Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer spent some quality time with his negotiations team over the past few hours and considered the actions of Yahoo concerning the $44.6 billion bid issued publicly back in February, and has come to a conclusion: enough is enough. Redmond has now made it clear in a letter published today that the Yahoo board has three weeks to come to some sort of agreement.

What Ballmer wants to do between now and then is sit down, have a nice, super-serious chat about Microsoft and Yahoo’s desires going forward. Ballmer wants to make some impression of cordiality. If he can do things civil, he wants civil. Yet he makes evident that if the two parties are not to come to a “definitive agreement,” Microsoft “will be compelled to take (its) case directly to (Yahoo’s) shareholders, including the initiation of a proxy contest to elect an alternative slate of directors for the Yahoo board.” Ballmer goes on to press Yahoo’s feet to the proverbial fire saying:

“The substantial premium in our initial proposal anticipated a friendly transaction with you. If we are forced to take an offer directly to your shareholders, that action will have an undesirable impact on the value of your company from our perspective which will be reflected in the terms of our proposal.”

What does this pressure push amount to? Is Ballmer implying that, if the Yahoo board continues to barrage itself against a deal as requested by Microsoft originally, and Yahoo’s market value diminishes further as a result of such opposition, that the software giant of the north will partly or entirely cut its offer for the Sunnyvale-based company, as Silicon Alley Insider’s Henry Blodget has optioned? One may well intuit such an ultimatum from the letter. Ballmer’s phrasing is strong enough yet still vague (which is to be expected, given the present state of the attempted buyout) to imply that all options are on the table, including a complete revocation of the original bid.

A response from Yahoo has not yet been delivered, but it would be sensible to predict one to come in the next few days. Of course, one can surely count on Yahoo’s volley to be equally generic in language. At least we now know when the clock for direct talks stops. (Granted, that assumes that Microsoft will keep precisely to alloted timeframe. We can only wait to see whether that challenge is a definite one.)

When big brands decide something is hot, they will move in and attempt to copy it. Sometimes they actually succeed at their goals, and sometimes…well, let’s just say that results are less than spectacular. We’ve sampled 7 well-known brands that tried their hands at creating a social network.

more>>  7 Brand Name Social Networks

Do you have friends that send you a never-ending stream of Facebook application invites? If so, good news arrives today for those suffering from this problem: You can now ignore them.

Nick O’Neill of AllFacebook is reporting that you now have the option of ignoring those friends that inundate you with invitations. The next time you receive any such invites, all you have to do is click where it says “Ignore All Invites from this Friend”, and that’s that. This has a two-fold positive effect to it, as 1) you will no longer be annoyed by these invites, and 2) app developers will no longer be penalized for ignored invitations.

True, this may seem a double-edged sword for developers as some of their invitations will not get through to other users, but it should make for a more pleasant user experience overall.

Joost wanted to go global with its broadcasts, but it turns out that the company is not going to be living up to that ambition. At least not in the short term. According to a report by James Ashton in The Sunday Times of London, the company is restructuring its business plans and will focus exclusively on the US market, where it appears to have the largest audience. In the UK especially, the BBC’s iPlayer has received a substantial amount more attention than Joost.

The IPTV company founded by the original Skype duo Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, Joost has with time become a somewhat stagnant entity, a sort of could-have-been. Note Mashable editor-in-chief Adam Ostrow’s bearishness on the product.) Though it attempted to draw a great deal of attention to its broadcast of the NCAA’s March Madness events as of late, it has seen Hulu, a joint venture by News Corp and NBC, among other content owners, surpass it with quite outstanding press attention. The reasoning for this is perhaps the more immediate gratification granted through Hulu’s more usable browser-based service.

As all Joost users past and present understand, the service operates independent of one’s Flash-enabled browser. One is required to install a proprietary software package to view material through Joost. (As a result of this newfound competition, the engineers at Joost have made clear their intention to establish a browser-based existence, rather than keep with its current strategy.)

A spokeswoman for Joost emphasized that the company was not under immense financial pressure or constraints (it raised 23 million pounds from investors like Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, CBS, and Viacom) and is “not shedding staff.” The unnamed representative only confirmed that the company has encountered “some situations here staff have been re-aligned to better fit (its) needs.”

So you’ve heard that a number of organizations - namely the MPAA, RIAA, and the more global IFPI - have been trying to get ISPs to implement filters to prevent the illicit transfer of digital files through peer-to-peer technologies, most especially BitTorrent. Well, it turns out that those groups’ wishes to circumvent piracy are going to be quite a bit harder to fulfill. The reason being that companies hawking the software required to bring about a future of nonproliferation don’t quite pass the strength test. As Janko Roettgers of NewTeeVee has found, a number of vendors, given samplings of encrypted and unencrypted transfers to detect, have delivered mixed results.

The team which conducted the study, a partnership between SNEP (the French music industry association) and Internet Evolution, first asked some 28 software vendors to put their products through their paces. All but five refused. Of the five which took part in the experiment, 3 requested that their respective results not be published. So the two parties that emerged from the trenches and allowed themselves to be temporary guinea pigs on public display, were Arbor Networks in the US and a German outfit called Ipoque.

Roettger’s outline of the findings is quite comprehensive and telling of what ISPs will likely encounter if they so choose to implement filters on their networks. With an average of the data from both Arbor and Ipoque, one can assume that unencrypted data is very likely to be swept away before it reaches its destination (97% detection rate recorded in this two-party study), while digital material laced with encryption may only be detected roughly 1/4 of the time. I imagine that would be best case scenario, too. (Or worst, depending on one’s vantage.)

According to the statistics gathered in the SNEP-Internet Evolution trial, Arbor “wasn’t able to detect BitTorrent traffic with strong RC4 encryption.” Meanwhile, Ipoque was successful in detecting traffic with any measure of encryption about 50% of the time.

What I deduce from these figures is that neither the abovementioned defendants of copyrighted content nor the ISPs currently serving consumers will most definitely not have it easy when they ultimately opt to filter data flowing about the cloud - if they even opt to do so to begin with. As with most things which involve industrial-sized problems, the idea of effectively regulating such transfers can really be summed in two words: “it’s complicated.”