andrestolcachir.com

B. Get a hearing before the Delaware Chancery Court and ask the judge to invalidate Yahoo’s employee severance plan. Icahn, should he go this route, may want to act long before the August 1 meeting, because if his proxy slate is successful in winning a majority of the board seats, it would trigger the severance plans for the next two years.

C. Aim for something less than majority control over Yahoo’s board, which means the employee severance plan could be pulled 30 days after the shareholders’ meeting.
Icahn, who is currently running a proxy slate to fill all positions on Yahoo’s board, would be leaving that outcome up to Yahoo shareholders, who will be electing the company’s next board at the August 1 meeting.

A. Give up the proxy fight, wait for 30 days to pass, then Yahoo’s board can withdraw the severance plan. Whether this would all be done before the August 1 shareholders’ meeting, when Icahn was going to run his dissident slate against Yahoo’s current board, is another matter. Obviously, this scenario is highly unlikely.

Which option do you think Icahn will take?

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn is in a bit of a conundrum.

Icahn’s proxy fight is considered a “potential change in control,” which means Yahoo’s board can’t voluntarily remove the severance plans, attorneys say.

But as reported Tuesday, Icahn’s proxy fight is what’s keeping the controversial severance plans in play.

On Wednesday, in a letter sent to Yahoo’s chairman, Icahn called on Yahoo’s board of directors to rescind the company’s controversial employee severance plans, fearing it was an impediment to a Microsoft buyout deal.

So, what are his options?

Velocity Interactive Group, an investment firm that concentrates on the digital media sector, has hired Jorge Espinel as an investment partner for activities in digital publishing, digital video, social media, games, and online advertising.

Espinel most recently led AOL’s corporate strategy, mergers, and acquisitions work, where he oversaw acquisition of companies including Tacoda, Third Screen Media, AdTech, Truveo, Userplane, and Advertising.com, Velocity said.

This customized Iron Man figure sure doesn't have an iron stomach.

It does, however, come with several miniature beer cans and a mini bottle of Bacardi that dear, dear Tony Stark probably swiped from a Paris Hilton Barbie. Painted in all the hues of the contents of your stomach after trying to prove you’re a drinking superhero, the green, yellow, and orange figure is up for auction on eBay and was commanding more than $100 at the time of writing.

(Credit:
Jin Saotome)

Hopefully, this figure will be popular and Saotome will do a Wayne Family Meets Joe Chill box set for July’s Batman movie.

Besides a wicked hangover and dribbles of stomach acid leaking from his mouth, the figure features 28 points of articulation. He probably needs all of them to keep himself upright, too. The auction also comes with an 8.5-inch-by-11-inch drawing of the inebriated Iron Man in flight from Web comic writer and artist David Willis.

Just in time for next month’s Iron Man action and CGI cinematic extravaganza comes this one-of-a-kind, custom-modded Iron Man action figure from Jin Saotome. Painted to resemble Tony Stark’s gadget-obsessed hero after a serious bender, and based on a Marvel Movie Legends Iron Man figure, the alcohol-poisoned hero doesn’t come with a Great White Telephone from which he can call Ralph.

The reason I’m mentioning this case is to argue that as encryption becomes more widespread–it’s part of OS X and Vista, after all–police will encounter it more frequently, and not just in cases involving illegal images. And not all encrypted files will be as easy to brute-force. Which means that the outcome of the Boucher case becomes more important than ever.

I mention this case not to show that there’s something remarkable about decrypting one of the older ZIP archives: the symmetric encryption algorithm used has long been known to be anything but secure. Newer WinZip archives, starting with WinZip 9.0, use more secure 128- and 256-bit key AES encryption.

Government investigators were able to easily break the ZIP file encryption that a Texas man allegedly used to conceal illegal images, a recent court case shows.

What Castillo also found were some password-protected ZIP files titled “Cindy 5.” Castillo apparently used a program called Zipkey 5.5 to brute-force at least some of the password-protected files and find images of a partly naked minor.

Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were called in, and volunteered that they had information from a previous investigation showing that Zimmerman previously bought a membership on a child porn Web site. (Left unanswered is why, if that was in fact the case, ICE never did anything about it.)

The investigation of John Craig Zimmerman began when his employer, the Brownsville Fire Department, received an anonymous voice message in February 2007 alleging that Zimmerman was a pedophile and had child pornography on his department-owned work computer. A city programmer named Albert Castillo searched Zimmerman’s computer and found adult pornography (technically a violation of department policy but not a crime) on an external hard drive.

What happened next: Zimmermann’s home was raided with a search warrant, additional images he allegedly took himself were found, he was indicted on counts of receiving and possessing child pornography, and he pleaded no contest except to say that the images had nothing to do with interstate commerce. In an opinion dated December 20, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen said there was a “rational basis” to assume that child pornography transmissions related to interstate commerce.

There are a lot of moving parts in Microsoft’s unsolicited buyout bid for Yahoo. One of the latest arose last week when the software giant switched its legal team back to its old standby, Sullivan & Cromwell, from Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, which dropped out as legal adviser due to a conflict with another client.

Microsoft, from the get-go, however, did not involve Simpson Thacher for any antitrust representation in its Yahoo bid, according to a report in Lawyer.com.

A spokesman for Simpson Thacher declined to comment beyond Ruegger’s statement and declined to disclose the name of the client in conflict.

Other Simpson clients include DoubleClick, which the firm successfully represented before the Federal Trade Commission involving the proposed Google merger. And while the FTC cleared the way for the merger, DoubleClick will still be represented by Simpson before the European Commission during the proceedings this year.

Full coverage
Microsoft’s big bid for Yahoo Click here for the latest on the software giant’s attempt to buy the Net pioneer.

Yahoo reportedly is in talks with AOL, News Corp., and others about them coming in as a white knight to outbid Microsoft.

“We hold Microsoft and its team in the highest regard,” Pete Ruegger, Simpson’s chairman, said in a statement. “However, in order for us to fulfill our ethical obligations to each of our clients, it became necessary for us to withdraw from this representation.”

However, the conflict centered on the “timing of a clearance” and the client declining to issue a waiver to Simpson Thacher to continue representing Microsoft, the source said. And because Microsoft’s bid was unsolicited, the issue of a potential conflict could not be addressed beforehand, the source noted.

It’s tempting to start connecting the dots, but one source familiar with the change said the conflict in question had nothing to do with Simpson’s client AOL LCC, which the law firm advised on the Goowy Media acquisition. That deal closed on January 30, two days before Simpson’s client, Microsoft, announced its unsolicited bid for Yahoo.

CIGS is a material that a number of companies are betting on, including Nanosolar, Global Solar Energy, Miasole, and Heliovolt.

The record for efficiency was done by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Research Laboratory (NREL) earlier this year, which reached 19.9 percent efficiency through a co-evaporation process.

CIGS is not the only area of the solar industry where IBM is investing.

The efficiency of the CIGS cells on the market now is at about 9 percent or 10 percent. HelioVolt recently announced that it hit 12.2 percent efficiency with a process that is faster than co-evaporation. Global Solar said it expects to get to 14 percent, eventually.

IBM has already built a prototype device. Once made at large volumes on a glass substrate, the cells are expected to deliver electricity at less than one dollar per watt at peak times–a long-held target of many solar outfits.

These companies are not producing cells at large volumes yet, but use of CIGS is expected to catch on quickly next year as their factories come online.

It’s a break with the most common CIGS manufacturing process, called co-evaporation, in which active chemicals are immersed in a solution that gets removed in a vacuum.

Rival Hewlett Packard, meanwhile, earlier this month licensed transparent electronics technology to Xtreme Energetics to make a solar concentrator.

In about a month, IBM intends to provide more technical detail of its solutions-based process in an advanced-material paper, Guha said.

15 percent efficiency goal
IBM’s CIGS manufacturing technique came out of research IBM had done about 10 years ago in flexible electronics.

Neither IBM nor its partner, Tokyo Ohka Kogyo (TOK), plan to manufacture cells themselves. Rather, they will develop technology that can be licensed to solar companies in two or three years, said Supratik Guha, lead scientist for photovoltaics at IBM Research.

“CIGS will be the big story of 2009 because we know how many companies are putting in multimegawatts of CIGS (production capacity) in 2009,” predicted solar expert Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute, who spoke at a recent Greentech Media solar briefing.

IBM is also looking to leap-frog existing CIGS manufacturers on efficiency with a target of about 15 percent.

The computing giant on Monday is expected to announce a deal with a Japanese semiconductor equipment manufacturer to make thin-film solar cells from CIGS, a combination of copper, indium, gallium, and selenide.

“We have the skills that we have developed in other areas–standard silicon semiconductors, materials chemistry–and we’re looking to utilize those skills in the photovoltaic space and develop IP (intellectual property) and know-how that other people don’t have,” Guha said.

Add IBM to the hordes of companies trying to build a better solar cell.

IBM’s “solution-based processing” calls for the chemicals to be dissolved in a liquid and then dried. It does not require a vacuum, doesn’t require as much energy to run, and can be done faster than co-evaporation, Guha said.

Traditional solar cells are made from silicon, but alternative thin-film materials are becoming a larger share of the market. Thin-film cells are less efficient at converting sunlight to electricity than silicon, but they require much less material to produce a cell, making them cost-competitive. Solar high-flier First Solar sells thin-film cells from cadmium telluride.

Again by modifying chip-manufacturing technology, IBM created a cooling method for a solar concentrator that it hopes to license to others.

It is also doing work on techniques to manufacture silicon solar cells on glass using very little silicon, Guha said.

I had to laugh when this error came up today when accessing LinuxWorld’s website:

commentary

To be fair, it’s just a conference company that organizes a wide range of conferences, not all of them focused on open source. Indeed, IDG also runs (or ran) the website for OSBC and ran it on a Windows infrastructure, too.

www.LinuxWorldExpo.com:
Microsoft JScript runtime error ‘800a138f’
‘brandGlobalXML.selectSingleNode(…)’ is null or not an object
/live/template1.asp, line 42

In both cases, it’s still mildly ironic to see IDG making money with open source…but paying money to Microsoft.

commentary

I was dubious the first year that Google ran its Summer of Code, but I’ve since become a believer. It’s a great way to 1) create more open-source code but also 2) connect talented young programmers with excellent open-source projects and companies. Everyone wins…including Google.

Google’s Summer of Code started with just 40 open-source projects in 2005 and jumped to 130 in 2007. It expects to accept 130 or more in 2008.

Not much time until the application process kicks off, but also not much time to submit an application.

Just as a reminder, Google is about to start accepting applications for its Summer of Code. Google will begin accepting applications from open-source mentoring organizations (i.e., open-source projects) on Monday, March 3, 2008, and will then stop accepting them on Wednesday, March 12th. Students can then start applying to participate in these projects on Monday, March 24 until Monday, March 31, 2008.

I had been blaming Firefox for the machine slowdown, so my apologies to the Mozilla team.

(Credit: Dave)

The last few days of my MacBook Air have been a little wonky. I couldn’t figure it out until today when I noticed that
Safari was using anywhere from 90-97 percent of my CPU. I also noticed a few times when the CPU was running over 100 percent.

Please note that I was using
Microsoft Office, but I didn’t feel good about it. We have a board meeting tomorrow and I needed to review some stuff. I still can’t figure out how to get the formula bar where I want it in Excel 2008 and it makes me crazy.

Safari pegging my CPU

A look at MySpaceTV's new direct-record tool.

(Credit:
MySpace)

MySpaceTV, the video-sharing section of News Corp.’s MySpace, has announced the addition of direct video uploads. This means that you can now sit in front of your Webcam, navigate to MySpace, and hit a “record” button, blab on incessantly about how the Jonas Brothers are ruining American youth, and you’ve got yourself a piece of Web video.

Many other video-sharing sites, including Google’s YouTube, have similar features already. The real advantage to the presence of direct uploads on MySpace, however, is the fact that they can then be quickly embedded in member profiles, “bulletins,” and comments, capitalizing on the fast-growing video commenting trend.

MySpace also announced that MySpaceTV videos’ maximum file size has been extended to 512 megabytes; that’s half of what YouTube allows, but YouTube also caps them at 10 minutes in length, which MySpaceTV does not.