote Bell: “If you do it, you can go to jail and face a very large fine.”

The jail part of Bell’s assertion was mostly a pre-Halloween scare, and also largely a canard, since every bit of information in the Alibaba memo had already been made public many times over.

Still, he pressed on, patting management on the back for “working hard to create an environment in which we share much more information with all of you than we’ve ever shared before.”

Actually, Yahoo has had a long record of giving employees lots and lots of information, whether it be on its Backyard comment system or via its once informative and quite adorkable Yodel Anecdotal corporate blog.

In my experience covering the company since the mid-1990s — that’s right, folks, I have been here almost since the beginning (and I am here to stay) — and through some much tougher times, Yahoo management has not hidden away from employees.

Case in point: Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang, who has always been a stand-up guy and made a point of responding fully to Yahoos, even if not every utterance was perfect.

He didn’t like leaks, either, but such is the situation at Yahoo, which continues to be a riveting corporate drama of great interest both inside and outside the company.

(Even still, try being Apple for a day and see what real scrutiny is like from a constantly rabid media.)

Memo to Ron Bell: Humans like to talk and they like to share, especially at a media company.

Still, I do get the concern about keeping internal information secret and under wraps, and it certainly can sometimes impact business.

But — given all the other much more important stuff that management should be more concerned with at Yahoo, such as improving moribund results and making innovative products that consumers want to use — it’s a silly, mean-spirited and even frivolous focus.

If Yahoo’s new team actually managed to turn the company around, even a mountain of leaked memos wouldn’t matter one iota.

But, like politicians who would rather bash the media than actually fix our nation’s problems, it’s easier to point fingers.

Which brings me to the one line in Bell’s memo that really was irksome and simply wrong: “Leakers put their personal agendas ahead of everyone else’s and directly undermine trust.”

It was followed by his urging employees to drop a dime on other employees, “if you know something about a leak or how it happened.”

Hey Javert, let me clue you in on something: Almost all Yahoos who send me information about what’s happening at the company have done so because they care about it deeply and have wanted much-needed change to happen as Yahoo’s fortunes have inexorably declined over the years.

It was those employees who first warned me, for example, about the critical problems in the regime of CEO Carol Bartz, and those employees who helped me ferret out troublesome issues around the false resume of Scott Thompson.

Instead of ratting out fellow workers, Yahoos might want to thank them for that, since, in both instances, the lackluster and incompetent board of Yahoo did not act — even with the massive damage being done — until forced to by increasing media and investor pressure.

Now there’s the possibility for hope in a mostly new board and a new CEO and a new strategy to be unveiled tomorrow to staff.

In order to start fresh and be successful in making much-needed changes, yammering on about memo-leaking betrayals and conducting a variety of mole hunts (and management is surely doing that using a variety of sneaky tech tools) seems both petty and, well, pointless.

In addition, most of the internal memos aren’t really that juicy, anyway, no matter how many “YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION — DO NOT FORWARD, SHARE, OR REDISTRIBUTE” notes you slap on them.

In any case, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.”

So true — but if that’s not enough, I would offer some words of advice from Benjamin Franklin, our nation’s first and best journalist: “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

Well, it wasn’t as tasty as free food this week at Yahoo, but in her second official all-hands meeting with employees — now reportedly called “Friday FYI” — new CEO Marissa Mayer rolled out another new Google-inspired Q&A tool to get the company talking about what matters.

The system allows anyone at the Silicon Valley Internet giant to post questions, ideas or suggestions on a variety of topics, which can then be voted up and down.

Actually, it’s been in use internally at — you guessed it — Google for some time, and is even available to the general public in a product called Google Moderator. Mayer has been importing a lot of corporate practices from the search giant where she worked for her entire career — from free food to better swag to these weekly confabs to, now, its method of hearing from the staff.

While Yahoo previously used its Messenger product to garner questions for its less-regular all-hands meetings, this is apparently a new interactive tool built by the company’s engineers (and not using Google’s free APIs, as far as I can tell).

It seems to be working fine, and there were a number of questions that bubbled up.

That included one about Mayer’s thoughts on her current executive team — which is still largely inherited from a series of previous administrations, despite some departures recently — and also how her regime will hold them accountable.

Algorithmic accountability among Yahoo execs? Things have changed!

Even better, declared the questioner of that particular query, to whoops from the audience: “I want an honest answer!”

But Mayer was diplomatic, only saying she was “pleasantly surprised” by the top execs. She also noted that the management would have quarterly goals that are transparent to the whole company. (I won’t say they do that at Google, but — ahem — they do that at Google.)

Mayer went through a number of questions in a precise and cut-the-mustard manner that employees seem to be enjoying, overall.

One very voted-up question was about leaks to the media, in particular to this Web site, and whether a board mole hunt has been successful (obviously not). Also, of course, what she was going to do about the situation.

Apparently, Mayer said she won’t be tracking down leakers, and that this new openness will solve the problem.

Good idea, but all that lovely transparency also needs some pretty good products if it’s going to work.

And product focus most definitely appears to be the path now. Mayer also showed off the new Yahoo Mail — which has been under revamp for a while, and was started under former Chief Product Officer Blake Irving — with some good response from Yahoos (last week, it was a look-see at its recent iteration of its IntoNow video offering).

There are other interface changes that have been in the works too, likely under the direction of Tim Parsey, Yahoo’s head designer, who also came on under Irving.

In fact, a lot of what Irving had pushed, including keeping advertising technology in-house and also maintaining control of key monetization engines, is the likeliest path going forward. The ad tech outsourcing deals, pushed by the interim CEO and his strategy head Jim Heckman, are apparently gone (and so are Levinsohn and now Heckman).

Also of interest to many at the company is the increased involvement of co-founder David Filo, who has become much less quiet under Mayer. I’d expect him to report directly to her — he’s actually been reporting for years to a variety of product and tech execs, despite owning more than six percent of Yahoo.

Thus, here’s my question for the new Q&A system for next week: So, when’s Jerry Yang showing back up?

The Joy of Tech

In a filing to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late Wednesday evening, Apple said the court should sanction Samsung by ruling that the patents at issue in the case are valid and infringed by Samsung. And if the court declines to do so, it should at the very least instruct the jury that Samsung has engaged in “serious misconduct,” and bar the company from any further mention of its “Sony style” argument in court.

Apple, in its motion for sanctions, argues that Samsung’s broadcast of excluded evidence is not only a clear attempt to prejudice the jury, but part of an emerging pattern of misconduct.

“Samsung already has been sanctioned four times in this case for discovery abuses (see image at right). Most recently, Samsung was sanctioned for destroying evidence,” Apple’s legal team wrote. “Litigation misconduct is apparently a part of Samsung’s litigation strategy — and limited sanctions have not deterred Samsung from such misconduct. Now, with so much at stake, Samsung has taken the calculated risk that any sanctions arising from its attempt to influence the jury with its excluded arguments are a price it is willing to pay.”

From Apple’s perspective, Samsung’s release of excluded evidence at a time when the jury will be away from Court for two days, was not only a clear attempt to prejudice the jury but a gambit for a mistrial. But Apple has no plans to request a mistrial. To do so, the company argues, would be to reward Samsung’s misconduct.

“The proper remedy for Samsung’s misconduct is judgment that Apple’s asserted phone design patents are valid and infringed,” Apple’s attorneys conclude. “Through its extraordinary actions yesterday, Samsung sought to sway the jury on the design patent issues, and the proper remedy is to enter judgment against Samsung on those same patents. It would be, to be sure, a significant sanction. But serious misconduct can only be cured through a serious sanction—and here, Samsung’s continuing and escalating misconduct merits a severe penalty that will establish that Samsung is not above the law.”

Reached for comment, Samsung said it plans to dispute Apple’s allegations. “Apple’s filing is baseless and we will be filing a response,” a company spokesman told AllThingsD.

Apple versus Samsung Full Coverage

The Shenzhen Bao’an People’s Court, in announcing its decision, said the head of a Chinese electronics-accessories manufacturer allegedly paid a former employee and a then-active employee of Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. for information about the iPad 2 in order to produce protective cases for the device. Hon Hai, known by its trade name Foxconn, makes the iPad 2 and other gadgets for Apple in its factories in China.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Here’s the tastiest part of an article in the New York Times yesterday about how Goldman Sachs essentially borked a deal to offer its rich clients in the U.S. private Facebook shares:

“However, over the last two weeks, the companies’ [Goldman and Facebook] relationship has grown increasingly tense, people involved in the offering said. Accusations about the news leak have flown back and forth, these people said.”

You can say that again, but –as leaky as the social networking giant has been over these many years in Silicon Valley–it seemed obvious that most of the intricate financial details about the offering were hand-delivered right from some of Wall Street’s hired guns to the DealBook scribes at the Times.

(Memo to myself: Start kissing up to those bankers, however appalling!)

Unfortunately for Facebook, it was those massive news leaks that drew the attention of government regulators to the deal. And with worries that it veered too close to the edge of violating securities regulations, the U.S. part of the offering had to be pulled.

Despite this particular mess, this kind of mishegas is only going to increase now that the banker bloviating is getting fired up a notch in 2011, as a spate of Web 2.0 Internet companies moves to public offerings.

Along with Facebook, that includes Zynga, LinkedIn and Groupon, as well as several others, all of which are just starting the banker bake-offs that used to be common in the Web space.

And that’s going to mean plenty of information to be found as some of those bankers inevitably drop a dime on the companies they are hired by.

Translated into more modern social terminology that these companies better understand: Bankers are really good at oversharing.

How do I know this? Because that is exactly what happened when the Web 1.0 bubble was in full froth.

Like Christmas in July, as bankers arrived to compete to win IPOs, the information flow suddenly became huge for reporters like me–I was at The Wall Street Journal at the time–covering it all.

It looks like more of the same for this round of stock sales likely to come. Already we know more about Facebook’s financials than we ever did.

And to that, I say: Loose lips may sink ships, but it will make for an awesome amount of news to come in 2011 about the Internet’s starring players.

What we didn’t know, until now, is how greatly other link services would benefit from news of the closure.

Late last week, Delicious competitor Pinboard tweeted a link to a screenshot of its traffic graph from the couple of days following the Yahoo leak, overlaid on more-typical traffic from previous days.

The sea-foam green area is Pinboard traffic after the leak, in number of server requests per minute (not unique or new visitors, which would undoubtedly be far lower).

The tiny blue and purple areas beneath represent typical request rates.

You can click on the graph to see it in full size, though the sense of scale speaks for itself.

The release of funds follows a number of denial-of-service attacks earlier this week that were aimed at the document-leaking site’s providers. Most of the providers are now refusing to work with WikiLeaks after the U.S. government accused it of being in possession of documents that were provided in violation of U.S. law.

Yesterday, WikiLeak’s founder Julian Assange was arrested and denied bail in London. He’s accused of sexual misconduct in Sweden.

While PayPal is releasing the residual funds to WikiLeaks, it is not reinstating the ability for it to receive donations.

PayPal was caught up in a brief media storm this morning, after PayPal’s VP of Platform Osama Bedier gave the impression at LeWeb in Paris that PayPal had cut off access to WikiLeaks because of direct pressure by the U.S. government.

PayPal now wants to set the record straight, and says that it reviewed its policies regarding WikiLeaks after the U.S. Department of State publicized a letter stating that WikiLeaks may be in possession of documents that were provided in violation of U.S. law. The letter was published, and not sent to PayPal directly.

“PayPal was not contacted by any government organization in the U.S. or abroad. We restricted the account based on our Acceptable Use Policy review,” writes PayPal’s General Counsel John Muller. “Ultimately, our difficult decision was based on a belief that the WikiLeaks website was encouraging sources to release classified material, which is likely a violation of law by the source.”

Further, the company disclosed that twice before–in 2008 and 2009–PayPal reviewed and restricted the account associated with WikiLeaks “for reasons unrelated to our Acceptable Use Policy. As soon as proper information was received from the account holder, the restrictions were lifted.”

PayPal has been one of many providers that have been the victim of computer attacks, where servers were inundated with traffic. A spokesperson told us that it mostly affected the company’s blog site, and did not directly affect its payments services.

Other affected companies include MasterCard and Swiss bank PostFinance, The Wall Street Journal reports. No one is yet claiming responsibility for the attacks, but some say they are being organized by the ad hoc “Operation Payback.”

A spokesman for the studio, a unit of Time Warner Inc., declined to say whether it had yet figured out the source of the leak, but said an investigation was underway. The spokesman said the early release wasn’t a promotional gambit.

The watermarked footage was made available for download on BitTorrent file-sharing sites such as IsoHunt.com and thePirateBay.org. Copies were still available Wednesday, though Warner Bros. said it was working to remove the illegal copies.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

And some memos are “confidential”–meaning there’s no real expectation that they’ll stay within the family.

You’d assume that Eric Schmidt’s memo to “Googlers” announcing big raises falls in the latter category. If that’s all Googlers, that’s some 23,300 people, so that’s pretty much the same thing as issuing a press release, right?

But Google thinks otherwise, says CNNMoney’s David Goldman. He reports that the company has fired an engineer who passed the information along to Business Insider yesterday:

Within hours, Google notified its staff that it had terminated the leaker, several sources told CNNMoney. A Google spokesman declined to comment on the issue, or on the memo.

I’ve gone ahead and asked Google for comment as well, but I’m not hopeful. (UPDATE: I can see the future! No comment from Google.) In the absence of one, I’ll speculate that Google was freaked out that the “leak” would cause it problems with Wall Street and/or the SEC.

But again, if that’s the case, that makes no sense–you can’t hand out big fat checks to 23,300 people and keep it quiet indefinitely.

And since the point of the raises is to keep Googlers happy in a hot job market–and presumably, to help recruit new Googlers–you’d think Google would want the “confidential” memo distributed. Right?

I gather that some of you agree with Google on this one. Since the company won’t talk, feel free to make their case for them in the comments below.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Last month we learned, from the Daily Beast’s Peter Lauria, that the Viacom (VIA) chairman was moonlighting as a talent promoter: Redstone was reportedly trying to get his MTV channel to run an unwatchable reality TV show about the Electric Barbarellas–a “scantily clad new all-girl group” the octogenarian was supposedly “smitten with.”

Now we learn, from Lauria as well, that Redstone is working on a new project: Trying to figure out which Viacom employee leaked last month’s story to Lauria.

Redstone, a lawyer by training, isn’t beating around the bush here–he just called up Lauria and told him to give up the name. “You will be well-rewarded and well-protected,” he promised. Here’s the astounding voicemail he left:

For the record, Lauria isn’t giving up the name of his source.

UPDATE: I’ll admit I’m a bit surprised to hear from Viacom at all on this one. But PR boss Carl Folta wants us to know that Redstone’s call was a freelance affair, and not a reflection of Viacom policy. “There is no investigation under way at Viacom,” he says.

Also totally uninteresting as far as eyes-only “vision” documents go (click on images below to enlarge). Their big revelations? Windows 8 will boot more quickly than its predecessors. It will likely include an app store. Instead of using a password, it might use facial recognition to log in users. It will be more closely connected to the cloud. It will be more energy efficient. It’s intended for a variety of different PC form factors–slate, laptop and all-in-one. And finally, it’s being developed with an eye toward aping the “it just works” simplicity and quality for which Apple (AAPL) products are known–“This is something people will pay for!”

Improved energy efficiency! Faster start-up! An app store! Support for slates!

Fascinating.

So the next iteration of the world’s most popular operating system will be an evolutionary one picking off low-hanging fruit was left after Windows 7? Tell us something we didn’t already know.

Correcting yet another too-early rumor, sources tell BoomTown that–as has been previously reported many times in many places–Microsoft and Apple are in long-term talks about adding the Bing search service as a prominent option on the iPhone and not as a replacement of Google.

Currently, Google (GOOG) is the default search on the popular mobile device, although you can easily go into its settings and switch the search option to Yahoo (YHOO). Few consumers do, though.

Microsoft (MSFT) has been angling to be added to the search options for a long time, but has wanted to do so in a way that makes the choice more visible.

And it is probably a good idea to give users of the iPhone more choice in a wide range of services.

But, whether Apple would make Microsoft’s Bing the default or whether it would simply allow iPhone users more of a choice among search services is unclear.

In addition, Microsoft wants to make its Bing mapping more integrated with the Apple (AAPL) iPhone.

“Being an option is what’s on the table,” said one source briefed on the talks. “That’s all for now, although who knows where it could lead?”

But, cautioned several sources, talks are not complete, even though the software giant is eager to be able to announce such a deal at Apple’s upcoming developers conference on June 7.

Microsoft execs have been nervous about completing such a deal, especially because Apple is notoriously secretive and is known to end talks due to leaks.

That said, relations between Apple and Google have become increasingly tense, as their product offerings–especially in the mobile arena–have become competitive.

Google was one of Apple’s principal partners on the iPhone upon its launch and its services are prominent on the device.

But, as the device has evolved, sources say Apple has been considering a number of search options, as well as mapping, for the iPhone.

Google execs have been anticipating this, of course, especially as the search giant has pushed development of its Android mobile operating system.

In fact, a recent developers conference that Google had in San Francisco, its top execs spent a lot of time publicly attacking Apple.

Thus, it is likely that its top-level placement on the iPhone and other Apple products will diminish.

While being an option is not the same as completely replacing Google, it would give Bing a well-known platform to show off its technology to consumers.

Microsoft would like to hip-check Google off of the iPhone, of course.

But like rumors that it would pay News Corp. (NWS) to “de-index” its content from Google and display it prominently on Bing, the notion is premature.

“They’ll make their announcement tomorrow on this one,” McGraw said. “We have worked with Apple for quite a while. And the Tablet is going to be based on the iPhone operating system and so it will be transferable. So what you are going to be able to do now is we have a consortium of e-books. And we have 95% of all our materials that are in e-book format on that one. So now with the tablet you’re going to open up the higher education market, the professional market. The tablet is going to be just really terrific.”

Below, video of the exchange. Tablet talk starts at 2:50:

The company’s technology encrypts music files with a watermark and lets record labels share them securely with radio stations and other destinations. The watermark allows Yangaroo to identify each person who has downloaded a track, so if a song is leaked, it can trace its origin.

Cliff Hunt, Yangaroo’s operating chief, used to work in music production and management but helped to start the company in 2004 after seeing a presentation about Biopassword. The biomarker system, now called AdmitOne Security, identifies a person’s unique typing rhythm. Mr. Hunt acquired the rights to use it for music and advertising.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

But that was when people still bought CDs. Now everyone from Britney Spears down to the smallest indie band routinely streams music for free, before the disc–or iTunes download–goes on sale, in order to whet appetites–or at least promote concert tours. No big deal.

But I still like the way that Wilco, the best band of all time in the whole wide world (disclosure: I am a big Wilco fan) handles this: Rather than linking up its free stream in a promotional tie-up, the band waits for the album to leak onto the Web, then streams it on their own site. And they ask fans who have helped themselves to an illegal download to donate to charity.

Slight bummer for Warner Music Group (WMG), which would like to sell as many discs as possible, but good vibes for everyone else. And, in truth, a nice promotion for the band as it heads out on tour this summer.

Here’s how the band describes it, via an email sent out last night:

Well, we made it nearly a month with copies of Wilco (the album) floating around out there before it leaked. Pretty impressive restraint in this day and age. But the inevitable happened last night. Since we know you’re curious and probably have better things to do than scour the internet for a download (though we do understand the attraction of the illicit), we’ve posted a stream of the full album at http://wilcoworld.net/records/thealbum/. Feel free to refer to it as “wilco (the stream)” if you must.

We also have our usual guilt abatement plan for downloaders. If you have downloaded the record, we suggest you make a donation to one of the band’s favorite charities, the Inspiration Corporation–an organization we’ve supported in the past & who are doing great work in the city of Chicago. Information and donation button here: http://inspirationcorp.org/.

If you don’t want to click through, here’s a version of the album’s first song, recorded last fall. Not as good as the album cut, in my humble opinion.

BoomTown provided continuing coverage of the Yahoo (YHOO) merry-go-round. This time, PR head Jill Nash announced her departure. As the company’s chief communications officer, she’s had a challenging two-year run. New CEO Carol Bartz definitely has some PR ideas of her own, including offering cash prizes to employees who provide info on their colleagues who leak information to the press. Not a huge deterrent yet, apparently–it didn’t take long for BoomTown to get info on both Nash’s farewell memo and Bartz’s bounty system. Next, New Networks, the publisher behind BarelyPolitical and its hugely viral Obama Girl videos, has widened its purview to include the tech sector with BarelyDigital, which the online network has envisioned to include regular shows, tech news remixes and the like. It’s rumored that Obama Girl will be making a cameo appearance or two. If the first two features are any indication, the future looks pretty funny. In another round of executive musical chairs, Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL ad head Lynda Clarizio will be leaving the online service, to be replaced by former Yahoo ad exec Greg Coleman. Microsoft (MSFT) is launching a slick new celebrity site on MSN called Wonderwall, created, designed and produced by BermanBraun Interactive, a Hollywood company run by former Yahoo media chief Lloyd Braun. And speaking of musical chairs, MSN is clearly upping its content ante–earlier this week, it hired Yahoo’s recent media head Scott Moore, who used to work at Microsoft.

MediaMemo asked: What happens when one of the world’s richest men lets loose a swarm (a small swarm) of mosquitoes at a high-end conference? Nothing too exciting, really, but when you consider that the stunt was the publicity-generating part of Bill Gates’s talk at TED, which was a discussion of malaria and some of the problems the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is facing head-on, it gets pretty compelling. Kindle 2.0, the new generation of the device dubbed the “iPod of the book world” will be unveiled Monday at a New York press event, but how many of the devices have been sold thus far? Amazon’s (AMZN) not telling, but Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney estimates the number at 500,000–and believes that the Kindle will be a $1.2 billion business next year. Obviously, a lot will depend on Monday and the new device’s reception. MediaMemo also took some time out this week to wish Facebook a happy fifth birthday, and to stack its track record next to Google’s at the same age, with interesting results. Even the pros are getting hit hard these days–in its quarterly earnings report this week, News Corp. (NWS) missed its estimates, recorded an $8.4 billion write-off and lowered its guidance. CEO Rupert Murdoch admitted that the downturn is worse than he thought. He also admitted that he spent $2.8 billion too much for Dow Jones. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and this Web site.)

Digital Daily followed the trial of four Google executives this week on criminal charges of defamation and breach of privacy after a much-publicized two-year investigation. Google (GOOG) insists the charges are unwarranted and “akin to prosecuting mail service employees for hate speech letters sent in the post.” Clearly, the ultimate outcome will have a huge impact on the future of a free, open Internet. MySpace said this week that it has identified and ousted 90,000 registered sex offenders–and those are just the ones brilliant enough to use their real names. There’s no way of knowing how many are actually using the service or how to prevent them from re-registering once they’re deleted. A free an open Internet, indeed. DD also pondered the future (or lack thereof) of the Motorola (MOT) handset division. Co-CEO Sanjay Jha says the company is committed to making the business work, but its products are looking boring and outdated, and a turnaround would be prohibitively expensive to execute. In the words of one analyst, the company’s problems are “gruesome.” On the other end of the spectrum, Microsoft continues to vehemently deny reports that it’ll be producing its own smartphone. In a report this week, analysts from Broadpoint.AmTech speculated that the device could be uncrated later this month at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Meanwhile, it’s been up in the air for two years whether or not iPhones will ever be uncrated in historic Georgetown. Apple (AAPL) has been around the table a few times now with preservationists wary of the architectural impact of an Apple store, no matter how much the business traffic is needed in the neighborhood. Looks like perseverance may have finally paid off, though–Georgetown’s Apple store could open later this year.

In Personal Technology this week, Walt Mossberg took a look at a program called Foxmarks, which sets out to synchronize bookmarks among all of your browsers and all of your machines. Sound a little too handy to actually work well? Walt found it does a pretty good job, with a few caveats. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt responds to readers who want to know more about doing “techie” maintenance on their PCs to keep them running well, whether or not to buy a 15-inch MacBook Pro, and options for email within Windows 7, which won’t ship with a built-in email program. In the Mossberg Solution, Katherine Boehret tests Google Latitude, an opt-in program that lets users track one another’s movements on their smartphones using GPS, Wi-Fi, and cell towers. Kind of like Gawker Stalker, only with permission and without Lindsay Lohan (unless you happen to be Lindsay Lohan).

Last but not least, Silicon Valley lost one of its own this week. The widely admired and much loved Mike Homer, whose rare, severe illness was a rallying point for many over the past months, passed away last weekend and was laid to rest on Thursday.

More next week.

Or a carefully orchestrated leak.

Incidentally, Linkin Park’s tour schedule puts the band in New York City on Thursday.

Or a carefully orchestrated leak.

Incidentally, Linkin Park’s tour schedule puts the band in New York City on Thursday.