• Sources say venture capital firm Bridgescale is throwing a party for over 100 people at the Quadrus conference center on Sand Hill Road.

• The copyright issue: The top question after Google buys YouTube is, "Will media companies sue over pirated content?" If they do, Google is ready, thanks to its experience defending Google Book Search against publishers, keeping Google Video out of its own copyright suits, and years of fighting for the right to host image thumbnails and cached web pages.

• McAfee's president and chairman-CEO resign after the company finds a $100 to $150 million discrepancy in the accounting of its stock options grants. McAfee notes that CEO George Samenuk is retiring, while the board fired president Kevin Weiss. [NY Times]

The New York Times takes a stab at turning the Windows testing program into a Dan Brown thriller with the story lede, "On a whiteboard in a windowless Microsoft conference room here, an elegant curve drawn by a software-testing engineer captures both five years of frustration and more recent progress."

• Big kahuna venture capitalists John Doerr and Vinod Khosla, Google co-founder Larry Page, Google CEO wife ("first lady"?) Wendy Schmidt, and eBay founder Jeff Skoll all donated money to promote Proposition 87 (which would add a tax to oil in California), embroiling them in an election-funding battle against oil companies and adding to a total $98 million combined war chest. [Mercury News]

I first discovered inclue when its CEO wrote me asking if Google Video was for sale. Nick Gogerty had found an RSS feed including the phrase "Google Video - Video Search [is:forsale]" — which means, of course, that the feed returns videos that viewers can buy through Google Video, not that Google's dumping the whole operation.

"Where do you want to go today?" "Think Different." "No wonder it's number one." The tech world's vague slogans may seem interchangeable, but if they're applied to the wrong product — even within the same company — they could prove disastrous.

• Why is Yahoo's stock stuck in the mud while Google's soars? Because Yahoo is slow, the CEO is "non-confrontational," and they don't "throw things against the wall and see what sticks." In other words, it's a good old media company. Hey, at least it takes those things decades to die, not the months of a real dot-com. [Economist]

Wallop, the invite-only social network spun off from Microsoft, launched today to much Internet hoopla, actually looks like a fresh take on social networking. This time, instead of seeing ads, users pay the site a buck or two to add modules to their user pages. It's a convenient way to re-establish the classic grade-school hierarchy, where it pays to be pretty and vice versa.

The Gear Live gadget blog videotaped a preview of the Zune, Microsoft's would-be iPod killer. Blogger Andru Edwards also chatted with the Microsoft employee carrying the Zune, who says on video that Microsoft is "definitely" trying to make Zune a PlaysForSure product. That contradicts Microsoft's message on the Zune, which says that the player will not be part of the "PlaysForSure ecosystem" guaranteed to handle music and videos with Microsoft's branded Digital Rights Management. (Maybe that's good, since PFS devices can't play songs bought on iTunes.)

• A WaPo columnist wishes Windows XP a happy fifth birthday, noting, "On a machine with a September 2001-vintage copy of Windows XP Home Edition, installing every bug-fix released as of August ballooned its Windows directory from 987 megabytes to 2.43 gigabytes." [Washington Post]

• Microsoft and other Seattle tech companies import their brainpower, says the Seattle Times in an article that imagines the city going bust. Thankfully for Seattle, if Microsoft wanted to move out of the city to the source of its employees, it'd have to search for that source, and we all know how Microsoft does at search. [Seattle Times]

by Beth Gottfried

In the late 90s, Internet companies announced deal after deal, whether or not they made a difference, to bump up the stock price (presumably so the engineers could afford to bump more cocaine). Now, Google is acting the same way for no good reason.

We must admit a certain glee at the exposure of Jerry Cummings, who (Warning: schlong photo) answered a fake dirty Craigslist ad with a photo of his member, sent from his work address at Microsoft. Cummings (heehee) told his pretend new lady friend that he's married but looking to "fill the needs not being done at home."

The Microsoft e-mail below isn't juicy in itself — that's why we put it below the fold. But the big red "Confidential" meant we just had to share this memo warning licensees that Windows Media DRM had been cracked. Again. They have teams working on it "around the clock" — staying up all night to save YOU from the nasty pirates!

A gang of Microsofties is trekking the Redmond campus, recording a visit to each cafeteria in a blog that's part Anthony Bourdain, part MSN Spaces.

The boys at Good Morning Silicon Valley gave Brian Valentine a warm send-off from Microsoft, finding a video of the ex-chief of Windows Vista development imitating Bluto Blutarsky from Animal House. We stole borrowed a shot to show you, but you oughta see the whole scene.

Silicon Valley writers may think they know it all, but this insider from Seattle has the real story on why Microsoft's Windows Vista chief just left early for Amazon.

• YouTube wooed Yahoo's Gideo Yu as CFO in move toward IPO. It's either a news item or a posthumous Seuss book. [Search Engine Journal]