As promised, All Things Digital is posting the full videos from our eighth D: All Things Digital conference, held in early June. Here's the interview Kara did at D8 with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong.

Based on the content of one video clip that it said disseminated extreme views, a Russian court has ordered Internet provider Rosnet to block access to YouTube in the city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur. Rosnet President Alexander Yermakov appealed to reverse the order and declined to enforce it, calling the judge "incompetent." Google Russia's Alla Zabrovskaya said that the ruling was an "obvious violation of the right to obtain information." The ruling is a textbook scenario of a longstanding human rights concern in Russia: that the state may gag a media outlet simply by accusing it of spreading extreme views.

Evidently Google’s Mainland China Service Availability page is not the best indicator of the availability of the company’s mainland China services. Though that page shows Google’s Web search, YouTube, mobile and ads as blocked in the country, they are in fact available — as a number of China-based Twitter users will tell you.

The Orchard, which distributes digital music and video to the likes of Apple's and Amazon's online stores, is going off the public market. The New York-based company is being bought out by its parent, private equity shop Dimensional Associates, and stops trading tomorrow. Shareholders will get $2.05 per share, and they're apparently okay with that price, since that's where ORCD has been trading for some time. This is a round trip for the company, which was originally wholly owned by Dimensional before a reverse merger deal that brought it public in 2007. Dimensional also owns e-music, the indie music MP3/subscription service. The Orchard may be familiar to some of you as the company whose copyright infringement lawsuit marked the end of iMeem.

The U.S. Department of Justice today said it is indeed suing Oracle for contract fraud, confirming June reports that it had accused the company of defrauding the United States government of hundreds of millions of dollars.

When President Obama first took office, he pressed hard to keep his beloved BlackBerry and ultimately won permission to carry a model with beefed-up security features. Turns out he didn't really win much. Appearing on ABC's "The View," Obama said only 10 people have his number, and their email conversations are really boring. "I've got to admit, it's no fun because they think that it's probably going to be subject to the Presidential Records Act, so nobody wants to send me the real juicy stuff," he said. Other tech notes from the interview: Obama said that the contents of the presidential iPod runs from Jay-Z to Maria Callas, and that "I don't tweet on a regular basis....I think there's an official president's tweet, but some 20-year-old is doing a lot of the tweeting."

BoomTown is in Redmond, Wash. today to attend Microsoft's annual Financial Analyst Meeeting, where top execs from the software giant have been taking the stage to talk about All Things Microsoft. I liveblogged this morning's sessions here, but it is onto the afternoon confab, which opened with CEO Steve Ballmer, who seemed was confidently strutting around after delivering record results last week for the fourth quarter.

Here’s a timely rebuttal to those who argue the merits of an “open” app store versus one that’s “closed”: Security firm Lookout says that an Android app called Jackeey Wallpaper has been harvesting personal information from the millions of users who downloaded it. While there's no evidence of malicious intent, it's still troubling.

QOTD: If Only Steve Jobs Would Say the Same Thing About Our Tablet … [Digital Daily] “They’ve sold certainly more than I’d like them to sell, let me just be clear about that.” – Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Apple and the iPad

As promised, All Things Digital is posting the full videos from our eighth D: All Things Digital conference, held in early June. Here's the interview I did at D8 with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong. As you will see, the Google veteran is a dynamic speaker (and his cheekbones could cut diamonds), trying hard to revive a long-troubled Internet icon.

Why did ESPN kill a pretty tame Web story about the most famous athlete in America? Hard to guess. In any case, it doesn't matter now: On a slow summer day, it's perfect fodder for bored Web surfers.

If the White House has its way, the FBI will be granted access to the Internet activity of terror and intelligence suspects without a court order. The activity covered under the proposal would include all data on email sent or received, and possibly Internet surfing history, but not email contents or search history. Supporters of the measure compare it to the FBI's ability to access phone records without court authority.

Nvidia on Wednesday afternoon projected a sharp shortfall in second-quarter revenue, blaming issues that caused PC buyers to spend less on graphics technology. But there’s a competing explanation, one more flattering to rival Advanced Micro Devices.

QOTD: Church of iEntology? [Digital Daily] “The religious-like behavior and language surrounding Apple devotion/fandom is an example of ‘implicit religion.’” – Texas A&M University professor Heidi Campbell, author of “How the iPhone Became Divine: New Media, Religion and the Intertextual Circulation of Meaning”

Walt Disney Co.’s $563 million deal to acquire two-year-old Playdom Inc. was the latest big exit in the hot social-gaming space, which is still relatively new considering Facebook launched its third-party platform only in May 2007. The deal follows Electronic Arts Inc.’s acquisition of Playdom rival Playfish Inc. for at least $300 million in November.

This is one way to get longer-form content on YouTube. What prompted the change? Google's site says it's because copyright owners aren't nearly as crabby as they used to be.

An unexpected quarterly profit from Sony this morning. With strength finally returning to its television and videogame businesses, the company posted a $293.9 million net profit in its first quarter and raised its outlook for the full year. “Our results for the quarter show that our mainstay electronics business is once again becoming our engine of growth,” CFO Masaru Kato said during the company’s earnings call. “We want to keep up the momentum.” That should be quite a bit easier, now that Sony's restructuring efforts are starting to pay off.

BoomTown took the corporate All Things Digital jet--aka Virgin America, seat 10A--up to Redmond, Wash., today to attend Microsoft's annual Financial Analyst Meeting, which also includes a passel of media drones like me. I am liveblogging the event all day, which is essentially a cavalcade of top execs from the software giant taking the stage and showing off their wares. Before it started, U2's "Beautiful Day" was playing over the sound system, which it is not up here in the Pacific Northwest this morning--it's kind of cold and gloomy, a la "Twilight"--but hopefully will be for sparkly Microsoft execs. We'll see!

File this under creative solutions for fixing the budget deficit: With a House panel's approval of a bill that would legalize nonsports betting and online poker, Congress seems to be on its way toward overturning its 2006 ban on Internet gambling. The bill, which would allow the IRS to tax Internet gambling operations and winnings by individuals, could yield as much as $42 billion for the federal government over the next 10 years.

Motorola’s decision to “double down” on Google’s Android operating system was clearly a wise one. Though the company’s mobile-phone unit reported an operating loss for its second quarter, it shipped 2.7 million smartphones, up from 2.3 million in the quarter prior and in line with analyst estimates.

Amazon gives out almost no real data about its Kindle sales, and even less guidance. So mark down this rare prediction from CEO Jeff Bezos, via an interview with USA Today: "I predict we will surpass paperback sales sometime in the next nine to 12 months. Sometime after that, we'll surpass the combination of paperback and hardcover. It stuns me."

Web publishers and TV networks are doing just fine. But if you're in the radio, newspaper or magazine business, it's a different story.

Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and other U.S. tech giants are pushing to streamline Europe's privacy rules in order to offer more remote computing and data-storage services. These companies, which are investing billions of dollars to build big data centers in Europe, are seeking a single set of rules across the 27-nation bloc for so-called cloud-computing services.

The 52-week low that Research In Motion hit earlier this month is quickly receding on rumors of some big upcoming product announcements. Word on the street is that the company plans to uncrate the BlackBerry 9800 at an event in New York City next week.

Google is reading my mind--or trying to. Drawing on the terabytes of data it collects on people’s search queries, it predicts, with each letter I type, what I’m most likely to be looking for.

The following is not a futuristic scenario. It is not science fiction. It is a demonstration of the capabilities of GIS to model the results of an extremely unlikely, yet intellectually fascinating query: What would happen if the Earth stopped spinning?

Microsoft has a long and illustrious history of operating system sales. The model has served the company well on the PC, but if it wants to make money in the phone market, it needs to start thinking like a consumer electronics company. That means selling Microsoft phones.

Back in the day, the knock on Hollywood was that it produced too many two-dimensional characters. Now moviegoers are beginning to grumble about paying up to see them in the third dimension as well.

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has quite famously been on record many times talking about how the Web is full of garbage. It’s a cesspool out there, he’s said. Today, a short fast look at how his own company pollutes the Web.

Online games phenom Zynga and Japanese Internet and telecom giant SoftBank announced a joint venture to develop and distribute social games across Japan. The new Tokyo-based service will be called Zynga Japan and is Zynga's first foray into that country. The companies also said SoftBank had completed a $150 million investment in Zynga, which had been previously reported.

The iPhone 4 did better than the 3GS in decent coverage, but still isn't a good bet for those in weak-coverage areas, writes Walt.

Walt recommends a netbook or laptop that can be used to check email while traveling, and more.

Amazon.com plans to release a cheaper Kindle e-reader next month, said Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, laying out a strategy to go "mass market" with an inexpensive gadget designed to do just one thing: sell digital books from Amazon.

Why ask why? Facebook has a question service because everyone has a question service. Couldn't be clearer, right?

Apple is investigating reports that the latest iPhone operating system causes problems for users of the iPhone 3G, after a series of complaints on Apple support forums and technology blogs. Apple is aware of the reports and is looking into the matter, a spokeswoman told Digits.

It says something about the direction of the cellphone market that LG sold 30.6 million handsets in its second quarter and that division still lost $101 million, contributing to a gruesome 33 percent drop in net profit.

On Monday morning, we did some looking into the legal issues surrounding WikiLeaks’ decision to unveil some 92,000 previously classified documents on the public, in connection with a handful of media outlets. The bottom line, some First Amendment experts informed us: the government certainly had the right to go after and punish the person within the military who leaked the information.

EBay acquired PayPal in 2002, the same year it largely conceded the Japanese auction market to Yahoo Japan, so the online payment service has never really had a chance at handling some of the billions of dollars in online transactions generated by that nation's consumers every year. That's about to change. PayPal now plans to ramp up its efforts in Japan, the first time it will enter a region without the built-in support of its parent's giant auction business. The company hopes to sell itself to retailers as an easy way to handle sales abroad, with more than 87 million accounts worldwide and the ability to deal in 24 currencies.

Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC has risen as a strong contender to Apple’s iPhone and other smartphones from Samsung Electronics and Nokia, the world’s two biggest handset makers. Now, the company is officially in the race to win over China’s increasing number of smartphone users.

UPDATE: I was totally wrong! I'll think twice before taking the company at its word from now on... Alternate theory: Amazon (AMZN) has stopped selling the Kindle because it's about to release a new one jam-packed with astounding features. But my hunch is that Amazon is being upfront when it says on its site that its $189 model is temporarily out of stock. If you absolutely must buy a Kindle today, though, Amazon is happy to sell you one of the super-sized DX models, starting at $359. The new one with a new color goes for $379.

Facebook users may have control over how their information is shared, but they don’t always get to decide where and in what form that information is shared unless they proactively choose to. Case in point: The torrent of account details for more than 100 million Facebook users that surfaced today.

QOTD [Digital Daily] “If you’ve got a one-trick pony, you want the one we have. We’re in the ad business, and it’s growing rapidly. We picked the right trick.” – Google CEO Eric Schmidt on the company’s online ad business, which makes up the bulk of its revenue

Spain's Telefónica SA won full control of a Brazilian wireless joint venture it had with Portugal Telecom SGPS SA after a sweetened bid of €7.5 billion ($9.75 billion) ended months of struggles between the two Iberian telecoms. Portugal Telecom said it would use some of the proceeds from the sale of its stake in Brazil's Vivo Participacoes SA to buy a 22.4 percent stake in another Brazilian wireless carrier, Oi.

Another "buy them instead of hiring them" deal: Facebook is about to pick up Hot Potato, a start-up that specializes in organizing chats about "real time" events. The transaction hasn't closed yet, but the social network is set to pay something in the $10 million to $15 million range for the company, people familiar with the deal tell me. That will mean a modest return for the investor consortium that put $1.4 million into the firm last year, but it will still be a return.

Sprint hasn’t posted a quarterly net gain in subscribers in three years, so the company’s announcement this morning that it added 111,000 subs to finish its second quarter with 48.2 million is welcome news indeed.

[ See post to watch video ]

Another product refresh from Apple this morning--Safari 5.0.1, which adds support for third-party extensions to the browser. Debuting along with it is the Safari Extensions Gallery, a showcase of about 100 extensions from the likes of Amazon, eBay, The New York Times, MLB and Twitter. Also included in this point release, a fix for that autofill vulnerability revealed last week.

Comcast says it's on track to close the NBC Universal deal by the end of the year. Which is good, because closing the transaction--where it picks up control of GE's media conglomerate--has cost it $88 million so far this year.

A global alliance of telecom operators said Tuesday it will establish a corporate entity as part of its plans to set up an open platform for mobile applications, hoping to broaden the market and emulate the success of Apple Inc.'s App Store and Google Inc.'s Android Market.

The L5 Remote and the FLPR allow you to control a host of electronic devices with your iPhone or iPad. But they each have quirks.