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Foes of a controversial copyright measure have gained some high-profile allies: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, and other Web companies have joined the ranks of the bill's opponents. They sent a letter (PDF) last night to key members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, saying the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, "pose[s] a serious risk to our industry's continued track record of innovation and job creation, as well as to our nation's cybersecurity." The protest was designed to raise objections in advance of a hearing before the full House Judiciary committee tomorrow at 10 a.m. ET (7 a.m. PT). The letter, also signed by eBay, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, and LinkedIn, asks politicians to "consider more targeted ways to combat foreign 'rogue' Web sites." SOPA, which was introduced last month in the House to the applause of lobbyists for Hollywood and other large content holders, is designed to make allegedly copyright-infringing Web sit...

  Microsoft has officially launched Office 365--the new cloud-based subscription productivity suite. Inevitably, there are a myriad of head-to-head comparisons and face-offs with the rival Google Apps platform, but those are only valuable for an individual or company that is seriously considering a choice between the two. For an organization that has no intention of dropping Microsoft Office, the question becomes one of which path provides the better value. Let me start with a caveat. The math behind determining the value of Office 365 vs. simply implementing and managing your own servers and Microsoft Office infrastructure internally are subjective. A lot varies by the number of users involved, or the how spread out offices or workers are geographically. And, you have to say Bill Gates backwards three times, and sacrifice a chicken to understand the voodoo math that goes into Microsoft licensing--so my math may be sWhat would it take for you to build your own 'Office 3...

In a decision reserved only for complex cases, the Calvert County Board of License Commissioners, or Liquor Board, deferred a ruling Thursday night on whether to allow the wine and beer license holders of Woodburns Beverages to transfer the license from the closed Woodburns of Solomons to the Lusby Food Lion supermarket chain store. “It’s been our policy to make a decision immediately following a hearing,” Chairman J. Allen Swann said after hearing almost three hours worth of support and opposition for the transfer. “I think there’s a very good chance of appeal no matter which way it goes. We want to make the best, the properest decision.” At the start of the hearing, Swann addressed the full house, admitting a decision would not be easy because Maryland’s liquor laws are not always clear-cut. “A lot of things are left up to the discretion of the board. If it was black and white on paper we wouldn’t be here,” he said, adding that Thursday’s hearing was one of the larges...

  The Data Liberation Front (DLF), a left-wing guerrilla group of Googlers, has finally launched its first service: Google Takeout. Just sign in, select which Google services you want to back up, and then click Creative Archive. Each of the services will be tidily backed up to a zip file in open formats that can be imported into other, non-Google web services. To start with, Takeout only supports the easy exporting of Buzz, Picasa, your Google Profile, Contacts, and Circles — Google’s recently-launched Facebook competitor — but the eventual plan is to provide easy exporting for every Google service. If you haven’t heard of them before, the DLF is a group and a website that helps you extract your data from Google’s web services into open, easily-transferable file formats. You can then take your email or docs or RSS feeds and import them into an installed program, or Microsoft or Yahoo’s equivalent web service. Curiously enough, though, the DLF is an engineering team ...

  Google +1, the social recommendation feature that lets users indicate their favorite pages, is picking up steam. Google is continuing to push the feature – in both its webmaster button form and the social search results connected to +1s – by releasing the feature in numerous additional countries. +1's Increasing Momentum The thought that Google +1 was part of a larger social construct has gained both more weight and some contradictory evidence with the release of Google+ – the actual Google social site that we've been bleeding for over the last year (editor's note: check back for more coverage on Google+ later today on Search Engine Watch). While +1s are likely to get an integration with the Google social network, much in the same way that Facebook Likes are integrated with the Facebook news stream, the +1 feature is also meant to stand alone. The +1 experiment started in March, webmasters got the button to add to their site earlier this month, Google has ...

Remember way back in February of 2010, when Google introduced a social media service called Google Buzz, and all the bloggers marveled that Google was so boldly taking on Facebook? Well, that didn't work out so well. Now Google is really taking on Facebook, and not just in a half-hearted kind of way. Witness the unveiling of Google+, a full-featured social network that aims to "bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software." "Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online," Google executive Vic Gundotra wrote in a statement announcing Google+. "Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools. In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it. We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software." RELATED: With Office 365, Microsoft says, hey, Google, get off of my 'cloud'  Check the vid...

  With Google+, it looks like the search giant may have finally built a social product that people will use. Shortly after Google announced the new social networking service, executives Bradley Horowitz and Vic Gundotra (who are leading the company's social efforts) spoke with Adweek about the lessons they've learned from past failures, both inside and outside Google. The company's most infamous social fumble was its product Google Buzz, which many users saw as a violation of their privacy—as did the Federal Trade Commission. Horowitz said that's symptomatic of of larger problem that he called "overfriending": When you're friends with too many people on a service like Facebook, then you don't want to share anything private. Google+, on the other hand, introduces the idea of Circles. Users divide their connections into categories like "friends" and ...

  An Aurora-area man was sentenced to 60 years in prison for murdering his elderly neighbor during a 2007 break-in at the house the neighbor built himself after his military service in World War II. Hector Mauricio, 25, had pleaded guilty last fall to the first-degree murder of Roscoe Ebey. Authorities say he stabbed Ebey more than 30 times and then ransacked his house before placing a gas canister on the victim’s body in an attempt to start a fire. “It’s over, but it’s not over,” Richard Ebey, the victim’s son, said following the sentencing hearing, which had been suspended late last year while the General Assembly debated outlawing the death penalty in Illinois. Prior to the state ban on capital punishment, Mauricio had been ruled eligible for death. With a death sentence off the table, prosecutors Wednesday asked for a natural life sentence, or alternately, for a 63-year prison sentence. Including time already served, that would have seen Mauricio potentially...

Guitar chords, eh? The Google homepage logo this morning doesn't look much like the word "Google," but no matter. The Google Doodle today is a stylized guitar in honor of Les Paul, the legendary musician who would have turned 96 today. And it's playable. Turn up the sound on your computer, move your mouse over the logo, and enjoy the results. You can even record what you play. Click on the black button near the bottom right corner of the logo, strum for up to 30 seconds, and click again. Google will reply with a short URL, or Web address. You can copy that and email it to your friends. Les Paul -- to say nothing of your friends -- might cover his ears at the cacophony that's been created today. But that's the fun of it. Out of respect for your neighbors, and perhaps your office mates, you may want to keep your computer's volume low. If you click on the logo, you'll learn that Paul (1915-2009), born in Waukesha, Wis., pioneered th...