The Friday before a holiday weekend is the ultimate black hole for news, and thus the perfect time to dump embarrassing announcements. A roundup:

Google: To compensate for this week's hour-and-a-half-long GMail outage, Google has given three free days of service to its paying Google Apps customers. The company wrote in an email we received last night, "We understand that this service outage has affected our valued customers and their users, and we sincerely apologize for the disruption and any impact.

Amazon: Company CEO Jeff Bezos has already apologized for silently deleting copies of 1984 off people's Kindles, but now the company has made official amends, offering affected customers either a redelivery of the book or a $30 gift certificate, the Wall Street Journal reports.

AT&T: The telecommunications company knows its wireless network is the scourge of iPhone owners, so it's just posted a YouTube video of an empathetic, long-haired geek named "Seth" to explain how hard it has been for the company to keep up with the torrid growth in smartphone subscriptions. You know what else is hard, "Seth?" Spending $100 per month for crappy service.

"We have heard you," he soothes. "We are on it." We predict a parody version of this video will be up by the end of the weekend.

(Top pic by spud murphy on Flickr)

AT&T spokesman Michael Cole sent us the following statement, saying AT&T's network was swamped with attacks from the server that hosts 4chan's infamous "/b/" forum, so AT&T blocked 4chan for a while:

Beginning Friday, an AT&T customer was impacted by a denial-of-service attack stemming from IP addresses connected to img.4chan.org. To prevent this attack from disrupting service for the impacted AT&T customer, and to prevent the attack from spreading to impact our other customers, AT&T temporarily blocked access to the IP addresses in question for our customers. This action was in no way related to the content at img.4chan.org; our focus was on protecting our customers from malicious traffic.

Overnight Sunday, after we determined the denial-of-service threat no longer existed, AT&T removed the block on the IP addresses in question. We will continue to monitor for denial-of-service activity and any malicious traffic to protect our customers.

4chan itself has come under denial of service attack recently; if the site's online enemies actually managed to gain access to the site's servers (via a different type of attack), they could have used it as a proxy to hit AT&T. Or maybe someone figured out how to trick /b/'s bulletin board software into doing the same thing; lord knows the online hangout is popular with plenty of crafty script kiddies.

(Pic via)

For benefit of the uninitiated, 4chan is a popular Wild West-ish outpost of internet known equally for its infamous hacking jobs and pranks (Rickrolling emerged from this murky swamp) as its meme generation, perhaps most notably the LOLcats phenomenon. 4chan's /b/ messageboard, one of the sections of the site blocked by AT&T, was once described as "the asshole of the internet" by Gawker and Valleywag alum Nick Douglas, an outpost where "btards" gather to engage in tasteless games of uncensored oneupsmanship, where the objective is often to see who can elicit the most shock from other members of the community.

Reports Tech Central:

Users of AT&T's DSL internet access across many states in the US are reporting that they are being blocked from the infamous /b/ message board in what appears to be an act of internet censorship by the phone company. This started today Sunday and no one has yet been able to get any official confirmation out of AT&T as to why.

Moot, the founder of 4chan, has confirmed AT&T is filtering/blocking the site.

In addition to starting a war with the internet's most skilled collection of cyber-rogues, Central Gadget says that AT&T may also be breaking the law.

Under the FCC's Comcast/BitTorrent ruling, Internet Service Providers may only slow or cap connection speeds. They are not allowed to block any service or protocol on the internet. Here, 4chan as a web site appears to fall under an internet service, but it is also conforming to standard web page protocols. It appears AT&T does not have the legal right to block 4chan, only to cap customers who are "abusing" their access to the internet.

Predictably, the 4chan crowd is already mobilizing both inside and outside of their online community. AT&T didn't just open a can worms, they dove headfirst into a den of vipers, and this will be very interesting to watch play out.

AT&T Takes on 4chan—Everybody Stand Back [Tech Central]
AT&T Blocking Access to Some Parts of 4chan [Central Gadget]
pic via

The State Department has released the list of minor players traveling to the country to share their thoughts on "how new technologies can be used to build local capacity, foster greater transparency and accountability, build upon anti-corruption efforts, promote critical thinking in the classroom, scale-up civil society, and further empower local entities and individuals by providing the tools for network building":

• Jason Liebman, CEO-Founder, Howcast
• David Nassar, VP, Blue State Digital
• Scott Heiferman, CEO, MeetUp
• Raanan Bar-Cohen, VP, Automattic/WordPress
• Richard Robbins, Director of Social Innovation, AT&T
• Jack Dorsey, Chairman-Founder, Twitter
• Kannan Pashupathy, Director of International Engineering Operations, Google
• Ahmad Hamzawi, Head of Engineering, Middle East/North Africa, Google
• Hunter Walk, Head of Product Development, YouTube
• Steven Levy, Senior Writer, Wired Magazine

Is this a joke? It sounds like the State Department rounded up all the people who couldn't even qualify to go to Social Web Foo Camp in the woods of Sebastopol, Calif. last weekend. (For example: Jack Dorsey, Twitter's "chairman," has time on his hands after being fired as the comapny's CEO.) In other words, we're hardly sending our best and brightest. Save for the misplaced Levy, a talented writer whose job we do not envy. How will he turn this gang of second stringers into the heroes of a Wired feature?

(Photo by AP)

The word from a plugged-in Sunnyvale source: Bartz, who has been on the job less than three weeks, was instantly suspicious of Yahoo's attempt to ship its own branded cell phone. But she got the proof she needed, according to our source, when she saw her daughter play with a prototype of the smartphone preloaded with Yahoo services. Layne, now a junior at the University of Southern California, immediately put the One Phone away and switched back to her own cell phone.

The fallout, our source says: a top Yahoo mobile executive left, and others may have been fired.

A Yahoo flack issued a non-denial denial, flatly insisting the anecdote "has no basis in fact" and then declining to answer further questions about the phone project. As for the firings, she said she had no knowledge of any firings or staff departures. Motorola, and AT&T did not respond to inquiries on the matter.

But the mere fact that this anecdote is making the rounds, though, bodes well for Bartz. It may strike some detractors as an executive making flip decisions. Another way to look at it: Bartz is going by her gut and exercising a clear vision for what Yahoo will and won't do. When she was hired, many expressed doubts about Bartz's boring background in enterprise software sales. It may turn out, after all, that she is the product nazi Yahoo has long needed.

"You also agree to pay for all charges for services provided under this agreement even if such calls were not authorized by you."

Regulators say this line makes it nearly impossible for customers to get out of paying for fraud or errors charged to their bill — even if they're added by AT&T.

"If you do not agree with the provisions of this agreement, your sole option is to cancel your services ... within 30 days after receipt of this agreement," it says.

I should've made it my lead: Quit now!

Heavy data users have two new options: pay $120 per month for 100 megabytes of international data use or $200 for 200 megabytes. Previously, AT&T announced a 20-megabyte plan for $25 and 50-megabyte plan for $60 plan. A word of caution: Those fees are in addition to what customers already pay to use the phone in the United States.

AT&T says customers can cancel whenever they want, but there are caveats. If you are overseas for only a week, you still have to pay for the whole month — an AT&T spokesman said the company doesn’t prorate the fees. And if you forget to cancel the plan after you get home, you will continue to be charged. AT&T won’t let you specify ahead of time when you want the international plan to end.

(Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

But I disagree with my esteemed colleague Kit Eaton at Gizmodo on one thing: AT&T's network is indeed the iPhone's weak spot. At least 50 percent of the U.S. population lives in an area not served by AT&T 3G. Even David Pogue's iPhone musical called out AT&T service quality as a minus. Verizon's EVDO network — which reaches 80 percent of Americans, per the cheat sheet — would be a much better match. Someday.

AT&T is already huge provider of telco and IT services to small business. Its track record is one of notoriously complex business processes that get in the way. If you schedule a "turn-up" to activate a new T1 line, you'll learn more than you want about AT&T internal politics. If your onsite technician doesn't show, your attempt to track him down gets ping-ponged around AT&T's org chart. Could be he has the wrong phone number or address. Could be he checked you off as done and took a vaca, as happened to Valleywag editor Paul Boutin's home-office installation. To AT&T, it's your problem. "Sorry, we have no available slots to reschedule until next week."

Want to get a reverse DNS record created, so you can send mail to EarthLink and Comcast without being spam-filtered? AT&T's answer: We can't do that unless we take over your DNS hosting entirely.

I don't expect the company's attempt to expand into home service to change its corporate culture. Instead, I pity ConnecTech's frontline support people. God help them when they try to explain AT&T bureaucracy to people who've been spoiled by FedEx.

In 1983, Knight Ridder and AT&T joined to launch videotext service Viewtron. Anybody with a dedicated terminal, phone line, and $12 a month could access news from the Miami Herald and the New York Times, online shopping, banking and food delivery, via a 300-baud modem. Norman Morrison, one of the subsidiary's VPs, said: "We're at the beginning of home information technology. We are dancing naked on the stage of history." Knight Ridder recorded a loss of $16 million on the project in 1984. Viewtron claimed as many as 3,100 subscribers before Knight Ridder folded the service in 1986. An impressive number considering all that equipment cost between $600 and $900. Bet it would've been more popular if it'd had porn.

In 1995, Knight-Ridder, Tribune, Times Mirror, Advance Publications, Cox Enterprises, Gannett, Hearst, Washington Post, and the New York Times each contributed $1 million to create New Century Networks in 1995. None of them actually wanted any part of it. The opening paragraphs of BusinessWeek's 1998 article on the fiasco best captures the mood.

It was created with a name most of its owners disliked, with a logo one partner ''hated,'' in a city everybody rejected, with a mission nobody understood. So it was fitting that when New Century Network was kicked off last April by nine media giants teaming up to conquer electronic competition, even the launch party bombed. In a ballroom at the Newspaper Association of America convention in Chicago, a thousand bottles of champagne emblazoned with ''New Century Network: The Collective Intelligence of America's Newspapers'' awaited the hordes expected to come to toast the watershed new-media joint venture. When fewer than 100 people showed up, Chief Executive Lee de Boer made an abbreviated speech before retreating.

The papers sunk $25 million more into New Century Networks before it folded in 1998, laying off 40. Perhaps it was for the best, says a disgruntled vet: "Even had New Century worked, it still would have been something like Google News and that's not exactly the best business ever." Which is funny because Google claims Google News indirectly generates $100 million a year for the company and doesn't crow about it much. These guys? It would've been more naked dancing on stages and things.

After participating in New Century Networks, the now defunct newspaper publisher Knight-Ridder launched Real Cities in September 1999, intending it to be a network of local portals featuring "news, email, search services, e-commerce, and site-building tools," according to PC World. In an article titled "Knight Ridder and New Media: If You Can't Beat 'Em...," Richard Siklos, then at BusinessWeek, wrote

Analysts applaud Knight Ridder's strategy, but some wonder if its network of local sites will ever gel, and they figure Real Cities will someday have to be merged into a bigger entity.

Knight Ridder ignored the pessimists and committed to investing $25 million in its new online business. "I live in terror that some big thing's going to happen that I don't see coming," Knight Ridder New Media President Bob Ingle told BusinessWeek. What Ingle didn't envision: nothing happening. Users didn't flock to Knight Ridder's localized portals. They start their Internets on AOL or Yahoo in Des Moines and by clicking into the Google search box everywhere else. Knight Ridder was eventually sold to McClatchy for $4.5 billion in 2006. Last week, McClatchy sold Real Cities to Centro, a local-media buying agency, for an undisclosed — read: embarrassingly low — amount. Maybe just enough to cover this year's wages?

Before there was Yahoo Answers, where users post questions for other users, there was a similar service from the New York Times called Abuzz, which the Gray Lady acquired in 1999 for a modest-by-bubble-standards $30 million. In January 2001, the Times shuttered the service and laid off 70 staffers, citing an "unexpected slackening of advertising revenue." That was the service's only failure, says a person familiar with the project:

They shut it down after the bubble burst, even though they could have kept growing it, for just the cost of the servers. The Times was always nervous about quality. It was user-generated content, not high-quality editorial and this was before they got down in the dirt with About.com. If they had just left it alone, it would have been ENORMOUS by now

Even when you can't sell adds on ENORMOUS, it's still good. Google News doesn't serve ads. Maybe Abuzz could have referred traffic to NYTimes.com like Google News does to Google. Google calls that trick $100 million. You know what the newspaper's call revenue gimmicks like that? They can't remember.

Founded in 1997 and still operating today, Classified Ventures operates Cars.com, Homescape, Apartments.com, RentalHomesPlus, and HomeGain. It's owned by McClatchy, Belo, Gannett, Tribune and the Washington Post, and is probably the newspaper industry's most successful online venture. That's not saying much. On December 30, 2007, part-owner McClatchy told the SEC its 25.6 percent stake in Classified Ventures was worth $99.3 million. In a filing last week, McClatchy said its stake was now worth $86.5 million — a 13 percent drop in half a year. Craigslist, eBay's Kijiji, and even Facebook allow their users to list cars, apartments, and other goods for sale for free, threatening the paid-classifieds business online and in print.

Oh, and Yahoo's Newspaper Consortium? Don't get us started. Or do.

(Photo by DRB62)