Losing face on MySpace

Seven convicted sex offenders with profiles on MySpace.com have been arrested in what Texas officials said was the country's first large-scale crackdown of registered offenders who use the social networking Web site, reports Business Week.

The men were arrested during a two-week operation by the Texas attorney general's cyber crimes and fugitive units.

They were picked up after MySpace.com released the names of offenders with online profiles to the state attorney general's office, which had issued a subpoena for the site's subscriber information. "Texans will not tolerate criminals who prey on our children," attorney general Greg Abbott said in a statement.

Alarming price declines in some types of semiconductors have sucked the revenue growth out of the industry for 2007, reports News.com.

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) initially thought revenue would grow about 10% this year. Instead, the SIA now believes revenue will hit $252 billion, a 1.8% increase over 2006.

The average selling price of DRAM, the type of memory used in PCs, dropped 33% from December to April. Flash memory prices have declined by 35%, year-over-year, yet shipments have gone up 54%.

In a nod to the increasingly popular Web 2.0 world, CNN and YouTube said yesterday that upcoming Democratic and Republican presidential debates will offer "transparency" to voters by allowing anyone to submit a question on video that could be posed to a candidate, reports Computer World.

The popular social networking site will also allow users to submit videos responding to and rating candidates' answers.

The Democratic debate takes place on 23 July in Charleston. The Republican debate will be on 17 September in a location yet to be announced.

Tonight, in Boston, home to eBay's annual seller conference, revolutionary-minded Google employees had planned to throw an alcohol-fuelled anti-eBay bash at a location sure to raise eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic, reports the Register.

eBay refuses to adopt Google Checkout - a PayPal-like online payment service - and, in protest, Google arranged a "Google Checkout Freedom Party" at Boston's Old South Meeting House, the site of a much earlier protest gathering.

"We'll use the same spot where revolutionaries launched the Boston Tea Party to celebrate freedom with free food, free drinks, free live music - even free massages," the Google Checkout Team wrote on the Official Google Checkout Blog.