US internet company Yahoo says it has reached a deal to sell part of its stake in China’s biggest internet company Alibaba Group.

Chinese regulators approve Google’s $12.5bn purchase of US phone maker Motorola Mobility, the final hurdle for the deal to go through.

Pakistani authorities restore access to the social media website Twitter after a brief ban for what officials called “offensive” content”.

Mobile phone data of suspects in police custody is to be extracted and retained, regardless of whether charges are brought, the BBC has learned.

Researchers reveal details of a promising way to make a fundamentally different kind of computer memory chip.

Twenty-three years ago, when I was a general assignment reporter at a soon-to-be defunct paper, the El Paso Herald-Post, I got a fabulous job offer. BusinessWeek asked me to open a bureau in Mexico City. If you had asked me at that juncture what a board of directors was for, or to distinguish between revenue and earnings, I would have been stumped. I had never covered business before (unless you count oil in Venezuela), and I didn’t know much about it. But BusinessWeek, I soon learned, was chock full of knowledgeable, friendly and forgiving folks who helped people like me learn on the job.

My career at BusinessWeek, which wraps up tomorrow, was an education. I’d start ignorant, and then learn on the job from sources and colleagues. That’s the great privilege of journalism, and BusinessWeek was the best place imaginable for it. When I was sent from Pittsburgh to Paris to cover technology in 1998, I knew far more about blast furnaces than semiconductors. When I came back to New York four years later as acting technology editor, I’d never worked as an editor or covered technology in the United States. People helped, and picked me up.

Many of those people are already scattered, and dozens more are leaving with me. I’d say I’ll miss them, but I plan to stay with them on the networks. Why would I ever venture out alone when I have the greatest colleagues? They’re the treasure of my career, and to forgo them at this point would be insane.

And so I move on. This is my last post at Blogspotting.net. A big thanks to Heather for the great company on this ride, and to all of you for your intelligence, feedback and friendship. We’ll stay in touch, I hope, at TheNumerati.net, and on your blogs and Twitter feeds. (I’m @stevebaker.)

I still haven’t figured out how to store the archives of Blogspotting. But I plan to write an email to the incoming editor in chief of BW, Josh Tyrangiel, asking him please not to pull the plug.

I came across a pumped-up email system called Pixetell that could help with a problem I’ve been having. Of late, I’ve been writing laborious click-by-click instructions to explain to people on a Ning network how to change their profiles. Sometimes the written word is a round-about way of communicating.

With Pixetell, it would be easier. You describe or explain whatever you want in your voice as you move the cursor around and click. And then it all goes in an email. The person receiving it might as well be looking over your shoulder. Here’s a video demo featuring my colleague Arik Hesseldahl.

The technology looks useful. It would be great for help desks. Not sure at this point if the rest of us would shell out $9 or $19 a month to be able to generate these messages. (Everyone can receive them, but for now, subscribers have to have Windows machines.) Looks like something that Microsoft and Google could add as an enhancement. In fact, it may compete with parts of Google Wave. But Pixetell looks far simpler. (I started to watch the Google Wave video, but then realized, to my horror, that it wasn’t a minute and 20 seconds, but an hour and 20 minutes.)

In a cluttered office, I’m discovering, almost nothing is worth keeping. But as I pack my things, I come across two books that give me second thought:

Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom–Why home values and other real estate investments will climb through the end of the decade, and how to profit from them. By David Lereah (sounds like something I should be on top of…)

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Microsoft Windows Vista. (Who knows, in two or three years, I might “upgrade” to Vista…)

Then my colleague Burt Helm, the marketing and advertising editor, comes by with an envelope. It’s a letter from the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation. You’d think these direct marketers would know Burt down to his weekend brunching habits. So it’s a surprise to see that they got his title wrong. They call him Bert [sic] Helm, Global President, Baby Kids & Wound Care Franchise. (I wonder if Bloomberg is quietly shifting his beat…)

Still working on saving the archives to this blog. It’s a bit of a problem here, because most of the people with control over the innards of this system have been let go. And even if they could help me, Bloomberg no doubt will own the content as of Dec. 1. Maybe I’ll just jury-rig something.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates it, and a Happy Thursday to the rest of the world. I’ll be seeing you at TheNumerati.net.

I’m one of those people. I knew from the very first story that I wrote 25 years ago for the Viking, Loudoun Valley High School’s own monopoly of a newspaper, that journalism was for me. I liked trotting around the halls interviewing the lead cheerleader about tryouts (the most important event at school), chatting up the music teacher about the annual musical (of course we only had one) and taking pictures of the boys’ soccer team (who wouldn’t like that). I quickly figured out the three or four different paths you could take to get into journalism (work for a wire service; get an internship at Time or Newsweek; cover courts and cops for the local edition of a metropolitan paper), and the path that you would travel after that (be a writer, start editing, become a senior feature writer or editor, then retire). It all seems so quaint now.

I went the wire route, starting my career (ironically) at Bloomberg, a young startup and one of the few media joints hiring in the early 1990s. (And a place where the word “ironically” was banned from stories.) The thing about starting with a young company is you get a lot of opportunity. And my opportunity was to build from scratch their coverage of the Internet, starting with Netscape’s IPO. It was phenomenal to meet those people (Jerry Yang, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen) when meeting them meant hanging out on couches at tiny conferences and talking about what all this Web stuff might turn into. It was 1994 and no one had a clue.

When I was hired by Bloomberg, the fellow hiring me asked me where I wanted to be in 5 years. He used to work at Businessweek (I know because it was one of the first things he told me when we sat down ) and so to impress him back, I said “Businessweek.” I soon figured out that that was actually a good idea and 3 years later I landed there, covering the Internet and continuing my love affair with emerging tech.

The environment at BW was incredible. Collegial, analytical, devoted to journalism. And that’s what I will miss. I could bore you all with stories of the past 12 years. But I’d rather discuss things that I am most thankful for.

First, just the opportunity to meet incredibly capable, thoughtful people and exchange ideas. Every time I got on the phone or sat in a conference room with someone from a startup or IBM or Amazon or what have you, I just felt privileged to be able to learn about something new. I was just as lucky to work with the fantastic group of folks here at BW. It’s hard to believe even now the level of conversation and analysis that I was exposed to here. I want to thank everyone who met with me or worked with me over the years for their patience, their insight, and their time.

Second, I’m thankful for the skills I learned. I am so lucky to have been able to learn to blog and podcast and use Twitter and be on Facebook for my job. I was literally paid to learn the skills that journalists need these days to thrive and given the foundation to consider new careers. And all of you helped me along, encouraging me and Steve to try new things, providing us with insight about different technologies and approaches to journalism. You taught us what we needed to know, whether it was evolving our thoughts about what journalism is or learning what new technology we should use.

Third, I’m thankful that I was able to explore an area that I am passionate about: clean tech and environmentalism. Now, with leaving Businessweek, I will have the opportunity to explore carving out a new career in that arena.

Fourth, I’m thankful that I was able to be a journalist. I loved writing, I loved the ethics, I loved grousing about how editors were asking for stupid new facts. I’ve been lucky to work at the kind of organization that really put a Chinese wall between journalists and advertising, that respected the work reporters did, and that hired the kind of people who did everything they could to make a story better.

I know that there is a lot more that I am forgetting right now. But, I let me just repeat, thank you all, within Businessweek and outside of it. And thank you Steve, for being the generous, warm, intelligent, and curious person that you are.

Heather and I both got the word on Thursday that we won’t be part of BusinessWeek once Bloomberg takes over, on Dec. 1. (We’re both pleased with this outcome, though it’s no picnic watching the staff get decimated, with good friends and colleagues heading off in every direction.) In the coming week, I think I’ll write a nice long eulogy for this blog.

But in the meantime, a question: Does anyone know how to preserve and store our four and a half years of blog posts and comments? Our colleague Arik Hesseldahl said something about turning each month into a pdf. I’ll look into that (as soon as I close my last story tomorrow). But you have a specific how-to, I’m all ears. As I wrote in September on my Numerati blog, I’m not sure how committed Bloomberg will be to social media. There’s no telling when someone might pull the plug on a server housing the archives of a discontinued blog.

An anonymous reader writes “It looks simple. I’ve got a laptop and a USB HDD for backups. With rsync, I only move changes to the USB HDD for subsequent backups. I’d like to move these changes to a more portable USB stick when I’m away, then sync again to the USB HDD when I get home. I figured with the normality of the pieces and the situation, there’d be an app for that, but no luck yet. I’m guessing one could make a hardlink parallel-backup on the laptop at the same time as the USB HDD backup. Then use find to detect changes between it and the actual filesystem when it’s time to backup to the USB stick. But there would need to be a way to preserve paths, and a way communicate deletions. So how about it? I’m joe-user with Ubuntu. I even use grsync for rsync. After several evenings of trying to figure this out, all I’ve got is a much better understanding of what hardlinks are and are not. What do the smart kids do? Three common pieces of hardware, and a simple-looking task.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jrepin writes with news of today’s release (here’s Linus’s announcement) of Linux 3.4: “This release includes several Btrfs updates: metadata blocks bigger than 4KB, much better metadata performance, better error handling and better recovery tools. There are other features: a new X32 ABI which allows to run in 64 bit mode with 32 bit pointers; several updates to the GPU drivers: early modesetting of Nvidia Geforce 600 ‘Kepler’, support of AMD RadeonHD 7xxx and AMD Trinity APU series, and support of Intel Medfield graphics; support of x86 cpu driver autoprobing, a device-mapper target that stores cryptographic hashes of blocks to check for intrusions, another target to use external read-only devices as origin source of a thin provisioned LVM volume, several perf improvements such as GTK2 report GUI and a new ‘Yama’ security module.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fluffeh writes “On Friday, a company called SceneTap flipped the on switch enabling cameras installed in around 20 bars to monitor how full the venues are, the mix of men and women, their ages — and to make all this information available live via an iPhone or Android app. Privacy advocates are unimpressed, though, as the only hint that people are being monitored is via tiny stickers on the windows. Beyond academics and policy experts, some San Francisco bar owners that originally partnered with SceneTap have said that they’re pulling out and will be taking down the company’s cameras. An increasing number of bars still listed on the SceneTap’s site are now saying that they’re not working with the Chicago startup, including Mr. Smith’s, Southpaw, John Colins, and Bar None.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TheGift73 writes “In a few hours a new episode of Game of Thrones will appear on BitTorrent, and a few days later between 3 and 4 million people will download this unofficial release. Statistics gathered by TorrentFreak reveal that more people are downloading the show compared to last year, when it came in as the second most downloaded TV-show of 2011. The number of weekly downloads worldwide is about equal to the estimated viewers on HBO in the U.S., but why? One of the prime reasons for the popularity among pirates is the international delay in airing. In Australia, for example, fans of the show have to wait a week before they can see the latest episode. So it’s hardly a surprise that some people are turning to BitTorrent instead. And indeed, if we look at the top countries where Game of Thrones is downloaded, Australia comes out on top with 10.1% of all downloads (based on one episode). But delays are just part of the problem. The fact that the show is only available to those who pay for an HBO subscription doesn’t help either.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First time accepted submitter Trubacca writes “The Northern-Pacific “Ring of Fire” has an opportunity tonight to observe an entirely different “ring of fire”: an annular solar eclipse where the moon, owing to it’s distance from the Earth, seems smaller than the apparent diameter of the sun. This results in the fiery ring for which the phenomenon takes it’s name. Space.com has a decent write-up on the path of the eclipse, times, and tips for safe-viewing.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mit dem HZM-T1 verspricht Sony das perfekte Kopfkino: In der Videobrille befinden sich zwei OLED-Displays, die laut Hersteller das Seherlebnis einer 750 Zoll Leinwand bieten sollen - wir haben uns die optisch auffällige Videobrille für rund 800 Euro genauer angeschaut.

Wenn ein von Microsoft beantragtes Patent durchgeht, könnten schon bald Android- und iOS-Apps auf dem Windows Phone laufen.

Trailer sind eine Kunstform für sich - das weiß Hollywood schon lange. Aber auch in der Spieleindustrie ist die Bedeutung von Trailern gewachsen. Wir haben die schönsten für Sie gesammelt.

In zwei Wochen wird das neue Samsung Galaxy S3 im Handel erhältlich sein. Schon jetzt hat Samsung exklusives Zubehör für sein kommendes Topmodell vorgestellt. Darunter auch ein Stift und ein nützliches Flipcover. Wir werfen zudem einen Blick auf das, was in Sachen S3-Zubehör noch kommt.

Diablo 3, wohin man auch schaut: Derzeit scheint es kein Entkommen vor Blizzards Hack & Slay-Orgie zu geben. Es soll aber Menschen geben, die von dem Zirkus um das Geschnetzel teuflisch genervt sind. Und für die haben wir genau das Richtige: Die besten kostenlosen Alternativen für Rollenspieler. Diablo? Nein danke.

Sie streiten um Politik, basteln an Hardware und feiern schräge Netzkultur: Auf der Sigint-Konferenz des Chaos Computer Club in Köln treffen Hacker und Netzaktivisten aller Strömungen aufeinander.

Sie nennen sich “The Unknowns”: Hacker haben nach SPIEGEL-Informationen hunderte Zugangsdaten von SPD-Servern erbeutet. Die Partei stellte Strafanzeige. Sie ist nicht das einzige Opfer der neuen Gruppe.

Am Tag des Börsengangs ist Facebook eine Klage über 15 Milliarden Dollar ins Haus geflattert. Nutzer werfen dem sozialen Netzwerk vor, ihre Spuren im Internet aufgezeichnet zu haben.

Für das neue Super-Android-Smartphone Galaxy S3 liegen bereits neun Millionen Vorbestellungen vor.

Die Urheber der Malware Flashback haben von ihrem erfolgreich aufgebauten Botnetz nicht profitieren können, erklärt der Sicherheitssoftwarehersteller Symantec.

Жители Японии и Южной Кореи увидели редкое астрономическое явление. Смотрите на видео РИА Новости кольцеобразное солнечное затмение.

Смартфон LG Optimus L7 с поддержкой новейшей версии ОС Android и усовершенствованными мультимедийными функциями по привлекательной цене Смартфон LG Optimus L7, входящий в линейку LG серии L, поступает в продажу .

Соглашение подписано 16 мая в Москве в рамках деловой программы 24-й Международной выставки телекоммуникационного оборудования, систем управления, информационных технологий и услуг связи “Связь-Экспокомм-2012″.

Экс-совладельцы “Ленты” выкупают 45% “Юлмарт” Мейер и Костыгин готовы инвестировать в онлайн-ритейлера до $120 млн Фото с сайта blogrostova.ru Бывшие совладельцы сети “Лента” вложили около 70 млн долларов в крупнейшего онлайн-торговца электроникой – сеть “Юлмарт”, пишут “Ведомости”.

Китайские антимонопольные регуляторы одобрили покупку производителя мобильных телефонов Motorola Mobility интернет-гигантом Google, сообщает MarketWatch. США и Европа дали свое согласие на эту сделки еще в феврале.

Компания “Родник” начинает поставки новых моделей встраиваемых серверов устройств XPort Pro. С мая 2012 г. для заказа доступны модели XPort Pro на базе операционной системы Evolution с увеличенным до 16 Мб объемом встроенной памяти.

Причиной срыва запуска частного космического корабля Dragon к Международной космической станции ( МКС ) в субботу стал неисправный клапан в одном из двигателей ракеты-носителя, установили эксперты производителя корабля и ракеты, компании SpaceX.

Итальянские ученые утверждают, что им удалось обнаружить фрагменты предполагаемого Тунгусского метеорита, предположительно упавшего на Сибирь в 1908 году и вызвавшего мощнейший взрыв, пишет газета The Daily Mail.

5 мая состоятся X Международная научно-практическая конференция «Здоровое поколение – международные ориентиры XXI века» и заседание круглого стола «Роль правительственных и общественных организаций в формировании отношения к здоровью как к ценности» в рамках.

Ученые из страны Восходящего солнца объяснили резкое повышение уровня воды в мировом океане чрезмерным использованием грунтовых вод. Известно, что глобальный уровень моря повышается в среднем на 1,8 миллиметра каждый год начиная с 1961 года.

Исследования климатологов, опубликованные в журнале Nature Geoscience, стали еще одним доказательством: сибирские реки вреднее, чем считалось ранее, пишет РИА Новости. “Северные реки оказались основным источником ртути в Северном Ледовитом океане: они интенсивно поглощают соединения этого токсичного металла во время весеннего таяния льдов и насыщают ими арктические моря летом и в начале осени”, –пишет агентство.