The tussle between Craigslist and eBay is getting real ugly: According to Reuters, Craigslist, which is currently being sued by minority investor eBay, filed its own suit against the online auctioneer on Tuesday, alleging that the company used its minority stake to steal the online classifieds leader's trade secrets. The suit also accuses eBay of copyright infringement and unfair competition through its Kijiji classifieds site, saying that Kijiji ran ads on Google that appeared to be Craigslist ads. The suit demands that eBay, which owns 28.4% of Craigslist, restore to the company or divest all of its holdings. EBay's suit …

CNBC on Tuesday reported that billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who unsuccessfully tried to overthrow the Time Warner board in 2005, has accumulated as many as 50 million Yahoo shares (about 3.5% of the company's total). Icahn has a history of buying significant stakes in companies he feels are undervalued with the intention of replacing their board. He's not always successful, however. Icahn's most recent proxy failure came in a battle for control of phone maker Motorola. According to The Wall Street Journal, the billionaire investor will decide whether to pursue a proxy contest against Jerry Yang and …

Ad Age looks far into the social future, beyond the recent data portability efforts of MySpace, Facebook and Google, declaring that the days of the walled garden social network are numbered. Over the past week, social networking's big three (although Google's position at that table is debatable) announced similar moves to open up their profile data to third-party Web sites and applications. According to the companies, the moves are unrelated, but the announcements are indicative of a greater trend: That social media tools and services will ultimately be separated from a single service; rather, they'll become the utilities under user …

Even the normally-resigned Eric Schmidt couldn't suppress the urge to gloat (a little) following the breakdown of the Microsoft-Yahoo merger, a move that would have represented Microsoft's "most direct attack yet" on Google's dominance of the online advertising market. "I'm happy to be crowned winner," a smiling Schmidt told Richard Waters. "But as we've learned in the election cycle, it goes back and forth." Indeed, many analysts and industry watchers declared Google the undisputed winner of the Microhoo row. "The failure of the Microsoft/Yahoo merger eliminates the biggest short-term threat" to Google's dominance, said Harvard Business School professor David …

"Open" may be the latest Silicon Valley buzzword, but it's definition actually belies how it's being used in practice, said GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham. MySpace, Facebook and now, Google, have all made attempts to "open" their social networks to third party programmers by making user data portable, but Higginbotham said that calling standards like OpenID, Oauth and OpenSocial "open" is a misnomer, because they're actually very restrictive. For example, the Google Friend Connect program through OpenSocial requires software makers to put a certain code in their programs to access applications built in OpenSocial, which expects to have 12-24 sites while …

Microsoft has now released, in beta form, its long-awaited WorldWide Telescope, a free tool that pieces together some of the world's best ground telescope and satellite images, using data and imagery from NASA's Hubble and Spitzer telescopes and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, among others. The tool allows users to pan and zoom around the planets and view anything from distant galaxies to exploding stars. It also features guided tours from some of the world's top astronomers. Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, puts it more eloquently: "Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom …

The Web is once again at the center of a dispute between the major Hollywood studios and their entertainment industry constituents. This time, it's the actors who want to make sure they're compensated appropriately when their images appear in video clips on the Internet. The main questions are whether actors should have to give consent for online clips of their work, and how much they should be paid for it. Studios, of course, would rather not have to pay actors on an individual basis; they want to see a flat fee to expedite the process and make it cheaper for …