They’re watching you! Two years after Yahoo! pledged to protect its users privacy, the company is now backpedaling. Rather than dumping search records after just 90 days, Yahoo! will keep tabs on your browser’s tabs for six times as long, according to the Daily News. more ›

When you attend a concert that happens on a Monday afternoon and also is sponsored by Yahoo, your expectations from the get-go are low, but from the moment Weezer ripped into "Hash Pipe," all the Monday blues were wiped away. You don’t need to hit a hash pipe to numb yourself on a Monday, all you need is Rivers Cuomo and the rest of his band mates, dressed in their white jumpsuits, blasting the Roxy like it was midnight, instead of 2 pm. more ›

The U.S. economy is in the tank. We all know that. But what we didn’t know is that somewhere along the line it became the norm for companies to become Scrooge-like by issuing pink slips, layoff notices, or holding reorganizations, reshuffling, restructurings, downsizings, rightsizings, RIFs (reduction in force, dontcha know) – the week or two before the Christmas/Hanukkah/New Year’s holidays. more ›

Yahoo! confirmed today that they will be laying off 1,500 employees globally including "an undisclosed amount at its Burbank campus on Empire Avenue," the Burbank Leader reports this morning. more ›

Monday Weezer taped their Nissan Live Set for Yahoo and LAist was there. The Weezer Hootenanny performance included "Pork and Beans", "Say It Ain't So", "El Scorcho", "Island In The Sun", "Automatic", Radiohead's "Creep", and "Beverly Hills". More than 200 fans played along on guitars, horns, accordions, and percussion. Everyone clapped, stomped, sang, and had an amazing time being 'in' Weezer. more ›

Our photo storage/sharing network of choice, Flickr, is finally offering a video component. In other words, Flickr will store, stream, and enable the embedding of any kind of content that can be produced by a basic digital camera (now that most shoot moving as well as still pictures). A Flickr Pro account is required to upload video, which at $25/year was already necessary to upload more than 100mb of photos each month. Also, at least for the time being, videos are restricted to 90 seconds (and no larger than 150mb). more ›

A few weeks ago, LAist was invited to see Herbie Hancock perform live, at the Nissan Live studio in Century City. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Nissan Live Sets on Yahoo! Music is a series of performances attended by fans (plus a friend) for an intimate show of around 400 that features A-list artists, and released only on Yahoo! Music. Previous shows mentioned by LAist include Iggy and the Stooges, Lenny Kravitz, PJ Harvey, and Wyclef Jean. Other artists featured include Beck, Christina Aguilera, Maroon 5, the Mars Volta, and Trisha Yearwood. more ›

We ran into former Microsoftee and current FastCompany.tv man and ubiquitous Web 2.0 presence Robert Scoble at Hollywood & Highland today, in front of Level 3 Nightclub, where Community Next: The Next Generation of Media and the Web is underway. more ›

Herbie Hancock is, hands down, one of the best Jazz musicians of time. After all, he won two Grammy Awards this year including Album of the Year for 'River: The Joni Letters'. And because Los Angeles is so cool like that with all the filming and stuff that goes on here, a week from this Thursday, you can be see him live, for free, in an intimate setting (as intimate as 400 people gets). more ›

• Happy 5th Birthday Gothamist!!
• A "possible" security breach at the Department of Water and Power Monday may result in more than 8,300 employees wondering, why are there two me's? The lifted information included stats on active DWP employee's names, Social Security numbers and dates of birth and could result in a massive case of stolen identity.
• The gig is up for all you stingy, free-loading kids who like to use their school's gym for league sports. "Soccer leagues, volleyball clubs and basketball groups that have had gratis access to LAUSD facilities from the Harbor Area to Carson will need to pony up beginning March 1 to defray usage costs and raise revenue," the Daily Breeze said. And it's about time. I'm sick of hearing the joyful laughter of kids who should be out getting a real job or doing drugs. Thankfully, they now might have to turn some tricks to pay for what was once free.
• Yahoo is planning to lay off nearly 500 employees in the next couple of months, including 111 in Burbank and 52 in Santa Monica. Yah-poo is more like it for the jobless.
• The LA Times offers a scathing editorial of the state assembly's efforts to cut down the $14.5 billion deficit. Wait, that's not an editorial at all. That's a news story with sentences like, "their move would not actually reduce spending" and "lawmakers' measures would put taxpayers on the hook for more debt." Most (not all) of the stuff is attributed, but I can find ten people right now to tell me I look great though I have a bag over my head.
• In an effort to clean our smoggy image, Los Angeles officials are proposing tighter green building standards that would require large, privately built commercial and residential projects to use environmentally sound practices. This is a great step, but you know what would actually reduce smog? Less driving! And more public transportation!
• Do you love Los Angeles? Do you want everyone to know how much you love this city? Monopoly is giving you the opportunity as it prepares to unveil its first global board where you can vote for the city (ahem, Los Angeles) of your choice to appear on the coveted square. Right now, Montreal is first, followed by Istanbul and L.A. is sitting not so pretty in the 43rd spot. Vote here.
• One smart bastard from Long Beach turned his collection of 301 rare pennies into a $10.7 million pay day. Dallas-based auction house Heritage Auction Galleries, which held the sale in Long Beach Friday night says that coin and a 1794 cent with tiny stars added to prevent counterfeiters each raised $632,500. People make fun of me for picking up pennies, but this seals it: I am never throwing away anything ever again.
• Hey Momma, you have two more days to enter the Kanye contest on LAist. Who loves you? We do.

• The Daily News has more details on those marijuana vending machines. Besides, you know, the fact that they are TOTALLY AWESOME!
• A rash of gang violence in Watts since the weekend has led to two shooting deaths and the injury of at least 13 others.
• Yahoo is not doing so well: a major drop in fourth quarter profits is going to mean layoffs somewhere in the neighborhood of of 7% of the workforce.
• Four people, including one juvenile, were arrested in Glendale for an attempted carjacking in which the suspects are accused of threatening the driver with a shotgun: "A suspect fired at the frightened driver as he took off in his truck, and shotgun pellets hit the back of the truck."
• More on the USC "Riots" and the cops who spoiled the party, from L.A. blogger WitnessLA: "Now, no one would argue against an officer having the right to use appropriate force on a large, drunk, bottle-throwing college guy. But, in multiple instances eyewitnesses insist that they saw an indiscriminate use of Tasers and batons on non-aggressive students."
• This isn't really news...which doesn't stop it from being TOTALLY AWESOME: make your Guitar Hero controllers into actual instruments!
• An asteroid passed by earth today, a mere 334 thousand miles away from us! Close calls, guys!

It was a craaaaazy night on the town. You took dozens of photos with your pocket-sized digital camera. But you don't have Photoshop, and all you want to do is upload your pics directly to Flickr (something you could even do wirelessly if Hanukkah Harry hooks you up with with an Eye-Fi). Good news. Flick just went live with a new feature that allows you to crop, resize, touch-up, de-red-eye, brighten, and flip your... more ›

Last month LAist was lucky enough to be invited to the Nissan Live studio on the Fox lot to see PJ Harvey perform one of her very few live appearances in support of her new cd, White Chalk. From what we heard, Polly Jean played once in NYC, once in LA, once on the Tonight Show, and once for Yahoo's Live Sets. It was an intimate, eerie, and fragile hour in West LA. PJ... more ›

With the NFL preseason underway and no team in LA, why would anybody dance for joy? Flashy wideout Chad Johnson challenged Adam Carolla (who broadcasts out of Los Angeles) to enter his Touchdown Celebration Showdown on Yahoo! Here's what Adam came up with. You can probably do better, so submit your 30 second clip and show the world that even though we can't technically win any NFL games here in LA, we can win... more ›

Welcome to the latest edition of 'Ask the MACist', the column where I answer your Macintosh and other technology questions. Our question this week comes from Alexa in Beverly Hills. She asks: I know the Mac comes with iChat but is there anything else I can use for IM that lets me use other accounts besides .Mac? When you decide you want to explore the world of Instant Messaging on your Mac, you are... more ›

Some tech tidbits that caught my eye this week. • Yahoo and Microsoft are getting cozy. Is there a marriage in the works? • Wally Schirra, pioneer astronaut and 5th man ever to go into space, died of a heart attack this week. He was 84. • Digg has a bad couple days. Is the honeymoon over? • Speaking of obscure digits that unlock encrypted HDDVDs, the guys who are fighting to protect their... more ›

In like a fox and out with a yodel? Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo for $50 billion. Many have speculated that Microsoft would eventually spring for big Y, as a marriage with the online media giant increasingly appears to be the most viable option to compete with Google in the great war of search and online advertising. Always a fun rumor to kick around, but today it's being corroborated by the WSJ, and considering... more ›

Some interesting tech-related news from around the web this week. • Imitation may be a form of flattery (the sincerest kind, so they say) but AOL, I think you might have taken it a bit too far. • AT&T Chief Edward "Moneybags" Whitacre is retiring. His going away present? $158.5 Million. Not a bad present. I bet he won't try to return it. • Apple issues a fix for the battery issues that plague... more ›

• The legal dispute between media giant Viacom and Google owned YouTube just gets more unpleasant. • Is Viacom engaging in a bit of hypocrisy when it comes to enforcing copyright on its programming? Maybe so. Take a look. • Did Viacom overstep its bounds a little when issuing those takedown notices for videos over at YouTube? Some people think so and are suing. • In other more pleasant Google news, one of its... more ›

• Social giant MySpace is prepping a new news service that may require users to verify their ages before entering. • Worried about the upcoming change to Daylight Savings Time? Find out what it means to you in the handy FAQ. • Sony launches its "Home" and "Little Blue Planet" services for PS3 users. And the world reacts with a thunderous yawn.... more ›

One year ago today, we wrote this: Not to fear L.A., male erotic dancing is a booming industry. According to Overture (a Yahoo! Company), there were 18,195 searches for “los angeles male stripper,” or any variation thereof, in the month of January 2006. And that doesn’t include Google statistics. Apparently male dancing in Los Angeles takes priority over The Dodgers, jobs, hospitals, attorneys, real estate and regular strippers. If you need one, Bachelorette.com has... more ›

The good people of Yahoo! saw our schoolgirl glee at Google integrating traffic into their maps today and sent us a little email to let us know that Yahoo! has had traffic on their maps since December of 2004. We sit corrected. And even though Yahoo!'s traffic is pretty damn good, and indeed better than Google's; Google's maps are smoother, cleaner, and thus better than Yahoo!'s. But we must say we never considered Yahoo... more ›

Because we're big fat gigantic nerds, LAist plays fantasy sports. Today we are in the Finals of the Yahoo Fantasy Football League of 11 other Ist editors. Our opponents are the Shanghai Neck Licks. Because there have already been a few games played, lets just say that he had one guy play already, Larry Johnson (KC - RB), who ran for 136 yards and scored a TD, and we had one guy play, Vernand... more ›

LAist has been around the block. And we know people. We have friends in high places and we have some friends who are simply high. Somewhere in between we have discovered what we could safely assume is something close to "the truth". One of our friends showed us an unedited list of a very popular search engine and we were somewhat surprised to see "ass" pretty close to the most searched-for term. Ass? In... more ›

Attention to all our flickr detectives: you've been bought! Our new Santa Monica neighbors, Yahoo!, have acquired every hipster and tech nerds favorite online photo site, flickr. The announcement comes after weeks of speculation that it had already happened. Flickr made an announcement that reminds us of when Livejournal got bought by Six Apart (is this too much geekspeak?) earlier this year. "Nothing's going to change...we're all staying right here...all of you original users... more ›