Tuesday's Turkeys

Enough time off. It's time for news... The horseshoe manufacturing machine was patented on this day in 1835. The first jukebox was installed in 1899 at the Palais Royal Hotel in San Francisco. Life Magazine published its first issue in 1936. The zoom lens was patented in 1948. Dr. Who was first broadcast in 1963. Happy birthday William Bonney, aka Billy the Kid. Harpo Marx and Boris Karloff were also born on this day.

1. Talk about bad taste - a game released yesterday on the anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination, JFK Reloaded, recreates the killing with the player as Lee Harvey Oswald. To make matters worse, the game costs $10 to play, there's $100,000 in prize money for the player who re-creates the exact timing and angle of the shots that killed the nation's 35th president. Ick.
2. That 10 year old grilled cheese sandwich reputed to feature the image of the Virgin Mary (looks more like Madonna than The Madonna to me), sold for $28,000 on Ebay. The winning bidder? Online casino Golden Palace.com.
3. Google is being sued by an adult website saying the internet search engine's image search is delivering thumbnails of its girlie pictures.
4. Google has filed a lawsuit of its own against a company it claims is fraudulently clicking on its own banner ads to make money. It's the first lawsuit over click fraud. Google says that Auctions Expert International signed up to display Google ads and then fraudulently clicked on the ads to make money.
5. Microsoft poo-pooed Finjan's report last week that a malicious web site could bypass the browser warning and download bad stuff to your PC. The hole in Internet Explorer even affects Windows XP systems with Service Pack 2 installed. Now that a French web site has posted demo code, Microsoft says it's working on a patch.
6. It's good news, bad news for Tivo. The company ended its third quarter with 2.3 million users. That's more than twice what it had a year ago but it still lost money in the quarter. Seems 61% of Tivos are sold through DirecTV, and Tivo only gets $1.30 a month from those customers. Steep marketing expenses helped boost Tivo's losses to $26 million last quarter, more than three times the losses of a year ago. Revenue was down 11.4%.
7. Apple shares have hit a four year high riding on ipod sales. An analyst at Piper Jaffray says the halo effect is real - his research shows that ipods end up selling people on Macs. He's increased his price target to $100. The stock is currently over $61.
8. Two new virus threats: the Skull trojan affects phones based on the Symbian operating system (like the Nokia 7610) and for the first time a web banner advertising site has been serving up the MyDoom virus. The site was hacked to serve the virus instead of its ads. No telling how many people were affected.

Listen in this morning at 6:45a Pacific for my weekly news commentary on KGO 810 AM in San Francisco.