Online Services

YouTube rolled out its April Fools’ prank early on Wednesday by turning videos and entire pages of content upside down.
The stunt demonstrates one of the few advantages of running an expensive, loss-making video streaming business: you can safely screw with the user experience without needing to worry about hurting non-existent revenues and the valued sponsor [...]

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says his company has drawn a line in the sand and is done trying to do a deal to acquire Yahoo! any time soon. And he also believes the future fight to own the search and online advertising business is a two-horse race that Yahoo! does not figure in.
“It didn’t work [...]

Aggressive “spam-filtering technology” deployed by Microsoft is apparently causing a whole lot of legitimate email to vanish into a blackhole before you ever see it. According to sysadmins, the company is taking a very relaxed attitude towards making sure email that complies with published standards gets through to the more than 250 million Internet users [...]