Today in Tech: Yahoo, Gawker hacked, and Zynga

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  According to a Tweet from Yahoo senior software developer Zach Graves, company layoffs began late last week ahead of schedule. Said Graves: “The number of people carrying boxes out of Yahoo tonight is not surprising, nor the last of it.” As reported by various outlets including Fortune recently, the Internet company is cutting at least 10% of its workforce. (TechCrunch)

• Gawker Media’s commenter database was hacked yesterday by a group identifying itself as “Gnosis,” reportedly unrelated to the WikiLeaks vigilante group “Anonymous.” In a statement, Gnosis cited Gawker’s “outright arrogance,” pertaining to a comments exchange between Gawker staffers egging on hackers. “I mean if you say things like that, and attack sites like 4chan (which we are not affiliated to) you must at least have the means to back yourself up,” the statement continued. (Mediaite)
• Sweden’s public service television, SVT, will broadcast a one-hour documentary of WikiLeaks. Here’s a link to a rough cut sans commercial interruption, viewable until the end of today. (Voices)
• Oracle wants SAP to pay up $211.7 million in “prejudgment interest” on top of the the record $1.3 billion it was awarded last month. In a statement, SAP said the hardware and software-maker is not entitled to any more compensation. (Wall Street Journal)
• If you’re one of the few (unlucky) owners of Microsoft’s KIN phones, there’s good news and bad news: come end of January, the majority of over-the-air features — Feed Reader, Search Near me, social site posting, social network contacts — will be shut off. The good? Verizon will offer those unlucky early adopters free 3G phones of their choice through March 31. (WPCentral)
• Twitter will set up its first international offices in London. One possible option: somewhere near “silicon roundabout” (aka Old Street roundabout) which the government has pledged £400 million pounds, or $632 million (U.S.) to set up a “tech city.” (Telegraph)
• The company behind mobile traffic app Trapster was acquired by Chicago-based mapping company, NAVTEQ, a division of Nokia, for unspecified terms. (GigaOm)

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  Device fingerprinting just may be “the next generation of online advertising.” At least, so says David Norris, head of the start-up, BlueCava Inc., which has identified digital signatures for 200 million of the 10 billion devices. (Wall Street Journal)

• Zynga’s latest, CityVille, now claims a userbase of 6 million daily active users. For some perspective, that’s double the number of users announced two days ago.(TechCrunch)
• Forty days into the holiday shopping season and consumers have already spent $21.95 billion online — a 12% jump compared with last season. (eMoney/AllThingsD)
• And in case you’re still gift-hunting, know that Amazon has extended its free shipping deadline for Christmas Eve delivery so long as orders are placed by December 17. (The New York Times)
• Apple’s iPad was the second most popular search term of the year and Time’s top gadget of 2010. (Fortune)
• At LeWeb, Microsoft introduced Montage, a glossy magazine or tablet app that works by letting users pick keywords. Once they do, the app pulls data and content from multiple sources like YouTube, RSS feeders, Twitter and Bing News and arranges it in a grid format not entirely unlike Flipboard. (Mashable)

Update: The TechCrunch item we linked to in today’s roundup was later corrected. Senior software developer Zach Graves says he wasn’t talking about layoffs at all. “I simply made an observation that a handful of my co-workers had made the decision, on their own, to leave the company,” he told the site. “In no way did it imply the Yahoo! had started layoffs.” We regret the error.