City News, a just-the-facts wire service that covered Chicago’s cops and courts 24 hours a day, seven days a week for more than 100 years, was about to file its last story on Saturday night. As they waited for the bulletin to appear, more than 100 current and former City News staffers crowded into the Billy Goat Tavern, a nearby bar popular with journalists ever since it opened in 1934, one year after Prohibition ended. Yellow crime-scene tape hung from the Billy Goat’s ceiling, substituting for black crepe. Against the wall, the mourners draped a banner bearing the wire’s hard-bitten motto: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." The shuttering of City News comes as the newspaper industry grapples with the challenges posed by the Internet, which has transformed the way consumers get information and turned upstarts like Google Inc. into feared rivals. Indeed, the Tribune Co., the wire’s owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, said it was closing the wire and laying off its 19 employees, in part because competitors were using it to get news to readers hours before the Tribune published its paper editions.

While 2005 will be forever seen as the year the US government managed to keep unilateral control of the Internet, everyone failed to notice a related change that will have far greater implications for everyday Internet users and for the Internet itself. That change will see greater state-controlled censorship on the Internet, reduce people’s ability to use the Internet to communicate freely, and leave expansion of the Internet in the hands of the people least capable of doing the job. It is also another example of where the US government’s control has–in real, verifiable terms–had a direct, unchecked impact on the Internet, despite constant assurances that it takes only a benevolent and passive role. And it has come as a result of the US administration’s hugely controversial decision to invade Iraq.

Eclipse continued to grow in importance while vendors like JBoss, IBM, Sun, BEA, and Oracle deepened their open source ties. Some speculate the open source movement has fundamentally changed the way software gets built and consumed.

Rates Technology, which holds patents for the process by which most Internet phone calls are made, confirmed on Friday that it is suing Google over its Web-based phone calling system. New York-based RTI said it estimated that damages from the lawsuit could reach $5 billion, assuming the litigation process takes four years as the market for Internet-based phone services booms. RTI holds two patents in the telecommunications field and generally takes a one-time fee of up to $5 million to cover companies who provide the services or the equipment to support them. It filed the suit against Google in October.

Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small town in England, has earned a million dollars in four months on the Internet. All he sells are pixels, the tiny dots on the screen that appear when you call up his home page. A 10-by-10 dot square, roughly the size of a letter of type, costs $100. Tew’s home page now looks like an online Times Square, festooned with a multi-colored confetti of ads.

A Trojan horse program is churning out bogus Google ads promoting products Google eschews–gambling, cheap Viagra, girlie photos and adult dating. The ads, being targeted at small publishers, are identical to Google AdSense ads except that referral graphic buttons are being converted to text, apparently due to a bug in the Trojan, according to the publisher who reportedly discovered the Trojan.

If you are seeking offshore IT services in 2006, chances are great your passage will be to India, an IT powerhouse that despite complaints about rising wages or crumbling infrastructure, captures between 80% and 90% of the total offshore dollars. Still, the rules for doing business in the global marketplace are changing. Companies are starting to tinker with the practice of bringing key people to the United States for training. The standard model allows offshore employees to learn at their master’s feet, so to speak, and soak in the culture of the company, thereby strengthening the relationship and ensuring a good outcome. Another trend is the emergence of the hybrid "captive" center, where companies build their own facilities in India, hire 200 of their own employees, for example, and supplement the offshore workforce with twice as many outsourced workers from one of the big Indian IT providers.

A suspected militant raid on one of India’s top science universities has confirmed fears that the country’s booming information technology sector could be a new target for terror groups. A professor was shot dead and four other people were wounded last week when an unidentified gunman drove on to the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) campus in the southern city of Bangalore, India’s tech capital, and opened indiscriminate fire from an automatic rifle outside a conference hall. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack on what security experts said is a "soft target."

Happy New Year from all of us at ZATZ!

The world’s biggest chipmaker said on Thursday it will scrap its 37-year-old logo and well-known tagline as part of a major rebranding that will emphasize its shift away from its core PC business and into consumer products. The original Intel logo featuring a lowered "e" will be replaced with one showing an oval swirl surrounding the company’s name. The phrase "Leap ahead" will supplant "Intel Inside," which launched the Silicon Valley giant into public awareness in the 1990’s and helped it build the world’s No. 5 brand , worth an estimated $36 billion.