Yahoo sales chief quits, following CEO
Anil Singh, Yahoo’s chief sales and marketing officer, has stepped down just a week after the resignation of its CEO, Tim Koogle. A Yahoo veteran, Singh was the company's 21^st employee. He ostensibly resigned so that he could be with his family and pursue personal interests. Singh’s departure was not a complete surprise; Yahoo said three months ago that Singh would give up some of his duties in order to concentrate upon senior-level strategic operations. Yahoo also issued an earnings warning last week, saying that it isn’t earning as much from advertising sales as it needs. Last month, two top executives resigned from Yahoo’s overseas operations.

Cops finger 15-year-old in NASA hack job
A teenager has been arrested for hacking into computer systems at three NASA branches and vandalizing their web sites. The 15-year-old Michigan boy is accused of breaking into computer networks in January at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. The young hacker inserted pictures associated with a hacker group, Electronic Souls, into the labs’ web sites. Attrition.org, a company that focuses on internet security issues, says that Electronic Souls has been responsible for 32 acts of web-site vandalism since last month. The boy did not access sensitive data, unlike a break-in NASA suffered on Christmas Eve, when a hacker filched the codes that control U.S. space vehicles and rockets. NASA has long been a favorite hacker target; other notable break-ins took place last fall and in June 1999.

Napster teams up with database company for filter help
Music file-swapping service Napster has enlisted a song-title database company to help it obey a court injunction ordering it to block unauthorized songs from its network. Gracenote, a music catalog specialist, has amassed a list of roughly 12 million song and album titles over the course of the past six years. The large database should help Napster halt illegal trades of some 135,000 song titles submitted by the five major record labels. When spelling variations are factored in, it turns out that the labels have actually sent Napster about 6 million titles. Not surprisingly, Napster is having a difficult time filtering so many iterations of song titles and artist names. The record labels sued Napster for copyright infringement in December 1999, leading courts to find the service liable for facilitating music piracy. The record labels consider the Gracenote partnership to be a stall tactic and say they will hold Napster to its deadline for halting the trading of copyrighted songs, which falls today.

Digital divide narrows as less affluent go online
Internet surfers who earn less than $25,000 a year are the fastest-growing group on the internet, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. The demographic has grown 46 percent since February of last year. Last month, there were 6.3 million people online who earned less than $25,000 a year, compared to 4.3 million the year before. The growth is due at least in part to the diminishing costs of personal computers and internet access. The ranks of upper-middle-class web surfers, who earn between $50,000 and $74,999 a year, increased by 42 percent in the past year. Thirty million internet users belonged to the upper-middle-class demographic as of last month. The number of middle-class users, who earn between $25,000 and $49,000 a year, increased by 40 percent, meaning that there were 26 million such users online as of last month. The wealthiest segment of the online population grew the least over the last year. The ranks of internet users who earned between $150,000 and $999,999 a year rose 28 percent. Overall, the population of internet users grew by 29 percent.

Zappa estate sues online music vendor EMusic
Just because some music sites charge for content doesn’t mean they can’t also get into copyright trouble like Napster did. The estate of late musician Frank Zappa has sued online music vendor EMusic. The Zappa Family Trust alleges that EMusic distributed 37 of Zappa’s works without complete authorization. EMusic’s side of the story is that in 1999, it sold selected Zappa songs licensed through the musician’s record label, Rykodisc. EMusic stopped selling the songs about a year ago. EMusic also says that it had been bargaining with the Zappa estate regarding back royalties, up to the point when the suit was filed. The Zappa family contends that EMusic knew that it was necessary to negotiate with the Zappa trust in addition to Rykodisc – and did not do so. The suit against EMusic is especially noteworthy given that EMusic itself recently filed suit against music file-swapping service Napster for not keeping EMusic files off its network.

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