For decades now, the corporate and political consensus in the U.S. has been that if America did more business with China, freedom would somehow follow. Despite early evidence to the contrary, this formulation gained further traction with the spread of the internet, one of the most powerful forces against the authoritarian state; big tech companies eagerly embraced the idea that, by working with a repressive regime, they could ultimately help bring freedom to hundreds of millions of people.

After years of following this same reasoning, censoring search results to secure a foothold in China, Google has finally come along and acknowledged how little China has changed, exposing in a corporate blog post the extensive threat posed by nationalistic Chinese hackers and saying it will leave the country if it can't publish uncensored search results.

Bravo. Google just had its best-ever quarter in China and relies on China-based engineers for global programming tasks, so this would be no small sacrifice.

But it needn't to cast aside 1990s-brand techno-optimism entirely. Google could embrace its position as the leading corporate voice that's critical of China:

• Sponsor a 20% time employee project to allow Chinese internet users to route around the Great Firewall with greater reliability than ever before.
  
• Create a Google-sponsored force of gray-hat hackers to oppose the efforts of Chinese hackers, primarily through defensive means. They would work to defend not only Google users but others, as well.
  
• Publicly detail all threats to non-Chinese computer users from China's hackers, after the operators of the targeted systems have had ample warning time. After all, Google discovered while investigating Chinese attacks on its own users that "at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses—including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors—have been similarly targeted."
  
• Work with similarly-minded tech companies (if any) to craft a concrete national policy proposal to address the issues the recent attacks have uncovered. Google and DC-bred CEO Eric Schmidt have already become a growing force in Washington.

That's just off the top of our heads. The specifics of Google's actions are less important than that the company takes some additional steps. There's no better way for Google to prove that is change of heart on China is rooted in sincere moral convictions rather than cynical business and security calculations.

(Pic: Schmidt, from his Twitter account and likely taken during his November trip to Iraq.)

It was also announced today that Silverman's company Electus (which sounds like a bad name for a campaign strategy firm) signed a deal with Yahoo to create content for the website. DumbDumb will create online commercials and other short movies that may eventually be turned into real live motion pictures on film if they are viraly enough (hey, people have made more out of Saturday Night Live skits, why not use the doodles of two of our favorite funny men?). Is this really the same deal? Is DumbDumb going to be making commercialized movies for Yahoo? Please don't say it's so. We have such high hopes for the AD alums, and all of this just seems so...so...something-something.

[Image via Getty]

Their point: Yahoo made about 1 million euros per worker from Yahoo France alone last year, and used to hype how "it's important to have [locally] concentrated engineering activities... to innovate" in France, where it would base "one of [its] most important centers in Europe." Yahoo France's engineers will now stop working until Yahoo agrees that they shouldn't have to stop working. At least they're fact checking the internet company's hype along the way.

The big bashes are off this year, a tipster tells us. Which is just as well: Last year, there were YEPs in New York, Los Angeles and the San Mateo headquarters; these plus the departmental parties meant that many Yahoos easily got to four parties a year, a tipster told us at the time. All the festivities came despite a wave of layoffs, which left Yahoo in the awkward position of having to set up metal detectors at its LA party, and of featuring Vegas-style showgirls in dollar-bill getups at the main headquarters party (see pic above) in the face of all Yahoo's bloodletting.

The 2007 party featured a Neil Diamond tribute band, so at least Yahoos apparently won't have to worry about any such torture this year. Ironically, though, 2009 has been a much better year for layoffs at Yahoo than 2008 was.

Know what any other tech companies are doing (or not doing) to celebrate the holidays this year? We're dying to hear about any conmpany parties: drop a line toryan@valleywag.com.

(Pic by Phil Hollenback)

Courtenay Semel, for those who are not familiar with her heiress-level fameballing, is not a shy and retiring person. A person does not make out with her attention-craving girlfriend Tila Tequila on red carpets because she mistrusts the media; a person does not scream at a club bouncer to "just fucking Google me, you dumb fuck" because she mistrusts the media; and a person certainly does not "joke" to a magazine reporter that "I'm kind of like the Don Juan of the lesbian world," as Semel did with Curve, because she mistrusts the media.

So it's odd that Semel would tell Curve that the "media kind of ruined that relationship" she had with Lindsay Lohan by saying the pair were dating. Semel added: "I can't even have a best friend because I guess I'm going to be linked with them next." But maybe she also can't have friends because she gives underminey quotes about them, like this one, from the new interview:

I think, you know, everyone scrutinizes, Lindsay for everything she went through, but they should thank her, because it shows you exactly what not to do.

That's a fairly cutting quote considering that Lohan has yet to enter rehab per Semel's urging. Of course, when Semel only went to rehab herself after her dad cut off access to the trust fund, something she left out of her little zinger. Semel, it would seem, grasps the advantages of strategic oversharing as well as the rest of her internet-bred generation; if only daddy Terry had been so savvy, Yahoo might be in a better place today.

[via People]

(Semel with heiress Casey Johnson this past May, top, via INF; Semel-Tequila pic, lower, via x17online.com)

Rasmus Lerdorf, inventor of the PHP programming language, confirms he is leaving the company. "It has only been a couple of days," he told us by email yesterday. "I really don't know what is next yet... I am enjoying having a bit more time to play with pet projects this week."

Lerdorf, whose widely-used programming and templating system has been especially popular among Web startups, declined to elaborate on why he left Yahoo. But he was blunt about the matter on Twitter this past summer, just moments after Yahoo announced a pact in which Microsoft would power its search results — previously handled by in-house code — while Yahoo would continue to sell ads against the results:

If we had to guess where Lerdorf might end up, we'd lay our money on Facebook, a PHP shop and a fast-growing one at that. The massive social network has no doubt pushed Lerdorf's language to the edges of its performance envelope. More importantly, the young company shows no inclination to outsource software development to one of its largest competitors and turn itself into a second-tier advertising network.

(Pic by Aaron Hockley)

Yahoo's proposed new HQ in the Silicon Valley town of Santa Clara would be big enough to house 7,000 additional staff, according to former Valleywag Nicholas Carlson, at Business Insider. The company continues to try and push permits for the plan through the city's approval process despite plenty of available office space in existing Silicon Valley buildings.

We've seen this movie before. It does not end well:

• Fox Interactive's $350 million new HQ near Los Angeles was said to be the biggest area development deal in 25 years. Amid layoffs, Fox cancelled its move as the building was being finished.
  
• Internet conglomerate IAC finished its new Gotham headquarters in early 2007. Within months came a plan to break up the company.
  
• Amid the dot-com boom, network technology company Cisco Systems planned a controversial Silicon Valley megacampus for 20,000 workers. In late 2001 it scaled that back to plans for an office that could — maybe! — hold 3,000 to 9,000 workers.
  
• Handheld device maker Palm had dot-com-era plans for a 39-acre campus; the collateral alone on the project was $238 million. By mid-2001 Palm announced it would sell that land.
  
• From late 2000 to late 2001, USA Today reported, "Intel, Excite At Home and Inktomi... shelved or cut back plans for new plants or offices."

It's worth noting that Yahoo's plans have been underway since three years ago, when the company bought the land in question for $112 million. Seasoned real estate developers know it often makes more sense to obtain city approvals before canceling a project, since the approvals can usually be transferred to a new owner, making the underlying land more valuable. So Bartz is not necessarily at fault for Yahoo's hubristic plans. But that doesn't make her any less likely to be the victim of what they portend.

Yahoo had a shot at acquiring or investing in Google before purchasing Geocities; according to John Batelle's The Search, Google's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin approached Yahoo in 1997 or 1998, but Yahoo passed. Page and Brin were becoming desperate for resources — they had scrounged far more than their fair share of excess servers, hard drives and bandwidth belonging to Stanford University — so on the advice of a professor they turned to Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim:

Brin sent Bechtolsheim an e-mail late one night requesting a sit-down, and Bechtolsheim answered immediately. He suggested meeting the next morning at eight o'clock... They agreed to meet, on the porch of [a mutual friend's] Palo Alto home...



[Page:] "We did a demo, and Andy asked a lot of questions. [Then] he said: 'Well, I don't want to waste time. I'm sure it'll help you guys if I just write a check.'"



...When Bechtolsheim went out to his car to get his checkbook, they pondered how much to ask for and at what valuation... "We told him our valuation and he said, 'Oh, I don't think that's enough, I think it should be twice that much...'"



Minutes later, Page and Brin had a check for $100,000.

This happened in late 1998, right around the time Yahoo would have been negotiating its Geocities boondoggle, which was consummated in January 1999. To think the company could have had Google for a song. Google users should be glad Yahoo didn't — Yahoo's bumbling managers probably would have run Google.com into the ground. Twitter investor Fred Wilson should be glad, too: the Geocities deal earned his venture capital firm a hundredfold return.

Despite the impressive profit numbers, former Valleywag Owen Thomas notes at NBC Bay Area, the internet company's revenue is down 12 percent, which means Yahoo is cutting its way to profitability — rather than growing like Google. "No wonder she's feeling under the weather," Thomas writes, in a refrain that will be all-too-tempting for the financial press. It's enough to make an executive want to suck her thumb.

Certain, that is, if you judge from recent history. Here's a roundup of tech chauvinism flare-ups from just the last couple of months:

• "Booth babes" were explicitly discouraged at the TechCrunch 50; some people still hired the attractive spokesgirls.
  
• On stage at the same event, Penn Jilette promoted his iPhone magic app by explaining how it helped a stripper increase her tips. Oy, said Twitter
  
• When the fit, female co-founder of the startup TotalTrainer gave a presentation at VentureBeat's Demo conference, some male geeks in the audience got snarky about her body on Twitter, provoking a backlash against their "sexist tweets."
  
• Attendees at TechCrunch had to be warned not to mock the accents of speakers from foreign countries, according to co-organizer Jason Calacanis.

What's more, the girls who danced on stage at this year's Yahoo Hack Day were merely a sequel to the gyrating women who appeared on stage last year, notes Kara Swisher at All Things D. That's despite the fact that an all-woman team won the top prize at Yahoo's first Hack Day, in 2006, and that Yahoo has a tough-as-nails female CEO.

Chalk it up as evidence that, whether a woman calls the shots or not, the tech world remains heavily male dominated. It goes beyond that, though: Human relationships, across the gender divide or not, get severely twisted in Silicon Valley's intense startup culture, where they're all too often pushed aside to make way for technical achievements (think marathon coding sessions) or business success. The Hack Day incident is as much about interpersonal awkwardness as sexism (does this guy look like he's enjoying himself?).

Images from this year's event are below, via simonwillison.net and CocaChou on Flickr. It's a well-stocked gallery, purely so you can fully appreciate how, uh, deplorable this whole scene was.

via CocaChou on Flickr

via CocaChou on Flickr

via CocaChou on Flickr

via CocaChou on Flickr

Blame this altogether more sinister portrait of Decker as narcotized, philandering spy on her increasingly messy divorce, which involves a custody battle over her children. The accusations are mentioned in a September 29 letter we've obtained, sent to Decker's legal team from the San Francisco attorneys representing her husband (Click here to read the eight-page letter) .

Notice of the breakup first surfaced nearly two years ago. There didn't seem much reason to believe the parting was especially bitter. Though Decker led a series of power grabs at Yahoo, elevating herself from CFO to president and would-be CEO, her divorce generated little such noise. Divorcing couples tend to fight over money, but in April 2008 it emerged that Decker's husband Michael Dovey was not seeking alimony; he told people he was independently wealthy.

But an increasingly contentious court battle has nevertheless erupted, judging from the September 29 letter. The attorney for Dovey references hearings and letters attempting to resolve how to handle discovery, the early legal phase in which evidence is collected.

Dovey's legal team is using discovery, in part, to collect evidence concerning Decker's purported and unspecified "accusations about" her husband — including personal emails Decker may have sent referencing his conduct, "state of mind and/or mental or physical well being," according to the letter.

Some of this material may reside on old Yahoo computers, and Decker's legal team is trying to win the ability to selectively block the disclosure to Dovey's legal team of evidence as it emerges, according to the letter. Dovey's team wants much more: all potential evidence not protected by attorney-client privilege or "attorney work product protection," with particularly sensitive material handed over and protected by a confidentiality agreement.

Near the conclusion of the letter, Dovey's attorneys hint at what else they might be looking for in discovery — and what else Decker's attorneys might be trying to keep a lid on:

These sorts of allegations are relatively common in nasty divorces and custody battles and Decker, for many years a fixture of Yahoo's quarterly conference calls with stock analysts, knows how to mount a strong defense in the bright glare of the public spotlight. Still, a woman who quit Yahoo in January and just bought a waterfront home in the San Francisco Bay Area's quiet Marin County can't be happy to be caught in such a maelstrom of mudslinging. Nor, one would venture, can her former colleagues.

We've posted the full eight-page letter here.

Update: Richard Rados, who wrote the letter, declined to comment on the divorce because of "pending litigation" and added, "I don't want to contribute to ill will between" the parties involved. We left a message for Jennifer Wald, Decker's attorney, and will include any comment when/if she gets back to us.

(Top pic: Decker at an "All Hands" company meeting last year. From Yahoo Blog's Flickr account.)

Should ousted founder Jerry Yang have sold the company to Microsoft? Yes! Duh! Was Yahoo in severe need of focus and technical competence before Bartz came along? Yes! Has the company been in a self-defeating funk for the past year? Oh God yes! At least Bartz didn't accuse her staff of being on a "sugar low" for the third time (see examples one and two).

When your past and present talent is migrating to Microsoft, it's probably a good idea to try and keep your remaining engineers from becoming completely depressed. Bartz might want to keep that in mind as she dispenses her trademark tough love.

Excerpts above; full video at Business Insider.

Now Flickr's copy of the image is deleted forever. Photographer and outspoken Flickr-watcher Thomas Hawk has seen the name and reports the surname has no Google hits and looks "like someone just typed random characters on a keyboard." Hawk also wonders, "If... 'Bob Xjibtstruytubopluy' claimed copyright over images in President Obama's stream, would [Flickr] simply remove these images as well?" Given the interest in this story among the president's critics, it probably won't be long now before we find out.

(Photo illustration via Thomas Hawk)

After Flickr users asked on the site about the caricature, with some saying it was covered as transformative political speech, Flickr locked down the thread. That's hardly the first time; locking discussion threads about mysteriously deleted accounts is a routine occurrence at Flickr. It's a perplexing customer-relations move for a site that asks people to trust it with some of their most precious memories — and that faces intense competition from Facebook.

At least some discussions are allowed to run for a while before hey got locked, like this one, about a guy whose perfectly innocent account was mistakenly deleted.Flickr did eventually apologize to the guy and, unlike in most cases, was able to give him his digital photos back. Why? Because was deleting so many other people's pictures that it was backlogged and never got around to his. Progress!

(Pic: Taken at Twitter HQ by Daniel Catt.)

Something like this has happened before. The last time we checked in with the Yahoo-owned site, it had irreversibly deleted 1,200 of a paying user's photos for posting excessive comments on the White House Flickr stream. To console the user, Flickr offered a $25 gift card, but that was it; Yahoo customer service VP Heather Champ told the user it was impossible to retrieve old photos, implying the site had no backups.

Now comes Morgan Tepsic, a photographer and soon-to-be art student in Taipei, Taiwan who said he spent "thousands of dollars" developing the photos in his paid Flickr account. A hacker — sounds like an old flame, perhaps — somehow joined a hotmail account to his Flickr account, then nuked his photos. Tepsic aruges, persuasively, that Flickr should have done more to protect his account, at the very least emailing him to confirm the Hotmail account or at least the account termination. Instead, he says he woke up to these three emails:

1. [redacted]@hotmail.com has been added to your account!

2. Your password has been changed!

3. Your account has been terminated!

Flickr support was a nightmare; at one point Tepsic was told Flickr had no phones, an assertion quickly disproved using Flickr itself (in a photo captioned "Too many phones... at Flickr HQ"). Last weekend we sent Yahoo questions about Tepsic's case and more generally about its backup procedures. Monday a Yahoo spokesperson said the company was looking into our query; we still haven't heard back.

If the struggling internet company wants to retain its paying Flickr customers, and compete with photo-saturated Facebook, it should be more careful with customer data. And Flickr users, of course, should emphatically back up their stuff. Keeping data in "the cloud" isn't all its cracked up to be.

(Pic: Taken at Flickr HQ, by Daniel Catt)

The most likely scenario is presaged by the logo above, used by the two companies on a website about their deal: Yahoo as a division of Microsoft. For 10 years, Microsoft will power Yahoo searches, while Yahoo will sell the ads. Assuming Yahoo can grow and remain viable — a big if — Microsoft will have every incentive to buy the company at the end of the deal, and Yahoo will be heavily motivated to sell. Microsoft will want to retain Yahoo's traffic and sales force; Yahoo will be loathe to swap out the search technology behind all its sites.

Alternatively, Yahoo continues to flail. Under that scenario, Microsoft's Bing search engine will at least be able to exploit Yahoo just as Google once did; Yahoo gave Google crucial revenue and visibility early in its growth, and will give a similar boost to Bing. At the end of 10 years, if Yahoo is still around, Microsoft will simply walk away, leaving Yahoo to crawl into a corner and die.

In any case, it's fun to see Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, no doubt mindful of the need to clear antitrust regulators, finally acknowledge Google's power over her company. In a new video, she says this deal gives Microsoft and Yahoo "the scale necessary to compete against Google, which dominates the market with 70% of all search." Barely two months ago, she bit off a CNBC reporter's head for saying basically the same thing. Compare/conrast in the video at left. There's no denying Google's power now; indeed, it's the main rationale for the deal.