Conde Nast Acquires Ars Technica

Conde Nast, the mother-company of Wired, has acquired technology blog Ars Technica (Latin for the art of technology) reportedly for $25 million, according to Mike Arrington of Techcrunch.

The report added that founders Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes will remain with the company as they get integrated with Wired Digital.

Formal announcement is expected next week.

U.S. Senators Take On Child Pornography With $1 Billion Warchest

Child pornography is one reality that’s part of the dark side of the Internet. If you’re going to ask me, people who take advantage of kids, especially for the purpose of pornography, deserves some form of lethal injection. But I’m not the law.

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved the Combating Child Exploitation Act of 2007 to encourage federal, state, and local police to use and create special software designed to nab child pornography swappers on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. The bill now rests in the hands of the Senate-at-large for voting.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), would allocate more than $1 billion over the next eight years for efforts aimed at combating Internet crimes against children. (more…)

Vodafone Snaps Up Social Networking Company

British cell provider Vodafone is moving into the world of cellular social networking.

Vodafone has acquired ZYB, a Danish company that connects cell phone features to the internet. ZYB lets users sync information like their contacts, pictures, texts, and calendar appointments with an internet database, creating a dynamic relationship. Users can update the info either via their phones or via the ZYB online interface.

ZYB also allows photo sharing and content tagging with friends and is currently preparing to launch a new Social Phonebook feature. The new tool will let you see friends’ physical locations, availability, and even connect to their Facebook and Twitter posts from your cell phone.

ZYB says it’ll continue to offer all its features for free under the Vodafone deal and will not limit its services to Vodaphone customers.

Microsoft to Offer Windows to One Laptop Per Child

When Microsoft started in 1975 they had a vision of a computer on every desk and in every home. Today, aside from continuing on that vision, and more, Microsoft announced that they have reached an agreement with One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) to offer Windows on the organization’s computers.

The OLPC laptop uses Linux and with Windows coming in, more orders are expected to to come in from governments and education ministries. The first OLPC laptops running Windows will be tested next month in limited trials over five countries.

“The people who buy the machines are not the children who use them, but government officials in most cases and those people are much more comfortable with Windows.” OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte said.

We can only hope that Windows would run just like how sturdy the OLPC laptops are. In the first place, we all want kids to have fun in computing.

Update at 11:56am: It’s here. In an email that we received straight from Microsoft (well, the PR representing Microsoft), a video was shown to us that Windows is indeed working on OLPC. Sturdy, we surely hope.

iPhone Hits The Middle East

The iPhone is going global.

Apple has announced it’ll team up with European cell provider Orange to bring the popular device to nearly a dozen more countries, including some in the Middle East and Africa.

The deal will soon land the phone in places like Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Portugal, Egypt, and Jordan — a big jump from the current limited list of nations carrying it.

The AP points out, though, that users in many of those uncovered countries have already had their hands on the iPhone by way of “unlocked” devices. They’ve basically modified the phones, against Apple’s wishes, to make them work over any network.

Apple hopes to sell 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008.

Yahoo Lashes Out At Call For Change

Yahoo is firing back at the billionaire investor who called for its board of directors to be removed.

Carl Icahn sent a letter to Yahoo executives yesterday saying the board “acted irrationally and lost the faith of its shareholders” during its broken down takeover talks with Microsoft. Icahn went on to nominate 10 of his own replacements for the leaders.

Today, Yahoo questioned Icahn’s understanding about the failed Microsoft deal and insisted its board is the “best and most qualified group” to helm the organization. You can read the entire letter below.

The Inquisitr Update: One Week In

It has been a little over a week since The Inquisitr launched and for me it has been a wild ride. My background in blogging has been as an owner for years, but after 12 months at TechCrunch and nearly 6 months prior to that I hadn’t run a reasonably high trafficked blog. I won’t make many of these sorts of posts (maybe once a month or so) but being part of the blogosphere is being transparent, so I’ll take the opportunity to share some stats, what we’ve done, and where we are heading in this post.
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Disqus: The Case For And Against

Editors note: I’d actually started writing this before this post hit Techmeme, so I’ve updated this post to fit.

Disqus is an embedded commenting system that’s getting a lot of viral support lately, and even some money via Fred Wilson and others.

Disqus, not unlike the original incarnation of CoComment offers centralized comment tracking, threaded messages and third party support. Those who use Disqus outsource their comment systems under the premise that what Disqus offers is better than what they have available to them on their current blogs.

I’ve had a lot of suggestions since launching The Inquisitr last week about services this site should either support or be running, and a couple of people have recommended Disqus. I’ve not been warm towards the service in the past (I was a fierce critic of the original incarnation of coComment), but I know if something is getting a ton of buzz it’s at least worth some homework. As far as I can read it, this is the case for and against Disqus
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China arrests four bloggers over earthquake rumors

According to this New York Times article four bloggers have been arrested for spreading false rumors that the government avoided signs that an earthquake was imminent.

“…officials announced the arrest of four people for spreading quake-related rumors on the Web and said they would be punished, although the officials did not describe the punishment or nature of the rumors.”

One of the so called “signs” was based on an invasion of toads in the town of Mianzhu, two days before the devastating earthquake. Toads are said to bring bad luck in China, but the director of Mianzhu’s forestry bureau said the movement of the toads is part of their normal breeding behavior.

Mike Henry is currently living in China writing a blog on the Beijing Olympics.

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