Overstock has added its name to the list of online retailers taking their protest against new tax laws to the people.

The Utah-based firm has terminated its affiliate advertising programs in California, Hawaii, North Carolina and Rhode Island as those states edge closer to passing statutes that would require it to being collecting sales taxes.

The move closely follows similar announcements from Amazon and Blue Nile, who are protesting states' redefinition of tax codes that would equate affiliate marketers -- Web site owners who post ad links to online merchants and receive commissions for the referrals -- with full-fledged employees of the company, thus triggering the tax-collection requirement.

When New York became the first state to enact the affiliate marketing tax provision, Amazon and Overstock both sued in cases that are still working their way through the courts. Amazon kept its affiliate program and began collecting the tax. Overstock terminated its affiliate program in New York.

With yesterday's announcement, Overstock warned it would sever its affiliate programs in any state that moved ahead with a similar statute, blasting state lawmakers for essentially taxing their way into economic ruin.

"It's awful to have to terminate these relationships with affiliates, simply because they live in states where unconstitutional laws are being passed," Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne said in a statement. "However, politicians have to remember that a tax is a price that government charges for a service, and when they raise their prices, we're going to buy less of their services."

Needless to say, the termination of affiliate advertising programs is a significant departure from a strategy of litigation. It seems that Amazon, Overstock and others are aiming to whip up protest from their local affiliates, who can fairly claim that they're getting shafted in the process. After all, a statehouse passes a law, the large online retailers react, and a source of revenue for the little guys in those states evaporates.

Now, as has been argued here in the past, this debate too often focuses on rhetoric about new taxes, when what's really happening is a shift in the burden of collection for an existing tax.

Chances are you already know.

According to a new report by Internet research firm comScore, nearly 55 million Americans visited an entertainment news site in May 2009, representing a seven percent increase over the previous year. Online video has also become an increasingly important channel for content in the category, with the number of videos viewed growing 53 percent in the past year.

“What’s also interesting is that Americans are feeding their hunger for celebrity gossip by ‘snacking’ on these news updates throughout the workday,” says comScore executive VP Jack Flanagan. “In fact, nearly half of all time spent on entertainment news sites comes from work computers.”

comScore estimates that more than a quarter of U.S. Internet users visited an entertainment news site in May 2009. Leading the way was Yahoo’s celebrity gossip site, omg! with 20.6 million visitors, nearly doubling its audience in the past year.

TMZ captured the #2 ranking with 9.9 million visitors (up 7 percent versus year ago), followed by People with 8.2 million visitors.

(PHOTO CREDIT: TMZ.com).

Other big gainers include USmagazine.com, up 325 percent to 6.5 million visitors, Entertainment Weekly, up 64 percent to nearly 4 million visitors, and The Insider, which grew 215 percent to 2.5 million visitors.

Celebrity overload

I noticed USmagazine was getting so much action today the site was briefly inaccessible. A message on the site explaining the outage said: “Sorry, we’ve gone into celebrity overload!”

Not surprising. In total, Americans spent more than 893 million minutes - or approximately 15 million hours - on entertainment news sites, with 44 percent of the total time spent in the category occurring at, yes, you guessed it, the workplace.

BTW, if like me you’re not familiar with OMG!, don’t assume it’s at www.omg.com. That Web site belongs, in fact to the Object Management Group that helps develop enterprise integration standards and could lead you to do actual work.

OMG!

HP today announced it will offer a high-end workstation with one or two of AMD's new six-core Opteron processors, codenamed "Istanbul," for its HP xw9400 tower PC workstations.

Just recently AMD updated the series to run the quad-core Shanghai processor, and it's socket-compatible with Istanbul, so if you own one of these beasts and are good with a screwdriver, it's just a processor and BIOS upgrade.

The move from four to six core processors means a 34 percent improvement in performance per watt, according to HP, and a pretty good boost in overall performance with some of the newer equipment. Like previous generations, this new version supports up to 32GB of memory.

The Istanbul-based xw9400 features HyperTransport 3.0 technology to increase interconnect rates from 2 gigatransfers per second (GT/s) to a maximum 4.8 GT/s. The HP xw9400 can be configured with the ATI FirePro V7750 3-D workstation graphics accelerator instead of the nVidia Quadro card, which came in previous generations.

The HP xw9400 Workstation is registered as an Electronic Products Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) Gold product, the highest rating available. The power supply is rated 80 PLUS, which is considerably more efficient than a standard power supply in terms of overall energy usage and the amount of waste heat.

Clearly not designed for running Office productivity apps, this kind of workstation is used in high-end applications like engineering, 3D digital content creation, oil and gas, and other science-related projects.

It might even be able to run Crysis.*

The HP xw9400 Workstation starts at a U.S. list price of $1,899 (although it scales up very fast as you add components) and is available now.

(* A running joke among gamers. The game Crysis is so system resource-intense that many rigs weren't able to play it. A long-running gag on Internet forums when discussing hardware is "But can it play Crysis?" People say that about everything from the iPhone to a supercomputer.)

NEW YORK -- Micah Sifry, the co-chair and co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum 2009, said that the rise of Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com demonstrates how the Internet can make celebrities and can make them fast.

"The site didn't exist a year ago," he said at the Forum. "Silver was blogging as Poblano on Daily Kos."

Silver, who was also present, explained that once the media became interested in what he was saying, they did not want to quote "Poblano on Daily Kos" so he uncloaked and started the fivethrityeight.com Web site.

The site had 3 million hits on election day, according to Silver, but between two-thirds and three-quarters of those left after the election or after Al Franken won the final race of the 2008 election.

"It's more fun now," Silver said. "I can riff on Iran, healthcare, and the climate bill."

Sifry asked if Obama could have won the election without the Internet.

NEW YORK -- In a speech to a receptive audience at the Personal Democracy Forum 2009, Danah Boyd, an ethnographer who works at Microsoft Research New England and at the Harvard Berkman Center for the Internet, said that many within the technology industry and the Internet industry believe, erroneously, that technology always delivers democracy in a speech she called "The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online."

Instead, she said, the online world mirrors the racism, classism, and stratification of the offline world. She said that a critical case in point is the competition between MySpace and Facebook.

While the release of Fusion Middleware 11g is the big news today, the company has recently released other products as well. Earlier this week, Oracle released a new security feature for databases called Transparent Data Encryption that is designed to make it easier to encrypt data.

"Being able to encrypt all application data efficiently is a big benefit to organizations in terms of keeping up with business needs and staying ahead of regulatory requirements," said Gary Loveland, PricewaterhouseCoopers' advisory principal and security practice leader in the US, in a statement.

The company also released Oracle Enterprise Manager, a product that helps companies handle configuration management. In a sense, the product switches from managing hardware to managing the hardware used to support specific software applications.

"Oracle has improved application configuration management capabilities allowing customers to manage 'application' configurations and their underlying infrastructure components in an easy and automated way. The solution helps customers automate configuration management across the deployment lifecycle -- for example, from test to production -- using a unique template-based capability that ensures tested and certified configurations are enforced as they are rolled out from test to production sites. The benefits are for both physical and virtual environments," said Moe Fardoost, Oracle senior director of product development, in an e-mail to InternetNews.com.

Oracle renewed its emphasis on cloud computing with an announcement that will make it easier for ISVs to deliver cloud applications. The "SaaS for ISVs" program delivers Oracle infrastructure on a monthly subscription model.

"The combined Oracle Platform for SaaS and licensing options deliver the power and flexibility ISVs need to compete and win in today's global SaaS marketplace," said Judson Althoff, Oracle senior vice president of worldwide alliances and channels, in a statement.