VentureBeat

With both DEMO and TechCrunch 50 going on, there’s almost too much to report. Here are some of the extra bits:

Old news becomes new problem — A six year old article about a United Airlines bankruptcy filing re-appeared on Google News Monday morning, triggering a massive sell-off of the company’s stock and deftly illustrating the potential dangers of modern (dis)information dissemination.

Spore spawns DRM hatred — The much-anticipated game Spore (see our interview with creator Will Wright) has hit stores, but restrictive DRM on the full version has a significant group of fans steamed, leading to (at last count) over 1,000 one-star ratings on Amazon.

DoJ hires litigator for potential Google antitrust case — The Department of Justice has hired Sanford Litvack, former vice chairman of Walt Disney, to help explore an antitrust case against Google over its advertising tie-up with Yahoo.

Microsoft breeds new blue mice — A new computer mouse rumored to be coming from Microsoft will use a blue LED, allowing it to be used on surfaces that won’t work with standard mice.

Berlin to test electric car charging stations — The German capital will install 500 electric car charging stations, testing them with 100 lithium-ion powered Smart cars.

Gist launches email management tool — A stealthy Seattle-based email startup, Gist, is opening a new email service that helps condense information from many emails, documents, Web links, blog posts and so forth into one location.

Google revisits privacy with shortened log times — User IP addresses stored by Google will now be anonymized after nine months, significantly shortening the company’s previous 18 month policy.

One company out, one staying in for IPO market — While XDx, a Brisbane, Calif. medical startup, has pulled its expected IPO with the usual complaint of bad market conditions, Fluidigm, a maker of integrated fluidic circuit systems for life science research, has pledged to stay on track for its $86 million IPO, according to VentureWire.