• "Among the many measures of a successful foreign investment, helping to set off a coup d' tat is definitely not one of them," says the New York Times, writing about Singapore company Temasek's purchase of Thailand's major telecom company from the family of the then-prime minister, months before a military coup overthrew him. [NY Times]

• IBM will start putting its patent applications online, hoping to rise above the morass of the U.S. patent system. [NY Times]

• Congress seeks to stop companies like AOL from logging customer data. (The last government interaction with this data was when the FBI ordered a big pile of it from AOL.) [CNET]

Well, this explains why Microsoft seems ignorant of the Net:

There's an ulterior motive to opening an official backchannel at a tech conference. It pulls all the dissenters into a virtual room, where they disseminate their snide remarks safely away from the real discussion.

Time for another roundup of the top dogs in tech, with names in bold for easy skimmin':

Got a single-featured startup? Done pretending you have the revenue to go public? Dot-commers, forget about selling your flipmeat to the usual Web 2.0 carnivores. The classic consolidaters of the industry are back in business.

ConFonz, a favorite Valleywag roving correspondent, reports again from E3 — this time, I suspect, from the hotel bar. It's okay, it was Thursday night and everyone was drunk. But just for fun, Valleywag won't proofread this edition of ConFonz.

It's a twofer today — ConFonz finds the hackers at EclipseCON 2006. Here's the wrap-up, either from ConFonz or from whatever script kiddy took over his laptop.