Two of the big pending M&A deals right now are Google's purchase of DoubleClick and the proposed tie-up between XM and Sirius. In the case of Google and DoubleClick, it's been assumed that the deal will clear regulatory muster, despite opposition to it from Microsoft. The Sirius-XM deal, however, has been seen as a longshot, in part because of the aggressive opposition to it from terrestrial broadcasters. But two new reports are pouring cold water on the conventional wisdom. An analyst at Bear Stearns believes that the satellite radio deal is looking increasingly likely, a conclusion arrived at by monitoring hearings and reviewing FCC documents. Meanwhile, a Washington policy expert believes that the FTC is likely to block the DoubleClick deal (via Tech Trader Daily), in light of the high concentration of online advertising power that Google would obtain through the deal. Whether you agree with his conclusion or not, he does argue persuasively that this market has indeed become quite concentrated. He also ends with the seemingly inevitable conclusion that Google is set to replace Microsoft as the chief target among the antitrust set.

An anonymous reader writes to let us know that a new X-Files movie is in pre-production, directed and written by Chris Carter and starring David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson. Duchovny said in an interview that his understanding is that filming will start in November for a summer 2008 release. The article notes that in an earlier interview, Anderson said the film "would stay away from the series' (and first film's) sometimes tortured mythology" (quoting the article, not Anderson).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Whether it's shareholder lawsuits, political interference or Sarbanes-Oxley, there are plenty of reasons for companies to want to avoid the public markets these days. Still, public markets represent a good way to both raise money and give a company's principals liquidity. Private equity firm Apollo Management has announced that it will sell its shares on a private stock exchange established and managed by Goldman Sachs. The exchange is only open to institutional investors, which will allow Apollo to avoid unwanted regulatory scrutiny, while generally relieving it of many other burdens that face public companies. While Apollo will still have to communicate information with investors, it should have a lot more flexibility than the current public system allows for. If Goldman Sachs' exchange can garner a critical mass of listed companies and institutional traders, it, and others like it, should represent an interesting alternative to traditional markets.

jd writes "Despite having one of the largest user-bases of any clustering system for Linux, openMosix is to be shut down. Top developers have left and they lack the means or motivation to continue. Their official claim of multicore CPUs making clustering redundant is somewhere between highly improbable and totally absurd, as has been pointed out elsewhere. Why is this shutdown so important? Well, from a technical standpoint, the open-source bproc (the Beowulf process migration module) is ancient, MOSIX is very hard to obtain unless you're a student, and kerrighd is (as yet) immature. From a user standpoint, openMosix is the mainstay of the Open Source clustering world and has by far the best management tools of any. The ability of this project to continue will likely have a major impact on the future of Open Source in the high-end markets — if the best of the best couldn't survive, people will be more careful about anything less."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in May, the Transportation Security Administration did its best to gloss over the fact that it lost a hard drive containing personal information on some 100,000 of its employees by putting out a press release about it at 7 o'clock on a Friday evening. Now, a few months later, it's disclosed that the drive wasn't encrypted (via Threat Level), in contravention of a White House order from last summer saying that all devices containing personal data need to be encrypted if they're taken outside secure areas. As we've noted, these sorts of edicts and guidelines are meaningless unless they're actually followed, and non-compliance brings real repercussions.

owlgorithm writes "Salon reports that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has been leaked four days before it hits bookstores. It turns out that someone with access to the American edition of the book has taken a photograph of every one of the pages and made them available via bittorrent. Publishers may well be quaking in their boots, but in some places the quality is barely legible. On many pages the pirateer's hands are in the pictures with other pages needing a bit of Photoshopping just to make out the words. It appears many of the sites have been removing the content, naturally enough."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cory Doctorow: The new Harry Potter novel -- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows -- has hit the Internet days before its publication. The publisher spent a reported $20 million on keeping the book secret. Was the money well-spent? As Bruce Schneier points out, the kind of person who downloads a series of photos of the pages of a giant novel is also the kind of person who'll line up and buy a copy the night it comes out.

Me, I'm just glad to finally know what happens who dies at the end of the final Harry Potter novel -- SPOILER ALERT! Select the text below to read it.

The publishing industry.

Seriously, though. With the last book, the publisher was so freaked out about ebook "piracy" that they refused to release an official electronic edition. The result? Fans made their own electronic text in 24 hours. And other fans translated the book into German in 45 hours.

That'a a lot of fan-energy, sitting out there, looking for ways to love these books. Surely there's a smarter way to deal with that kind of love than attempting to suppress it?

Four days before it hits bookstores, I've got a copy of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." I downloaded it from a link posted at the Bittorrent file-sharing site the Pirate Bay. But hold on. It's not as sweet as it sounds. What I've got is not really the book but a series of photographs of the book -- someone has meticulously snapped shots of each page. Some who've discussed leaked copies say that they've seen only Pages 1 through 495. But the copy I have includes all the pages; I could, if I wanted to, tell you the very last line of the very last Harry Potter book right now.

Link, Link to Deathly Hallows torrents on The Pirate Bay

Mark Frauenfelder: Jim Woodring's latest work of art is a doozy!

5,000,000 sunsets later, all that remains of our fatally flawed species, which introduced the concept of tragedy to the local cosmos, is an intriguing architectural motif and the unusual second and third layers of crust which cover so much of the surface of the planet. The world has become an interdimensional crossroads where nothing is capable of having a bad result. How strange we were!

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• New stuff from Jim Woodring
• MP3 interview with Jim Woodring
• Woodring animated
• New Jim Woodring figurine from StrangeCo
• Jim Woodring profile on STRANGEco
• Jim Woodring handpressed prints
• New Jim Woodring toy: Mr Bumper
• Woodring and Frisell's Mysterio Simpatico
• The Comics Journal Audio Archives: Jim Woodring
• Cool Jim Woodring animations
• Jim Woodring's pop-up Moleskine art
• Jim Woodring's Mr. Bumper toy sculpture
• New Jim Woodring toys: "Imperial Newts"
• Jim Woodring Interview
• Woodring's amazing plastic pals
• More wonderful Woodring Weirdness
• New Jim Woodring print: "The Confidence Bird"
• Jim Woodring interview
• Woodring-esque Salamander from old German kids' books

SkiifGeek writes "Controversy is slowly building over the development of a claimed new worm that targets OS X systems, dubbed by its inventor Rape.osx. Using a currently undisclosed vulnerability in mDNSResponder, the worm is said to give access to root as it spreads across the local network. As with a number of recent Apple-related security discoveries, the author, InfoSec Sellout, is delaying reporting the vulnerability to Apple until after completing full testing of the worm. While the worm has yet to leave a testing environment (with 1,500 OS X systems), it is bound to join the likes of Inqtana and Leap as known OS X malware."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last month, a much-hyped partnership between Salesforce.com and Google turned out to be a real snoozer, when it was revealed that the tie-up would simply offer Salesforce.com customers a better way to manage their AdWords campaigns. One aspect of the deal that was troubling was that it belied the myth that all these various web services are so easily mashed up. After all, why should Salesforce.com have to sign a deal with Google to offer AdWords management? Ideally, any company would be able to offer this functionality. Today, Microsoft announced enhancements to its own AdManager service, which allows users to manage advertising campaigns on Microsoft's search. Now, however, customers can buy ads for Live search and for Ask.com. It's really great that Microsoft is taking this big tent approach, acknowledging that there are other search engines out there that customers would like to buy ads on, but it's still missing a couple -- Google and Yahoo come to mind. Ultimately, if it wants AdManager to be a valuable service, then it should allow customers to manage as many different campaigns as they want, through any search engine. This piecemeal approach, allowing customers to buy ads on different Microsoft-approved sites, isn't going to get the company very far in its software plus services strategy.

Mark Frauenfelder: Damon Burke wanted to use the recharger he built from a Minty Boost kit to juice up his iPod so he could watch movies on a long flight, but the TSA was afraid it was a bomb designed to blow up the homeland.

I tell him it is a battery charger for my iPod. He asks if I made it myself, to which I reply that I purchased a kit over the internet. He says that he can't let me on the plane with it. I explain to him that I have flown with it 4-6 times a month for a year now and nobody has questioned it. He says, "Not on my watch and not with my people."

He swabs the device and runs it through the calorimeter. Again, no residue.

I ask why it can't be taken on the plane and he said, "Because it looks like an IED."

Link (Via Make)

Mark Frauenfelder:
The wonderful Mitch O'Connell has designed a set of stitching patterns for Jenny Hart's Sublime Stitching. They look great! Link (Via Craft)

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Interview with artist Mitch O'Connell

Mark Frauenfelder: Here are nine YouTube videos arranged to re-create the famous intro to the Brady Bunch. Link (Via otomano)

Mark Frauenfelder: The Mouse Trap reports on a New Scientist article that looks at the roots of punishment and revenge.

Another article in the New Scientist , takes this one step forward and looks at motivations and mechanisms behind why we punish. The researcher, Terry Burnahm, asks the question as to why people indulge in a punishment behavior, though the punishment comes with a cost to themselves. Is it driven by a moral sense outrage, a desire for fairness or due to some other biological mechanism. The paradigm they use is the ultimatum game, wherein one person is given some money (say 10 $) and he is supposed to share it with another person. If the second person accepts the money, both get to keep the money; else both lose their money. Experimentally it is found that if low offers are made (say 1 $), they are usually rejected by the second person. This is due to the fact that the second personal wants to punish the first person for making an unfair offer.

What Terry discovered was that the propensity to refuse low offers was correlated with testosterone levels in males. Testosterone levels have also been correlated with aggression in the past and with dominance seeking behavior. The author suggests that the high testosterone connection is due to dominance seeking behavior of humans and by refusing to accept the low bet, the male saves putting himself in a subordinate position. It is presumed that this was beneficial in evolutionary times and thus has been selected for.

Link (Via Mind Hacks)

Mark Frauenfelder: Someone created the obligatory animated GIF based on the photo of Homer Simson and the aroused Pagan deity I posted yesterday. Link (Thanks, minifig!)

Mark Frauenfelder:
"Look! I'm writing a check on my 1983 Apple telephone!" Link

I've gotten some feedback about the OPML 2.0 spec, hopefully there will be some more as people review it one more time before it's frozen. See yesterday's post about why it's time to review it now.

Don Hopkins wants two things: 1. I should define flatdown in the spec and 2. It should be possible to include elements of OPML 2.0 in other XML documents.

I may attempt both of these items, but I can't do it quickly. An informal definition of flatdown could be done in a few minutes. A rigorous one might take a lot longer (which is why I didn't try to define it in the spec in the first place). It appears in the definition of the expansionState element, which is an element specifically for people who are implementing outliners, and those people surely know what flatdown means (informally, it means moving to the next node down from where you are, regardless of structure). But even an implementer of an outliner could ignore expansionState and all that would happen is that the user would have to re-expand the outline as he or she likes it. It's a convenience for the user, basically. Certainly not crucial to anyone's implementation of OPML.

Item #2 is something I definitely want to do, because I want to use OPML 2.0 elements in an RSS 2.0 feed, in fact, I already am doing that in the feeds for the TwitterGram site. For example:

http://mp3.twittergram.com/rss.xml

You'll notice that each item has an ownerId element, in the opml2 namespace, which is declared at the top of the feed to point to the OPML 2.0 spec.

I decided to approach it this way to avert a flamewar or Pilgrimish rants that there are 18 different versions of OPML. The worst that could happen here is that the feed for the TwitterGram site has an error, and so far, no one has reported this particular difficulty (Harold Gilchrist did work with me on another unrelated problem).

I'll write some more about this use of OPML 2.0 as a namespace in a bit.