Daily Roundup for 2007-12-27

• Should I pay my investor’s legal fees? - Venture Hacks
  Venture capitalists don’t want to pay their legal fees for financings. Don’t fight this term—that’s a “big move on a little issue.” Instead, cap your contribution to the investor’s legal bill. And watch the legal bills in small financings: don’t spend a large portion of the investment on lawyers or give up a lot of equity for the privilege of paying your investor’s legal bill.


• Santa Is Packing More Sofas and Less Jewelry - New York Times
  Forget about strings of pearls, dive watches or flower baskets. This could be the year of Barcaloungers and blenders. According to early online shopping statistics, sales of holiday stalwarts like jewelry, watches and flowers have dropped from last year’s levels, while sales of more practical items like furniture and appliances have climbed about 70 percent.

• Combating Web 2.0 Threats - eCommerce Times
  At the core of Web 2.0 are applications that use code written in Ajax and JavaScript, which make them behave in ways that traditional security technologies can't cope with, explained Alfred Huger, vice president of engineering for Symantec in Santa Monica, Calif. "Ajax blurs the line between the Web and my applications on the desktop," he told the E-Commerce Times.


• Anarchists in the Aisles? Stores Provide a Stage - New York Times
  This is the season of frenetic shopping, but for a devious few people it’s also the season of spirited shopdropping. Otherwise known as reverse shoplifting, shopdropping involves surreptitiously putting things in stores, rather than illegally taking them out, and the motivations vary.


• A Valet Key for Your Identity - Technology Review
  As online services that make use of personal data multiply, it's becoming more common for users to need to pass data from one service to another. This often requires users to hand over usernames and passwords, in spite of the obvious security risks involved. A new open-source project called OAuth, released earlier this month, is intended to solve this problem by allowing users to give services a valet key to their identities, rather than full access.


• Care to comment? Google feature lets news sources respond - International Herald Tribune
  The days when the journalist had the last say about a subject are long gone. This thought is usually expressed by repeating - and then dismissing as outdated - the words of A.J. Liebling: "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."  Google News, an increasingly popular way to get news online, may tip that balance, however, with a feature it calls "Comments From People in the News."