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Meanwhile, the Identity Theft Resource Center released its 2007 report on identity theft, offering comparisons to data it’s collected over the last five years.

Verizon found that 73 percent of the data breaches were the result of outside sources, with only 18 percent from insider threats. Of the outside sources, 39 percent were attributed to business partners. Third parties, not victimized organizations, discovered 75 percent of the breaches.

Attack methods vary around the world, Verizon found. Attacks from Asia, China and Vietnam in particular, often involve application exploits. Attacks from the Middle East involve site defacements. And attacks from Eastern Europe and Russia involve point-of-sale compromises.

More disturbing, 62 percent of the respondents to the ITRC survey reported that thieves had committed crimes, such that warrants were issued in the victim’s name.

Eighty-two percent of the victims learned of the theft through creditors or collection agencies, up from 76 percent a year ago. Only 10 percent found out through proactive measures, with 8 percent identifying something on their credit reports.

On Wednesday, Verizon Business released a four-year study concluding that 9 out of 10 corporate data breaches could have been prevented, had appropriate security measures been taken. The Verizon report includes the results of more than 500 forensic investigations, including three of the largest data breaches ever reported.

The ITRC report looks at the other side: the impact of identity fraud on its victims. In 2007, 57 percent of stolen information was used to open a new line of credit, while 13 percent was used to order cable and or other utility services.

For Microsoft, such comments mean it likely can’t count on Icahn to carry its message to Yahoo investors and ask them to vote in his dissident slate, with the hope the dissident slate would approve the partial search buyout deal that the current Yahoo board had rejected.

“While the Google deal is not the same as an offer of $34.375 per share for Yahoo, I am continuing to study it, and it might have some merit.”

One proxy solicitor had this observation regarding Microsoft’s memo:

In the coming weeks, leading up to Yahoo’s annual shareholders meeting on August 1, it will be interesting to see whether Microsoft solely spends its time talking about the potential anti-trust issues with a Yahoo-Google advertising relationship, or spends an equal amount of time discussing the shareholder value of its partial Yahoo buyout deal.

The software giant, however, sounded like a potential presidential candidate testing the waters before declaring, in a memo sent Friday to Microsoft employees. Although the memo was meant for Microsoft’s workforce, there was plenty there that could also speak directly to Yahoo investors.

• A More Profitable Ongoing Business. This proposal would have resulted in higher operating income on an annual basis for Yahoo, with our projections more than doubling Yahoo’s operating income in the first year of operation, and increasing it by more than $1 billion above its current operating income level.

Unfortunately Yahoo has chosen a different course, and yesterday announced an agreement that would start to consolidate over 90 percent of the paid search advertising market in Google’s hands. This will make the market far less competitive. There are many experts who suggest that a host of legal and regulatory problems lie ahead for Google and Yahoo.

Update: June 16 at 7:15 a.m., with comments from a source on whether a hostile bid for a portion of a company’s assets, not the whole company, is doable.

We believe this proposal would have created compelling value for Yahoo and its shareholders in at least three ways:

Taken together, we believe that our proposal would have created total value for Yahoo’s shareholders in excess of $33 per share.

Icahn, in the interview, declined to comment on whether he would continue with his proxy fight to unseat Yahoo’s entire board with his own slate of dissident directors, or scale it back and seek only a minority representation on Yahoo’s board.

“I continue to be extremely disappointed with the Yahoo management, but the Google deal might have some merit and seems to be better than the alternative deal proposed by Microsoft.”

Regardless of Yahoo’s decision, we will continue to move forward on our strategy in online services and advertising.

Whether Microsoft would want to entertain a hostile tender offer for a portion of Yahoo’s business and generate enough investor support for such a deal is highly questionable. In fact, that option is not available to Microsoft, given a company cannot launch a hostile bid for a portion of another company’s assets, noted one source familiar with hostile bids.

Icahn, as quoted in a Reuters report Sunday, said he believed Yahoo’s advertising partnership with Google “might have some merit.”

• A More Compelling Search Offering. The combination of the search platforms would have unlocked new R&D innovation, eliminated redundant engineering efforts and allowed for greater scale in serving our customers.

Here’s an excerpt from the employee memo, as reported by News.com’s Ina Fried :

“In the modern world every message has multiple audiences, in part because of media coverage. Every communication about a corporate event like a proposed transaction - or lack thereof - between Microsoft and Yahoo! will be scrutinized and analyzed by investors, even when the communication may have been designed for internal purposes only.”

If Microsoft was holding out any hope of enlisting Yahoo investor activist Carl Icahn to its side of the table with a partial acquisition of the search pioneer’s business, Icahn apparently isn’t budging.

Said Icahn in a Reuters interview:

Within hours of announcing its failed talks with Microsoft, Yahoo announced it would enter into a search advertising partnership with Google–a move that Microsoft has previously stated it would find objectionable.

Icahn’s comments follow Yahoo’s statement Thursday that talks with Microsoft have come to an end, after it determined selling its search business to the software giant was not in its best long-term interests and that Microsoft reiterated it had no intent to launch a new buyout bid for the entire company.

• New Transfer of Cash to Yahoo Shareholders. This proposal would have transferred $9 billion from Microsoft to Yahoo, which could have been used by Yahoo to reward their shareholders.

Most would-be open-source contributors don’t have time to become anything more than casual contributors. This means that the vast majority of potential open-source contributions remain in their silos and never make it back into the common code pool.

It’s a non-trivial question with much at stake. The organization that cracks this code would likely immediately take center stage in open-source development. It must become easier to contribute to open-source communities if we hope to make open source more than simply an interesting facet of the software industry, and turn it into the central, driving force behind the industry.

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Think about Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst’s suggestion that enterprises need to start participating in open-source development. I’m going to be speaking at the New York CTO Club in November on this very topic: how do we encourage “drive-by developers” to become full-fledged members of open-source communities?

Jack Repenning, CTO of Collabnet, takes issue with my complaint that contributing code to open-source projects is hard. Jack’s suggestion that “while community membership requires more than ‘casual contribution,’ you shouldn’t have to ‘become a key member’” in order to play a part is fair and spot-on. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really tackle the big issue.

According to the Financial Times, music label EMI is planning to launch its own music portal to sell songs and videos, and offer some free content as well.

I suspect that this is more of a cross-marketing play instead. Users will google an EMI artist like–just to pick an example at random–A Perfect Circle. Instead of directing them to a boring alphabetical list with a link to the band’s MySpace page, users could land on a label-owned page with actual songs and videos and CDs, both free and for sale. Once there, EMI might intelligently discern that a fan who likes A Perfect Circle might also like Korn and Iron Maiden, two other metal bands with recordings on EMI, and offer those recordings for sale as well.

But surely EMI’s digital team, led by former Googler Douglas Merrill, is smart enough to realize that it can’t take on Apple’s iTunes with a label-specific store.

And now, just because I haven’t linked to it in a while, here’s the Sex Pistols.

My first reaction was similar to that of the anonymous music executive quoted in the FT article: dead on arrival. Listeners don’t know and don’t care about labels; they want to buy all their music in one place, and so on.

Along with the usual litany of death threats and illegal conduct with bribes I’ve come to expect from anybody with a Roman numeral after their name, the best part of today’s indictment claims this goof slipped ecstasy into the drinks of unsuspecting tech execs. (What great fodder for a future summer movie treatment: Cheech & Chong meet the technology industry.)

Only one problem: it was all a fig newton of Papows’ considerable imagination. Turns out that he was an air-traffic controller while the degree came from an unaccredited correspondence school. And he’s not the second coming of Chuck Norris, either. No tae kwon do black belt. Ditto for the orphan reference; his parents lived close to his home in Massachusetts. But no harm, no foul. He just liked to relate tall tales. (These days, Papows is CEO of Maptuit.)

•  In or around 2001, defendant Nicholas distributed and used controlled substances during a flight on a private plane between Orange County, Calif., and Las Vegas, causing marijuana smoke and fumes to enter the cockpit and requiring the pilot flying the plane to put on an oxygen mask.” (That’s a lot of cannabis. A lot of cannabis.)

•  Defendant Nicholas used threats of physical violence and death and payments of money to attempt to conceal his unlawful conduct. (Yikes!)

•  Defendant Nicholas hired prostitutes and escorts for himself and customers, representatives, and associates of Broadcom and other businesses entities with which he was affiliated and supplied such prostitutes and escorts with controlled substances. (I get invited to the wrong parties.)

But there’s still nothing like the litany of allegations against Nicholas. Among the charges, consider these eye poppers:

•  Defendant Nicholas spiked the drinks of others with MDMA (ecstasy) without their knowledge, including, without limitation, the drinks of technology executives and representatives who worked for Broadcom’s customers. (Party on, Garth!)

Remember, this is the same guy who famously imposed a spit-and-polish dress code and woe to the unlucky employee who run afoul of his famous temper. As an aside, let’s not forget that last year a contractor sued Nicholas for $150,000 in back wages, claiming he had a secret underground hideaway at Nicholas’ Laguna Hills estate used as a “personal brothel” and for drug use.

Nicholas isn’t the only former senior technology exec caught up in career-ending scandal. Of course, there’s the garden variety pretexting or stock option finagling. Then there’s the truly bizarre stuff that pops up on the radar from time to time.

Meanwhile, Nicholas and three former Broadcom confederates face separate charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission relating to the backdating of stock options.

Remember Jeffrey Papows? He used to be president of Lotus before the press debunked his claims to have shucked off his lowly orphan beginnings to become a Marine aviator with a Ph.D. from Pepperdine University, as well as a black belt in tae kwon do. If that doesn’t say “don’t mess with me, I’m bad-ass,” then nothing does.

You can’t make this kind of stuff up. You just can’t. The newly unsealed grand jury indictment against Henry Nicholas III paints Broadcom’s co-founder as an alleged drug-addled weirdo hell bent on feeding a covert addiction to ecstasy and cocaine.

Then there was the 1999 arrest and subsequent conviction of former Disney Internet exec Patrick Naughton, who got nailed for crossing state lines with the intent to have sex with an undercover police officer that he thought was a 13-year-old girl.

(Credit:
Yahoo)

Delicious, Yahoo’s “social bookmarking” site that lets people archive, tag, and share Web site addresses, got its start closely tied to the
Firefox open-source Web browser (download Delicious for Firefox). Now Yahoo is branching out to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, too.

The company released a beta version of the IE plug-in Tuesday (available on Download.com). Though there are differences, the IE version is similar, offering users the ability to add and tag bookmarks and to search their own bookmark collection.

Yahoo now offers a beta version of its Delicious browser plug-in for online bookmarking functions.

The software works on IE 6, IE 7, and the
IE 8 beta on Windows XP and Vista, Yahoo said.

“We’re very excited about this release, as we have many users who use Internet Explorer as their primary browser,” said Nick Nguyen, senior product manager for Delicious, in a Delcious blog postint Tuesday.

You don’t always realize how dramatic that transition is going to be when people aren’t depending on your decisions day by day.

Gates, who is stepping down from his full-time role at Microsoft this week to focus on his $37 billion charitable foundation, is the subject of an article that profiles Microsoft’s successes and failures during his tenure, as well as the difficult transition the company and its founder will likely face. (CNET News.com plans to publish its own retrospective on Gates’ departure, but in the meantime, you might want to refresh yourself with some stories from when the transition was announced.)

He founded the company, he’s accumulated this wealth, he’s got this foundation, he’s got this fame. That’s irreplaceable. Also, Bill grew up with every one of the technologies in this company. He’s got more capacity to remember things than anybody I’ve ever known. It’s unlikely we’ll have anybody again who has that breadth.

This whole thing about which operating system somebody uses is a pretty silly thing versus issues involving starvation or death.

“He’s not just Bill Gates, he’s the Bill Gates,” Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO and Gates’ right-hand man for decades:

So how about Bill? Is he going to miss being in the trenches, slugging it out with Apple, Google, and Mozilla? It doesn’t sound like it from what he told the magazine:

Paul Allen, who co-founded the company with Gates, remarked from the perspective of his own departure from the company in 1983:

As Bill Gates prepares to walk away from Microsoft, both the man and the company he founded will face challenges getting along without each other, according to the new issue of Newsweek magazine.

A lot of the company’s strength is that Bill created a culture of crisis–if there weren’t a Google, we’d have to make one. This is a period of unprecedented strength for the company. If there had to be a time when Bill transitioned out, we couldn’t have set it up better than it is right now.

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET News.com)

Gates was also responsible for stoking the fires of urgency at the software giant, said Ray Ozzie, who took over Gates’ job as chief software architect:

While the Newsweek story mentions Microsoft’s challenges in antitrust probes,
Windows Vista versus Windows XP, and the Internet search arena, the story also offers intimate perspectives from the people who know him the best, as well as Gates himself.

We will likely be seeing more of Bill Gates with people such as U2 front man Bono (like in this video), working on famine relief and education.

You kick off a meeting by typing into a plain English description of what you want to do, such as, “Get lunch on Monday with Joe,” or, “Set up book club meeting with Jack, John, and Claire at Sparky’s Diner.” Then you get a screen showing what the system thinks you mean. It guesses at the times and dates, and you enter in missing information like e-mail addresses. It also helps you find and map locations for meetings.

I found setting up test meetings in Presdo quite easy and almost fun. But I’m also left scratching my head. Presdo, at the moment, doesn’t give you any real insight into when it would be good for you or anyone else to meet, meaning the thorniest part of setting up a meeting–choosing a time–is still completely manual. Nor does the clever location finder link in to a service like OpenTable for restaurants or Fandango for movie tickets. And the natural-language starting gate for Presdo is cute, but it’s not smart enough to obviate the need for you to carefully check its work on the event page that it creates once you type your plain text.

What makes this service peculiar is that it does very little that you can’t otherwise do through e-mail and Web surfing. However, it packages everything up so nicely you might not notice.

I like the idea of new, pure interface for scheduling meetings. And Presdo does do a nice job of keeping your e-mail free of hard-to-follow messages about meetings. But I want much better integration into other calendar-related services before I start to use it.

Of all the meeting time brokers I’ve seen, Presdo is the most peculiar. Which means it’s worth checking out. Unlike other apps I’ve covered (Timebridge, Jiffle, Tungle, Timedriver, etc.) Presdo’s strength is not that it automates the selection of meeting times that work out for attendees (it doesn’t), but rather that it helps script the dialogue that’s usually a part of the back-and-forth in setting up a meeting.

I do appreciate the Google-simple start page.

Once your meeting is set up, the system e-mails the other attendees with your plans. They can propose new times and places. The whole back-and-forth is captured on your event’s dedicated page. Once everyone buys in to the plans, attendees can pop the meeting into their calendar (Outlook, iCal, Yahoo, or Google).

See also: IWantSandy and ReQall (review)

Presdo is smart, but not brilliant. You have to hold its hand after you first tell it what you want.

Qi Lu

Update 1:17 p.m. PDT: A source familiar with Yahoo’s situation confirmed that Lu is in fact leaving the company.

Yahoo already lost several high-level executives in the last week:

Update 6:34 p.m. PDT: The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the reorganization will centralize product groups into a central product organization.

Update 12:17 p.m. PDT: Lu, who leads search and monetization work at Yahoo, can’t be in an easy position. Yahoo just announced a major agreement under which Google–Yahoo’s top rival–will supply its own search ads next to Yahoo’s search results.

Three more executives are leaving the company: Qi Lu, executive vice president of engineering for search and advertising technology; Brad Garlinghouse, senior vice president of communications and community; and Vish Makhijani, senior vice president of search, TechCrunch reported Thursday.

“You can see that Jerry does not have the support of the leadership inside Yahoo,” the source said.

(Credit:
Yahoo)

Update 5:07 p.m. PDT: I’ve confirmed all three departures from multiple sources familiar with the situation.

“We have a deep and talented management team across all areas of the company. Our successful implementation of our core strategies and the timely rollout of key products this year testifies to the effectiveness of our team, and we continue to recruit outstanding talent. Yahoo continues to be a leader in our industry and remains a unique, exciting, and important place to work even as we experience the attrition that’s to be expected in the Internet industry.”

The executive parade from Yahoo could well be getting a lot longer.

Yahoo didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Garlinghouse is best known outside Yahoo for his “Peanut Butter Manifesto”, in which he complained, “We want to do everything and be everything–to everyone…The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.”

• Jason Zajac, who has been general manager of social media, head of finance for the audience division, and vice president of corporate strategy.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

• Jeremy Zawodny, an evangelist of what’s now become the Yahoo Open Strategy.

• Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, the husband-and-wife co-founders of Flickr.

Brad Garlinghouse

• Usama Fayyad, chief data officer and executive vice president of research and strategic data solutions.

But one source within the company had a more skeptical view of the reorganization, believing it a forced reaction to executive departures rather than the cause.

“It’s definitely not a shuffle,” the source said. But while some have called for the ouster of Chief Executive Jerry Yang, the change won’t affect him or President Susan Decker, apparently. And it likely won’t involve layoffs.

The pressure has to be strong for Makhijani, too. Yahoo is interested in search, but in the last year, search queries performed at Yahoo in May declined 13.8 percent to 1.33 billion while Google’s increased to 4.65 billion, according to statistics released Thursday by Nielsen Online. And third-place Microsoft, whose search queries increased 72 percent to 1.04 billion, is trying to poach Yahoo search employees.

Update 3:40 p.m. PDT: Yahoo offered a statement, but it’s only general:

• Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of the network division.

I have to wonder: Is this the level at which attrition is “expected”?

And there’s more: Yahoo plans a major reorganization, potentially to be announced as soon as next week, one source said. This change will be of much bigger magnitude than the rejiggerings of recent quarters.

One factor contributing to some of the executive departures is dissatisfaction with how they’d end up after the reorganization, the source said. Another is what amounted to the choice of recommitting to Yahoo or moving on.

NNDB, a directory of important people and celebrities (the two are not exclusive) standing for Notable Names Database, has put together a mapping tool that lets you connect the dots to see how people are intertwined.

One example, featured in this demo video, shows the overlap of board members for large tech companies, including Apple, Intel, Yahoo, and Microsoft. You can use the tool to figure out who’s worked where, then drill down to their personal histories–both work and play, with very little effort.

The backgrounds of each individual are maintained by the NNDB community and its editors. You can also go in to create your own charts, though you’re limited to NNDB’s directory of people and companies.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

This reminds me a lot of Cogmap, a service that lets you map out the hierarchy of your workplace. It’s got a little more flash, though, and is similar to They Rule, a site outdated about four years that chronicles the “ruling class” of corporations around the world.

Thanks Harrison.

Wondering how companies fit together, and where there's overlap? Check out NNDB's mapper tool.

For those who are less corporate-inclined, some of the celebrity “maps” are pretty amusing, including charts of who’s been romantically involved with whom.

I was going to do one for CBS and CNET, but alas we’re not there. You can, however, compare CBS to NBC, ABC, and even Fox Broadcasting. There’s not a lot of overlap, but you can easily see people’s positions at the company and where else they’ve worked.