Marriage of convenience

       The longest running soap opera in technology ended like all the others - with a marriage, a happy man and woman, a bright future and the bodies from the past buried and forgotten.
       Manly Microsoft's soft-spoken CEO Steve Ballmer got the dowry after winning the heart of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, said dowry consisting of the Yahoo search engine and the right to brag about the new Microhoo or Yabing or whatever he will call the children, formerly known as Yahoo Jr and Bing; Ms Bartz claimed she was thrilled to lose a lot of weight and get Yahoo back to the past and its roots as an Internet portal, the culmination of the plot that began with the ouster of Yahoo founder Jerry Yang. In return, Yahoo gets 88 percent of the search revenue for five years, while Mr Ballmer gets to take on Google head-to-head in the Internet's hugely profitable search-and-snoop business of following consumers around; as the new battle starts, Google has about 60 per cent of all search traffic, while Yahoo and Microsoft between them have about 30 per cent.
       The Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas appeared to show that the only people who gamble are those like you and us, because the hackers will have their way with us; a presentation showed how crackers can make a phony website look legitimate, and how others have fully cracked and activated the Ultimate edition of Windows 7, weeks before its release.
       At the beginning of July, chief TechCrunch honcho in charge, Michael Arrington, unleashed post after post about the morality of publishing stolen internal documents; at the end of July, after a Singapore company building the latest TechCrunch "CrunchPad" gave a newspaper interview, chief TechCrunch grouch Michael Arrington in charge of bad moods and profanity unleashed tweets and posts about "unauthorised press BS"; he was last seen biting hard cheese and trying to peel tough bananas.
       CEO Michael O'Leary of European budget airline Ryanair whipped out his fountain pen, inkwell and cardboard megaphone to win the coveted Iron Luggable Trophy for Quote of the Week; asked why his airline only accepts complaints by letter or fax, Mr O'Leary complained (without either): "People will say, 'As the founding fathers wrote down in the American Constitution, we have the inalienable right to bear arms and send in our complaints by email.' No, you bloody don't! So go away."
       Earlier this year, the US state of Hawaii passed an Internet tax bill, and Amazon. com opted out of all advertising relationships with Hawaii; in July, Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle vetoed the tax bill, and Amazon resumed business in the Aloha State.
       Scientists at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute took 18 months to discover that texting ... oh look, there's a squirrel. US scientists discovered that texting while driving was the greatest and most dangerous distraction for truckers, with a collision rate of 23 times greater than non-texters; in other words, if you're driving right now, you are safer just reading this article than you would be trying to send a comment on it; US scientists really have a great job, eh?
       Steve "President For Life" Jobs and his Apple Inc minions refused to allow an iPhone app capable of displaying girls in skimpy bathing suits, but endorsed one that helps people find US marijuana salesmen.
       Sun Danyong of China committed suicide after he lost a prototype of the Apple iPhone; police were asked to investigate Sun's death after reports that a "security official" of the Chinese firm Foxconn roughed up Sun; Foxconn is the actual maker of the iPhone, and apparently feared the Wrath of Jobs over the lost prototype of next year's iPhone 4, leading to Sun's decision to take his life.
       eBay announced it will hive off its old acquisition Skype to make a new company which might, at last, make some sort of money. The founders of Skype, who sold out to eBay a couple of years ago, announced they may sue the auction site for using some of their licensed technology in Skype; now there's a case that should bring a few new Mercedes Benzes for the lawyers involved.
       Sony and Nintendo reported that in a recession, people do not buy game consoles; sales slumped, with Wii sales in the second quarter off by 50 per cent compared with 2008.
       No 3 US yuppiephone firm Sprint Nextel bought Virgin Mobile USA for $483 million, based on the stock price at the time of the sale; Sprint will assume roughly $200 million in debt of Virgin, but most importantly will launch the company firmly into the prepaid ("1-2-Call") sector, still a sleeping giant in the US mobile business.
       Did you notice the big drop in spam and malware on the Internet in the past few months? Neither did the folks at McAfee's alleged security firm, which said that spam levels in the second quarter leapt to an all-time high, 80 per cent above the first three months of the year; the US still produces about 25 per cent of world spam, but is losing ground to Brazil, India and (figure this one) Turkey; according to the rough McAfee research, spam now accounts for 92 per cent of all email.