//beconfused

Sarah Palin recently had her Yahoo! mail account taken over. Screen shots of her email is revealed on forums causing much upset to the Republicans and, erm, Bill O’Reilly.

Here’s Bill O’Reilly visibly pissed off but we know that’s his normal look anyway.

Bill O’Reilly - Sarah Palin Email Hack

Palin Sued for Private E-Mails About State Business

In a lawsuit filed in Alaska Superior Court, a Republican activist seeks to force Gov. Sarah Palin to produce copies of official correspondence she sent and received on private e-mail accounts.

Andrée McLeod filed the suit Wednesday and publicized it in a news release today. “Rather than using her state e-mail account, throughout her two-year tenure as Governor of Alaska, defendant Sarah Palin, as a matter of routine, has used, and, on information and belief, continues to use, (at least) two private e-mail accounts… to conduct official business of the State of Alaska,” the suit alleges. (Source: The Trail)

A Republican activist filed a suit? That’s interesting.

Microsoft withdraws Yahoo! bid! One of the rare news where I can put two exclamation marks instead of one.

Microsoft Withdraws Its Bid for Yahoo

The about-face followed a meeting on Saturday morning in Seattle between Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, and Yahoo’s chief and co-founder, Jerry Yang, according to a person familiar with the talks.

At the meeting, which also included Yahoo’s other founder, David Filo, and a Microsoft president who oversees its online unit, Kevin Johnson, Mr. Ballmer increased Microsoft’s offer to $33 a share, or a total of about $47.5 billion, from $29.40 a share. Mr. Yang told Mr. Ballmer that Yahoo would not accept an offer below $37 a share, this person said.

“Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid by roughly $5 billion, Yahoo has not moved toward accepting our offer,” Mr. Ballmer said in a statement. “After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal.”

Microsoft’s decision to walk away casts a cloud of uncertainty over Yahoo and its shareholders. The breakdown in the talks is likely to send Yahoo’s shares plunging, and Mr. Yang and his team will have to decide how to placate investors. (Source: NYTimes)

I think this is good news for Microsoft shareholders. Yahoo isn’t that worth the money to purchase, plus Microsoft has the technology, they just need to work out their visitor numbers. For Yahoo!, it perhaps it a good thing too, but I just kinda have a bad feeling that Yahoo! won’t be doing too well in the coming months to come.

I just joined MyBlogLog days ago just to see how it actually works. The idea is pretty cool so I decided to keep it on my sidebar.

(Very nice. I like the black one. It didn’t look very right due to my stylesheet. My sidebar one looks correct though.)

They’ve just released a new widget for the recent visitors tool and it’s looking really good. Go to their site to fetch the new codes. I kinda found the flyout feature to be rather annoying and disabled it. MyBlogLog is a Yahoo company.

Yahoo Inc.’s board plans to reject Microsoft Corp.’s bid to buy the Internet pioneer, The Wall Street Jornal reported on its Web site Saturday.

Board members concluded the unsolicited $44.6 billion offer massively undervalues the Web pioneer, a person familiar with the situation told the newspaper.

The bid was made public Feb. 1

read more | digg story

What could this mean for Yahoo and Microsoft?

Probably drops in shares. Yahoo probably won’t have a good year ahead. They’ve got a few key people who just left. Yahoo has Flickr, delicious.com and pretty cool stuff for developers. They lack a good ad network though.

Microsoft, being Microsoft would go on of course. But their internet arm still is pretty weak. They’ve recently bought a couple of firms to enhance their mapping services. I wish they do something with social networking instead. And Microsoft needs to have a video streaming service like YouTube. They have one that no one uses so it’s not counted.

Google is probably smiling happily right now.

Google’s Gmail has been updates to allow bigger file attachments, 20 MB that is. I never had to send such huge files through Gmail but it is always good to hear of an upgrade.

The little problem is that most email providers don’t support incoming mail with such big attachments making Gmail rather lonely. Basically Gmail people would just be happy sending the 20 MB to their fellow Gmail friends. Perhaps other companies would move to 20 MB soon.

But really, what’s cooler is that - at Yahoo! Mail, there is no storage meter! Archive as much as you want now. Yahoo! is being really generous. Are you listening Microsoft?

Microsoft wants to aquire Yahoo! for $50 billion. Yahoo! has a lot of great products under its wing, notably Flickr, del.icio.us, Auctions, Finance, advertising and Mail.

But I do not want Microsoft to acquire Yahoo! at all! Imagine all the lost in competition. Currently the competition is among Microsoft, Google and Yahoo!. If they were to be together, it’s just one less competitor.

And Yahoo! is probably too big a company to gobble. They’d take years to completely acquire and integrate Yahoo! into the rest of Microsoft products. Eventually this acquistion may even set both companies back.

What Microsoft (and Yahoo!) should be doing is a partnership and more promotions. Make things work faster and build better interfaces.

Microsoft:

• your MSN Spaces is still quite crappy
• your Live Hotmail still needs to look better, compare Yahoo!
• your Virtual Earth product isn’t as cool as Google’s
• your search engine still needs to be improved a little
• you bloody need an RSS program that is online and integrated with Live products
• your Live ID program seems to be losing traction
• your calendar needs to learn a bit or two from Google
• you need to compete with Google with your the Office documents
• please look at del.icio.us and then look at your Windows Live Favorites, it’s more fun using del.icio.us
• you need to cross promote your software like what Google did
• stop working on Windows Live Mail Desktop, use concentrate on Live Hotmail
• you need to allow more publishers in your advertising program.

Microsoft, you don’t need to acquire Yahoo!, just work on your web applications and brush them up. I find myself using lesser and lesser of your products. I’m always willing to give your products a try, but a lot of your products aren’t too inspiring. There are some startup companies that does thing better than you do.

I portray Google and Yahoo! as much cooler companies. Your Windows Live brand isn’t cool at all. Tip: change all your products to LiveMail, LiveLinks, LiveSpaces, LiveReader, LiveEarth and whatever. Drop the Windows word, it’s boring. I applaud names such as Silverlight, that’s a fantastic start.

In the meantime, I’ll go back to using Gmail and Google Earth.

read more | digg story

[Oh by the way, Wall Street Journal has reported that the Microsoft-Yahoo talks of a possible acquistion is no longer active.]

I’m personally quite afraid of clowns. I came across one of the questions in Yahoo! Answers that has a satisfatory answer.

Why do so many people have a fear of clowns?

The official term for this irrational aversion to red-nosed entertainers is coulrophobia. While many are merely creeped out by clowns, the fear runs much deeper for others, affecting their daily lives.

Several theories attempt to explain the origins of the phobia, though none seem definitive. One of the more interesting comes from Kathryn Cillick. She believes most people are afraid of clowns because it’s impossible to gauge a clown’s true emotions. Thanks to painted-on smiles, people can’t distinguish if the clown is as happy as he seems or if he’s actually about to bite somebody’s face off.

Several celebrities are decidedly anti-clown. Rapper P. Diddy has a “no clown” clause in his concert contracts. Johnny Depp had nightmares of clowns as a kid. And, of course there’s Bart Simpson, whose utterance “Can’t sleep, clown will eat me” speaks volumes about his feelings on the subject.

Source: Yahoo! Answers

Clown don’t look friendly to me at all, their hidden emotions made them even scarier perhaps.