Yahoo’s new web portal goes live BBC

Internet giant Yahoo has relaunched its web portal, supported by a $100m global advertising campaign. The company hopes the website refresh will boost both traffic and revenues. Yahoo will also open its home page to rivals, allowing users to integrate third-party web services like Facebook or Hotmail into its portal.mYahoo has been struggling to turn its position as the world’s most popular website into profits. The portal is the first move of new boss Carol Bartz. [Also see Yahoo threatens even more online advertising ]

Linus calls Linux ‘bloated and huge’ The Register
LinuxCon 2009 Linux creator Linus Torvalds says the open source kernel has become “bloated and huge,” with no midriff-slimming diet plan in sight. During a roundtable discussion at LinuxCon in Portland, Oregon this afternoon, moderator and Novell distinguished engineer James Bottomley asked Tovalds whether Linux kernel features were being released too fast, before the kernel is stabilized. Citing an internal Intel study that tracked kernel releases, Bottomley said Linux performance had dropped about two per centage points at every release, for a cumulative drop of about 12 per cent over the last ten releases. “Is this a problem?” he asked. “We’re getting bloated and huge. Yes, it’s a problem,” said Torvalds. Asked what the community is doing to solve this, he balked. “Uh, I’d love to say we have a plan,” Torvalds replied to applause and chuckles from the audience. “I mean, sometimes it’s a bit sad that we are definitely not the streamlined, small, hyper-efficient kernel that I envisioned 15 years ago…The kernel is huge and bloated, and our icache footprint is scary. I mean, there is no question about that. And whenever we add a new feature, it only gets worse.” He maintains, however, that stability is not a problem. “I think we’ve been pretty stable,” he said. “We are finding the bugs as fast as we’re adding them — even though we’re adding more code.”

Eminem’s music publisher takes Apple to court Associated Press
Eight Mile Style and a co-plaintiff, Martin Affiliated, are suing Apple, claiming they never authorized the use of 93 songs in a downloadable format on the Cupertino company’s iTunes service. They are also suing Aftermath Records, which controls the recordings in question, saying it didn’t have the right to make deals on digital downloads. A nonjury trial in the rapper’s hometown of Detroit is scheduled for Thursday unless a settlement is reached today with the help of U.S. Magistrate Judge Virginia Morgan. It’s unclear from court documents just how much money is at stake, but the plaintiffs claim Apple wrongfully gained $2.5 million through iTunes downloads, including $466,915 from “Lose Yourself,” Eminem’s biggest hit from the hip-hop film “8 Mile.” The publisher also believes it should get a share of Apple’s profit from the sale of iPods.

AT&T takes the phone out of iPhone CNet
Three weeks ago, I got a call on a friend’s iPhone while in the middle of a desert; cell phone coverage had come to Burning Man. By contrast, several calls I made last night to my parents from my San Francisco apartment were dropped and a subsequent connection became garbled. That happens daily when I try to converse on my first-generation iPhone in my apartment and in certain other neighborhoods. I’ve come to anticipate that if I can even make a call it’s likely to be short-lived or poor quality. Frustrated by the numerous interrupted calls, I decided to try to find out why my iPhone service is so poor that it’s easier to have a Web video conference over AIM with my boyfriend because neither of us can use our iPhones (his is 3G) reliably inside either of our homes. This is not a new problem. AT&T was criticized when traffic from attendees at the South By Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, overwhelmed the network earlier this year.

Sex rumours land loose-lipped Swedish pastor in hot water The Local
A pastor in Malmö in southern Sweden has been accused of leaking intimate details of a woman’s sex life to other members of the congregation. The pastor has been reported for allegedly violating his duty of confidentiality and passing on intimate details of a woman’s sex life to other members of his congregation, writes the SkÃ¥nska Dagbladet newspaper. The accusations come after the pastor ran into a male member of his congregation near the parish offices in August of this year at which point the pastor is said to have initiated a conversation pertaining to the the sex life of one of the female members of his congregation.

EU probe ‘costs Oracle millions’ BBC
Oracle head Larry Ellison says his firm is losing $100m (£61.2m) every month while it waits for the verdict of an EU probe into a planned takeover deal. The business software firm has proposed a $7.4bn takeover of computer hardware and software maker Sun Microsystems.In August, the US Justice Department gave its approval to the deal, agreed between the two firms in April. “The longer this takes, the more money Sun is going to lose,” Mr Ellison told an audience in Silicon Valley.

Lotus Notes fumbles JavaScript in RSS feeds Heise Online
If you get a file with potentially dangerous JavaScript from an unknown source, what is the stupidest thing you can do with it? Well, you could store the script locally and then open it in Internet Explorer on a normal system. The browser would then install the script locally and run it in the local security zone. Practically everything in this case, including all local files, could be read, and complete spy programs could be downloaded from the Internet and launched. And that is exactly what Lotus Notes does with embedded JavaScript via its embedded RSS feed reader. So if you have subscribed to a potentially malicious RSS feed, you have a serious security hole on your hands. IBM’s reaction, which can be followed on the time line in the disclosure, is interesting. Last April, the Swiss firm Scip informed the IT giant about the problem. The Swiss say that they wrote again in August and still did not receive an answer, so they went ahead and described the problem on a security website.

EU adviser: Google ads don’t infringe trademarks Associated Press
A European Union court adviser said Tuesday that Google does not violate luxury goods makers’ trademarks when it sells brand names as search keywords that trigger its lucrative advertisements. The adviser’s legal opinion will now be studied by judges at the European Court of Justice, which has been asked to tell a French appeals court how to apply EU trademark law in a dispute between Google and several French luxury goods companies over the Internet search engine’s ad system. Advocate General Miguel Poiares Maduro did not give Google a complete all-clear, warning that it could be held liable if brand owners could show that Google’s ads had damaged their trademarks.

Pay for BBC iPlayer says TV chief BBC
Users of the BBC iPlayer should be charged “micro payments” to use the online catch-up service said Lorraine Heggessey, chief executive of TV production company Talkback Thames. Ms Heggessey was speaking at a BBC event on Tuesday. Tony Cohen, chief executive of Talkback’s parent company Fremantle Media, has also spoken out in support of a revenue model for all catch up TV. Fremantle is currently conducting a feasibility study of the concept.

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