Venerable search engine-homepage-media company Yahoo has announced that Oscar winning actor and nice dude Tom Hanks will be streaming an original, scripted sci-fi webseries called Electric City through the company’s video service. This would be Yahoo’s first foray into scripted content, after greatly expanding their video service.

Yesterday, a group of nine of the biggest online companies took out a full page ad in the New York Times to voice their concern over two pieces of legislation in congress that could greatly affect the way America uses the Internet. In the letter, Google, Facebook, Mozilla, Zynga, eBay, Twitter, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and AOL ask that their point of view be heard regarding the Protect IP and the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Some cryptic memos from the upper echelons of Yahoo! management have given new strength to rumors that the company’s board might be planning on selling all or part of the online media organization. The first memo, signed by board chairman Roy Bostock and cofounders David Filo and Jerry Yang is not at all explicit. It encourages the staff to keep working hard, and promises good times ahead, but also drops this tantalizing tidbit:

Our advisers are working with us to develop ideas that we will pursue proactively. At the same time, they are fielding inquiries from multiple parties that have already expressed interest in a number of potential options. We will take the time we need to select and structure the best approach for the company, its shareholders and employees.

Could this be the admission of a sale by any other name? We’ll have to wait and see. The full text of the memo follows below, along with a second message from interim CEO Tim Morse, so you can read and judge for yourself.

Last night, executives from AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo! announced a plan to team up and cooperate on ad sales in order to try and maintain some level of competition with Google. The plan involves all three companies selling ad inventory on each others’ sites in hopes of allowing them to collectively regain some of the ad spending that has been going to ad networks.

The three plan to share revenue on the ads and calculate that the profit gained through that approach will be greater than the slim pickings they would get by all individually going to ad networks. While the pact encourages a certain level of cooperation, it’s an open relationship; no pact member is prohibited from breaking down and working with the very ad networks they are teaming up against or even from going to Google itself. The hope is that the mutual benefit of the situation will prevent that kind of behavior organically. We’ll see if it actually works.

(via AllThingsD)

When logging into a website or establishing a new account, many users are prompted to decipher a visually distorted string of letters and numbers to keep spammers from gaining access. This list of characters is a CAPTCHA, a puzzle that is glaringly easy for most humans but that stops computers from automatically deciphering the text. CAPTCHAs also come in audio form for the visually impaired, but these audio puzzles are an easy target for would-be spammers.

An audio CAPTCHA is a list of letters or numbers read along with additional audio distortion. The user has to list the characters correctly to gain access like with a regular visual CAPTCHA. A team of researchers from Stanford University, led by Elie Bursztein, has developed an algorithm that can automatically defeat audio CAPTCHAs. The ability to automatically solve CAPTCHA puzzles would allow spammers to create new accounts and thus even more spam.

Yesterday’s news that the most notorious man of the 21st century had been killed struck a chord with millions of Americans. The younger folks seem to have been left out in the cold, though, as Yahoo! reported in a recent blog post.

According to their search statistics, searches for “Osama Bin Laden” went up 100,000% making him the most searched person on Monday. One quarter of those searches came from those under the age of 24. Younger users, ages 13-17, were responsible for 1 in 3 of the searches for “how did Osama Bin Laden die,” and 40% of searches for “who killed Osama Bin Laden.” Most surprising, however, was Yahoo!’s report that 66% of the people searching for the phrase “who is Osama Bin Laden?” were also in the 13-17. For reference, these pubescent users would have been born in 1994-1998, meaning that the oldest amongst them were in first grade during the 9/11 attacks.

While it’s possible that they were simply too young to remember the attacks, and have — as teenagers are wont to do — ignored many of the news issues of the day, search traffic alone doesn’t imply ignorance. They could have just as easily used the search term to learn more about the deceased leader of Al Qaeda. But, if you need to make a friend feel old and despair about the future, just share the above factoids with them.

(Yahoo! Search Blog via Boing Boing)

This afternoon, Yahoo! announced the introduction of Search Direct, a search feature which will cause both fast, algorithmically test-driven completions of partly typed search terms and links to relevant articles to appear in the main search box across Yahoo!. In its press conference today, Yahoo! took a few direct shots at its competitor Google, whose Google Instant is arguably a lot better-known, claiming that its service is not only faster, but delivers “answers” instead of links.”

TBI:

This new feature, currently in beta, taps into Yahoo!’s unique opportunity to combine content and structured data and to provide a rich search experience. Search Direct predicts search results as fast as a person types, character by character, and presents those results dynamically, generating a fast, simple search experience that goes beyond a list of blue links. Search Direct rolls out in a public beta to Yahoo! users across the U.S. today, and will be available in other Yahoo! products and markets later this year.

“With today’s launch, direct answers – not the search results page – is the primary focus. We are redefining the search process and prominently displaying direct answers where search decisions are being made,” said Shashi Seth, senior vice president, Yahoo! Search and Marketplaces. “Search Direct is evidence of Yahoo! continuing to lead innovation in search, enabling people to take action faster, find what is most important, and sample what is possible with the next stage of search technology.”

Giz argues that the new search function is a lot worse than Google’s, in that it forces users to navigate content within a little box and also foists trending queries upon everyone, which by definition are less personalized.

If you would deign to use Yahoo! in the first place, does this seem useful?

(via TBI)

When they’re not shutting down Delicious, Yahoo is apparently being awesome and installing large movie-poster-sized touchscreens at twenty bus stops in San Francisco, on which people waiting for the bus can choose from and play a variety of video games, which include online multiplayer with people playing in other bus stops. The “Bus Stop Derby,” as Yahoo calls it, will pit pre-bus passengers from twenty different neighborhoods against each other, through trivia, puzzle and other genres of games, and the neighborhood that has the most points when the competition is over will receive a free block party featuring OK Go.

Our post yesterday on a leaked Yahoo presentation slide about services being shut down or merged generated a lot of concern among Delicious users, who saw their beloved social bookmarking site in the dreaded “Sunset” category. A lot of other sites went ahead and declared (on insufficient evidence) that this meant that Yahoo was for sure going to kill Delicious, and even went so far as to provide lists of similar services for users who wanted to jump ship.

Not so fast, says Delicious in a blog post: While they acknowledge that “there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!,” they write that “there’s no reason to panic. We are maintaining Delicious and encourage you to keep using it.”

In the wake of Yahoo’s layoffs of 600 employees, it makes sense that the company would tighten its belt; if the above leaked slide is for real, that tightening will kill off a few of Yahoo’s established services. Eric Marcoullier, the co-founder of MyBlogLog — one of the sites purportedly affected by the shutdown — tweeted a picture of what appears to be a presentation slide from a Yahoo products all hands presentation, dividing various Yahoo web products into “Sunset,” “Merge,” and “Make Feature.”

Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Blake Irving seems to have all but confirmed the authenticity of Marcoullier’s slide with a threat to fire whoever leaked it: (h/t Liz Gannes) “@bpm140 @joshu Really dude? Can’t wait to find out how you got the web cast. Whoever it is, gone!”

Among the items on the sunset list: Delicious, Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog, and Altavista.