Microsoft Corp. on Friday agreed to buy Greenfield Online for $486 million. Greenfield is the parent company of Ciao, an online price comparison and products reviews site, which was believed to be Microsoft's main target in the deal. Greenfield had only just terminated takeover negotiations with the Quadrangle Group earlier in the week before Microsoft was revealed as the new buyer. The software giant's offer is worth $17.50 per share, according to the Financial Times, representing a pretty small premium over the group's closing share price on Thursday. Microsoft has already agreed to sell Greenfield's online research business, although …

The initial idea behind Wikileaks was to publish secretive documents from "oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East," but the reality has been exposing Swiss banks, Mormons and Scientologists. However, now that the site has started selling secrets at auction, the bigger fish are swimming closer to the harbor. Apparently, a senior official inside Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's administration has some dirt for sale. But the documents aren't really for sale, per se. Whoever wins the right to the information will only have a set period of time to make use of …

So Comcast went and imposed a 250-gigabyte monthly cap on its users. As Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer points out, that's actually a heck of a lot -- certainly a way better deal than Time Warner Cable's 5-40 gigabyte monthly caps. In its announcement, Comcast noted that the median monthly data usage by residential customers is only about 2-3 GB, so practically nobody is going to be affected by the enormous cap. In fact, Broadband Reports says that just 14,000 of Comcast's 14.1 million broadband subscribers go over that limit in a month. Given SAI's report, we'd love to know …

The Web blogged and tweeted away as Barack Obama on Thursday accepted the nomination for President at the Democratic National Convention in Denver last night. "It was a deeply substantive speech, full of policy detail, full of people other than the candidate, centered overwhelmingly on domestic economic anxiety," wrote The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, a Republican and an Obama admirer. "What he didn't do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric. If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check." Meanwhile, on the microblogging service Twitter, traffic surged. This wasn't surprising, …

Analysts and legal eagles watched with a keen eye as Judge Howard Lloyd of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled on Wednesday that Veoh did its part to protect copyright holders, thus qualifying for "safe harbor" protections under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Adult entertainment company Io Group alleged that the online video provider had not done enough to stop users from uploading unauthorized clips of its adult sex films. "The DMCA was intended to facilitate the growth of electronic commerce, not squelch it," Judge Lloyd said. The DMCA protects publishers from being held …