As we reported last night, Harsh — full name Griff Harsh V — was forced to withdraw from the university for a year, moving from the class of 2008 to the 2009 (thus presumably graduating last May. (The Daily Princetonian's seems to confirm the timing; the campus paper last year said ID'd him as a member of the class of 2008 but in January this year ran a correction saying he's really in the class of 2009.)

Our tipster, who lives in Princeton, NJ and says he knows the university well, says that the suspension appears academic, given Harsh's reputation as a not-so-bright legacy.

The Whitman kid does sound more like a boor than a bright light, given the party antics described in a campus magazine, which had the heir bragging that his wealth protected him from obnoxious behavior.

But the heir may have another reason for his brashness: According to our tipster, the university assigned one of the toughest guys on campus to be his roommate, the lacrosse-playing son of a New Jersey real estate developer.

The bodyguard roomie was probably the doing of Momma Whitman, who is very concerned Griff might be kidnapped, our tipster claims. Having donated at least $30 million to the university, she wouldn't have much trouble wielding influence with the housing office. Her fears would also help explain why we haven't been able to find any pics of her son on the internet, save for the tiny thumbnail above.

Genuine or not, Whitman's protectiveness over her son provides a ready-made excuse to avoid all discussion of and appearances with him on the campaign trail. Whitman can hardly be expected to answer questions about hearings and suspensions when she's trying to prevent an honest-to-God kidnapping, right? If only the Republican had some similar excuse to avoid answering questions about gay marriage rights.

The real news is horrible enough without the added layer of internet deception. During what police described as a domestic dispute with his wife fiancée, Henry tried to jump into the bed of a pickup truck in which his wife was driving away. He fell and was later found lying on the road and rushed to the hospital. He died at 6:36 am ET this morning.

But Henry was reported dead approximately 12 hours earlier on Twitter. Real and fake deaths were bound to bump up against one another on the microblogging service sooner or later, by sheer chance. Twitter supplies a steady stream of misinformation, including most prominently the prematurely reported death of actor Patrick Swayze, outrage over an Amazon gay book ban that never existed, and the false news that California courts had overturned a gay marriage ban.

The Henry death scam was, as these things go, relatively sophisticated, perpetrated by a scammer who went to the trouble of changing his screen name to "Gerry," calling himself a "Sports Reporter for Dallas Morning News," and attaching a picture of real-life Morning News columnist Gerry Fraley, plus a link to Fraley's page on the newspaper's website. With Cincinnati Bengals receiver Henry known to be in the hospital following a car accident, it would be easier to pass off fake news:

These reports were flatly denied by one of the supposed "sources," and the fakester was even outed by the real Gerry Fraley as fake. An enraged Twitter turned ferociously against the scammer (except for a few people who later insisted he'd been proven his correct, despite the 12 hour gap between his false tweets and the actual death):

The Dallas Morning News must be thrilled with all the people who still think the scammer worked for the paper. Welcome to microblogging, printies!

The investment firm, Russia's Digital Sky Technologies, led a broader group of investors in putting money into San Francisco-based Zynga, according to the New York Times. It's DST's second Silicon Valley conquest, following two investments in Facebook earlier this year that totaled $300 million and that allowed the social network to cash out employee equity.

Usmanov (pictured), who reportedly owns 32 percent of DST, comes with the sort of unsavory press clippings worthy of a long-survivng oligarch in anarchic, organized-crime-ridden Russia: He's been accused by a former British ambassador of being a "gangster and racketeer" and of close ties to mafia drug trafficking and, as we've reported previously, controversially tried to censor bloggers who linked to news of the accusations.

Then there was this, last year: After Usmanov bought a chunk of mobile phone operator Megafon through a holding company and from a fund called IPOC, a former Megafon shareholder said he had been physically coerced into selling his Megafon holdings to IPOC; he later disappeared from his bloodstained vacation home in Latvia.

Zynga is used to dealing in the dark fringes of the markets; it made loads of ad revenue off scammers who deceptively sold "learning CD" and SMS subscriptions to gamers trying to earn virtual currency and now faces a class action lawsuit. Now, despite all the company's talk about reforming its way back into the light, it is, in a way, going deeper into the shadows. Zynga CEO Mark Pincus once bragged about "doing every horrible thing just to get revenues right away." Let's hope, for his sake, he's not making such a recklessly calculated move now.

• The Killers. The rock/synth-pop bad played for Mayer and her guests Friday night at San Francisco club Bimbo's. Mayers' friends tried to Twitter discreetly about the private performance; others around town caught wind of the show but the not the bride.
  
• Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Vongerichten is considered one of the world's best chefs and is proprietor of, among other establishments, an eponymous restaurant in New York with three Michelin stars. He doesn't have a restaurant in San Francisco, however, which makes it all the more remarkable that Mayer brought his culinary services into the SF Four Seasons, where she lives and the home base for her nuptial celebration. Rumors of his presence at the hotel have already begun to circulate.
  
• Singing toaster: Mayer was serenaded by Google co-worker Craig Silverstein in a singing toast. Anyone have further details?
• Mystery pastry chef: Also something of a star, apparently, though we don't know who it is yet.
  

Mayer is an obsessive and data-driven planner in her role as VP for search products at Google. She also loves Oscar de la Renta and having her own fashion spreads in Glamour and Vogue. So it's no surprise her wedding was such an elaborate affair, from the ornate, velvety invitation boxes right through to the celebrity catering. Husband Bogue, a hunky investment manager one year her junior, is no doubt accustomed to handling the pressure of such complex, high pressure events.

Many of Mayer's friends seemed similarly in sync with Mayer, tweeting infrequently during the three-day affair in a nod to Mayers' privacy (not to mention her intense security policies).



Speaking of which: We've yet to find any pictures from the wedding. Mayer banned outside photography, one source tells us. If you have one, or can answer any of the questions above, or know the names of the more prominent guests, I'd love to hear from you.

Oh, and Marissa, Zach: Congratulations!

(Top pic: Mayer at New York's Carnegie Hall in November, accepting a "2009 Women of the Year" award from Glamour. Getty Images.)

Valleywag was the first to report, back in 2007, how Newmark and co-founder Jim Buckmaster required the equivalent of a $16 million bribe from eBay to honor an early employee's 25 percent stake in the online classifieds company. The employee, purported Craigslist co-founder Philip Knowlton, had previously agreed to sell his equity to eBay in desperation, for a separate $16 million, after Newmark and Buckmaster tried to dilute his holdings with new shares. People would speak about the incident only anonymously at the time.

But an eBay executive laid out the same story in testimony today in Delaware court, saying Newmark and Buckmaster demanded $16 million and threatened to block the deal if they didn't get it — their ownership award to Knowlton be damned. Their demand amounted to "essentially extortion," the executive, Garrett Price, testified, according to NBC Bay Area and the San Jose Business Journal.



What's more, Price also testified that Newmark and Buckmaster asked that the payment be hushed up to protect Craigslist's altruistic image. That way, Newmark could continue to float preposterous, image-enhancing deceptions like this one, swallowed by Wired and printed as part of an August 2009 profile of Newmark:

Newmark abandoned the idea of running Craigslist as a nonprofit, which would have required him to learn and follow too many rules.... in the meantime he handed out a significant portion of his ownership to others as a way to avoid acquiring too much authority.

So on the one hand, Newmark is telling the press he's intentionally diluting his ownership in the company to keep his ego in check; on the other, he's frantically bolstering that ownership, a process he only halts when he gets a payoff, made to him, at the expense (effectively) of a major shareholder and former employee/co-founder. What's more, as a result of these shenanigans, his quirky indy SF startup is now partly sold out to a big bad tech giant.

Newmark has yet to take the stand. It should be interesting to see how he spins his way out of this one — not only in the court of law, but in the court of public opinion and brand image.

Sent in by the friend of an ultimately unsuccessful Google applicant, the test was supposed to be completed by the applicant within three days. It asks for a response to an imaginary request from an imaginary Google manager, for an analysis of whether the company — "Poogle," not Google, mind you — can hire 750 engineers in six months to launch a new product within 12 months (click to enlarge):

This is a terrible question. The only issue is whether it is an intentional one, designed to test the applicant.

It's terrible because doubling the number of engineers on the sort of product Google makes — software — emphatically does not make it ship faster, certainly not within the first six months of their work, and certainly not at the scale of 750 engineers.

This has been widely understood among software managers since the publication of Frederick Brooks' Mythical Man Month in 1975. As blogger and former Microsoftie Joel Spolsky summarized the thesis 25 years later:

When you add more programmers to a late project, it gets even later. That's because when you have n programmers on a team, the number of communication paths is n(n-1)/2, which grows at O(n2).

From Mythical Man Month:

Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them. This is true for... picking cotton; it is not even approximately true of systems programming.

When a task cannot be partitioned because of sequential constraints, the application of more effort has no effect on the schedule. The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many woman are assigned...

Since software construction is inherently a systems effort — an exercise in complex interrelationships — communication effort is great, and it quickly dominates the decrease in individual task time brought about by partitioning. Adding more men then lengthens, not shortens, the schedule.

Even when a software team can benefit from some organic growth (as opposed to Poogle's doubling), it's going to take on the order of six months just to get the new people up to speed on the existing code base and trained in corporate peculiarities, which at Google are significant due to the scale at which it operates (Ken Thompson, legendary co-creator of the Unix operating system and inventor of Google's new Go programming language, still isn't allowed to check in code there, having failed to jump through the requisite hoops, he recently said in the book Coders at Work ).

So "Poogle" shouldn't be asking whether it needs to hire more recruiters to add 750 new programmers to "Product X" in six months; it should be asking whether the feature list for Product X should be trimmed, the deadline lengthened or a subset of it easily split off into Product Y.

But maybe Google is asking candidates to come up with that answer on their own. Whoops.

Supporting documents supplied as tabs to the test:

This one goes on; we've cut it off:

(Top pic: Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Getty.)

Schmidt once dismissed Twitter as a "poor man's email system." But as the microblogging service has picked up more users, more activity and more search traffic, Google has been forced to take it more seriously. Today, Schmidt's engineers announced that Twitter-style "real-time" searching of tweets would be integrated into Google's core search service. I guess that's what you'd call a Poor Man's Real Time Search Engine, mmmm? Whoops.

Even worse, Schmidt's attempt to join Twitter itself proved something of a disaster this morning. He first logged on with the handle "eschmidt0", prompting a cyber-diss from high-profile New York tech executive Anil Dash:

Oh, snap! Surely a big-time CEO wouldn't let a zinger like that get under his skin right?

Except that within a few hours Schmidt had duly changed his handle and moved over his old content:

It looks like Schmidt also received some help from the Poor Man's Email Service's Rich Man's Identity Authenticator, because he's now got a "Verified Account." Throwing his (semi-)celebrity weight around at Twitter Inc.? Schmidt's starting to get the swing of things. Now just tweet about your next lunch choice, Eric. We promise not to mock. Too hard.

The spring makeover, an awkward attempt to ape Twitter, overwhelmed Facebook users with excess information. Over the summer, Facebook tested a stripped-down "LIte" interface that pulled back much of the clutter. Now, there's a new design previewed in PCinpact.com that, as noted by Business Insider's Alaska Miller, consolidates the chat-and-notification-toolbar at the bottom of the current Facebook homepage with the search bar and account links at the top. In other words, continues the quest for the sort of simplicity Facebook used to have.

Before:

After (click to enlarge) (via):

(Top pic: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, by Mathieu Thouvenin)

The spooks at the NSA are, of course, notorious for their role monitoring internet activity, and for their use of warantless wiretaps to monitor U.S. phones, often illegally. So computer users could easily be worried to hear that the NSA has "partnerships" with Microsoft, which makes their operating systems; Intel, which makes their wireless chipsets; and McAfee, which makes their antivirus software (so-called!).

From NSA Information Assurance Director Richard Shaeffer's testimony to the Senate Judiciary's Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security:

Working in partnership with Microsoft and elements of the Department of Defense, NSA leveraged our unique expertise and operational knowledge of system threats and vulnerabilities to engance Microsoft's operating system security guide without constraining the user's ability to perform their everyday tasks... All this was done in coordination with the product release, not months or years later during the product's lifecycle.

Shaeffer also talked about his agency's "trusting relationship" with the private sector, including a "partnership" with Intel and McAffee to promote a security protocol — or should we say, "security" protocol? — from the federal government.

These IT companies all want to do business with the government, so it's to their advantage to be seen as cooperative in implementing federal protocols in their products. But should consumers distrust these ties? The general consensus among private-sector security experts canvassed by ComputerWorld was, in the words of one, "I can't imagine NSA and Microsoft would do anything deliberate because the repercussions would be enormous if they got caught."

Right, because if there's anything that clearly motivates these two massive organizations with virtually guaranteed near-term revenue streams, it's fear of public shame. This is why we have not seen either entity doing anything embarrassing, recently.

(Pic: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, by Getty Images.)

That's bad news not only for News Corp. chairman Murdoch but also for all the other old media barons hoping online paywalls will save their bacon. Even those who will pay can't decide if they want to buy individual articles via micropayments, subscribe to print-online bundles or subscribe to just the website:

Then there's the anecdotal evidence collected by Ad Age's Simon Dumenco, who surfed the comments section of Murdoch's websites and found that most of his own readers thought his paywall would fail. Some were downright mean, like Times of London reader Robin Stack: "It will reduce your wealth and influence; please do it."

So, in order to have any hope of weaning consumers off free content, the likes of Murdoch will have to offer a diverse array of payment plans and work like hell to change the thinking of the vast majority of his existing audience. For moguls used to exploiting their readers' and viewers' basest instincts, that sounds like an awful lot of persuading.

In 1983, when Microsoft was still a small (if fast-growing), privately-held software company, Allen left his company to battle Hodgkin's disease, undergoing radiation therapy and a bone marrow transplant. (He retained a substantial stake in the company, which eventually made him fabulously wealthy.) A year ago, Allen underwent an "undisclosed medical procedure" that took him away from a local awards ceremony attended by his Microsoft partner Bill Gates.

His health then seemed to improve, but now Allen's announced a diagnosis of "diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, a relatively common for of lymphoma." The good news: Allen believes he'll be able to continue his role as chairman of investment firm Vulcan, Inc. And he's been through this before. As Bill Gates told TechFlash, " I know [Allen] to be a strong and resilient individual."

(Pic: Allen, left, with his friend Gates at a 2000 Portland Trail Blazers game. Getty Images.)

The only non internet person on Couric's list, in fact, is FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. The other people who control the media, according to the CBS Evening News anchor, are all Web heads:

• Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
  
• Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington.
  
• The founders of the women's blogging network BlogHer: Jory Des Jardins, Elisa Camahort Page and Lisa Stone. This is a big stretch but we're assuming Couric is trying to imagine the less sexist world she'd like to live in and lend some buzz to a feminist cause. Fair enough.
  
• Craig Newmark, Craigslist founder.
  
• Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone.
  
• Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Couric is obviously just trying to butter up people who might be able to help her ditch the old fuddy-duddies at CBS News and expand her promising sideline in lifecasting. Which is, frankly, brilliant. We know some other people who might be able to help you Katie, call us.

Oh, and the Jewish thing? Couric is no anti-Semite, but we couldn't help but notice that her list of people who supposedly control the media does contain a majority of people of Jewish descent: Brin, Page, Newmark, Zuckerberg, Genachowski and Camahort Page.

Of course, the pace of change in Silicon Valley has a way of leveling these old-world distinctions. Page's family was non-practicing; Zuckerberg has gone atheist and Camahort Page is "a total non-religious person."

[via Bay Newser via NBC Bay Area]

Pacific Coast News has snapped a picture of Timberlake on the set of The Social Network, the Facebook flick also staring Jesse Eisenberg as co-founder and current CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew Garfield as spurned co-founder Eduardo Saverin. We've put the shot, above, next to a Jan. 2009 Getty picture of real-life Sean Parker. Timberlake's got the the curly hair down; with some highlights and that wardrobe he might pass for the 'N Sync version of himself from the late 1990s. Click to enlarge.

Timberlake picture by Pacific Coast News

Ad Age reports (via) that Silverman might take over CollegeHumor at the behest of Barry Diller, who bankrolls both CollegeHumor and Silverman's new online venture. Van Veen, meanwhile. is transitioning out of CollegeHumor and into his own Diller-funded media startup, Notional, which sounds a lot like Silverman's Electus (both have something to do with online video production).

We're told Silverman and Van Veen have been working very closely together and talking to each other every day. Perhaps a grander merger is in the works that would combine Electus, Notional and CollegeHumor into one venture. Silverman may have been ousted from old media, but he could still be lord of the new media flies. Especially within a venture that actually celebrates a refusal to mature, an inability to grow emotionally and a proclivity for partying to excess. Those are Ben Silverman's specialties, right there.

(Pics: via Getty, Webbyist)

In Fiorina's official candidacy announcement, published in an op-ed in the Orange County Register, the Republican hopeful lays out some of her political positions, which include safeguarding gargantuan CEO paychecks from the government; unshackling agribusiness from environmental protections; and denying national health care to people who get cancer like Fiorina but who, unlike her, aren't rich or well insured (Fiorina does think these people should be able to go to twee "community clinics," though).

Fiorina also boldy writes, "Let's put every government budget and every government bill on the Internet for every citizen to see." Great idea, Carly! If this were 1996. The government already puts federal and proposed budgets online here and here, and the bills can be found here, among many other places. At home in California, the budget is here and the bills are here and here. Maybe you should ask your good friend John McCain to teach you a thing or two about the internet.

Microsoft has said it will lay off 800 in this round. A tipster tells us it shed at least eight 11 people from the Cambridge, Massachusetts office of its "FUSE" social networking research initiative, announced just last month by Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie. Our tipster said the Cambridge operation has been going for a year and a half, though, so it seems likely this is part of the restructuring that created FUSE from three existing Microsoft groups. This is the group, by the way, that brought Twitter search to Bing.

Stuck twenty points behind Democratic rival Jerry Brown and without the support of "major San Francisco donors who helped underwrite Newsom's successful campaigns in the city," Newsom is dropping out of the governor's race. Newsom dropped the word "young" into his exit speech, a move that helps remind people he's a rising political star who in all likelihood plans to try again for higher office, just once he tackles some of those festering homelessness and crime problems he promised to attack when first elected mayor six years ago.

Though losing an alcoholic wife-fucker like Newsom will take some fun out of the gubernatorial race, the contest still features Democratic hopeful Brown, who proposed a state space academy last time he was governor, and Republican contender Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO whose personal voting record is "unacceptable," according to one Meg Whitman.

Arianna Huffington has allowed her editors to run ultra-close ups of the aging body of Vogue's Anna Wintour ("what does she really look like?") and now actresses Lindsay Lohan ("unedited" and splotchy) and Elizabeth Hurley (a bit sweaty). It's a case of her unprofitable company's need for monetizable, non-political Web traffic (read: cheap celebrity clicks) running headlong into Huffington's need to suck up to celebs, who write for her site and come to her parties and help her seem very glamorous.

We won't lecture Huffington on her company's too-often-shoddy attempts to make money in the online publishing racket. At least, not in this post. But we will keep her honest: If Huffington is going to run unedited pictures of others, it's only fair there should be some unedited pictures of her out there.

Click any of the images below to pop-up large, hi-res versions. (Warning, this may slow down your web browser and ruin your lunch.) We've played by HuffPo rules: Posed, red carpet pictures with no editing. We've also excerpted a highlight, as Huffington did with Wintour.

UPDATE: Jessica Wakeman at The Frisky notes that the first chapter of Huffington's book On Becoming Fearless is about positive body image. Plastering someone's picture on HuffPo is certainly one way to nudge that person toward becoming "fearless."