You like music, right? How about CDs? Do you still have CDs? Don’t have any cash this week? Did you spend a lot of money on presents for the kids already? Do you want one of these Olive No 4 Hi-Fi? Am I asking too many questions? Yes? No?

Book publishers are increasingly embracing digital books, and not just on Amazon’s Kindle. Today, John Wiley and Sons, Barnes and Noble imprint Sterling Publishing, Chronicle Books, and the University of Chicago Press announced they will join a total of 150 publishers to offer ebooks in the Scribd Store. Wiley is the venerable publisher of the For Dummies series of books as well as Frommer’s travel guides and CliffsNotes.

Scribd lets people embed and share documents in a Flash viewer, but has been partnering with publishers since March to also sell downloadable digital versions of their books. Other publishers already on board include Simon & Schuster and O’Reilly Media. The ebooks are downloadable as a PDF, and excerpts can be shared through the Scribd reader.

Justin.tv, one of the most popular live webcasting services on the net, will be testifying in a hearing held by the House Judiciary Committee tomorrow morning. The topic of the hearing: the future of live online sports broadcasting.

We got hold of the startup’s written and oral testimony, which Justin.tv hopes will be enough to convince the Committee that the nature of live video broadcasting makes it impossible for them to avoid copyrighted content from ending up on the site, whether it’s live sports or other content like TV shows.

The winner of DEMO’s enterprise category and people’s choice award, Liaise, is moving from private to open beta by launching their much anticipated mobile calendar integration and introducing their Team Services platform.

Liaise focuses on collaboration within email: it analyzes the content within your incoming and outgoing emails, captures the important information (Liaise dubs these KeyPoints) which needs to be acted upon, and sets up a management list based on this info.

Rest assured that 2010 is going to be a big year for the Android operating system, with many new handsets finding their way to stores around the world (including Google’s own phone) and an increasing number of developers building tools, games and the likes for the fast-growing platform.

One way of noticing that the OS is poised for a big breakthrough at the expense of Windows Mobile, Symbian and other operating systems designed to run on various mobile devices, is the number of applications already available for download in the platform’s own application store, Android Market.

Lo and behold, that number hit the 20,000 milestone just moments ago, a little over 5 months since it reached 10,000 apps.

Zoho Reports, the web-based productivity suite’s business and data intelligence tool, is ripping off the beta tag and officially launching today with a new pricing model and set of features. Zoho Reports, which was formerly known as Zoho DB, provides developers and database administrators with better ways to manage, digest and understand their data. It’s similar in theory to Microsoft Access but that the application is online.

Zoho Reports can upload data from a variety of sources including Excel and HTML files. And Zoho Reports works with hosted and behind-the-firewall business applications and databases from Oracle, Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and MS Access databases. Users can interact with Reports via a drag and drop interface, with the application featuring in-depth collaborative tools that let users develop reports together and share reports with each other. Zoho also promises security of all reports.

Grouply, a startup that’s built around creating an managing online groups from Google and Yahoo Groups, is launching a more customizable and social version of its service. Launched in 2006, Grouply was one the pioneers of the socialization of groups and essentially lets users combine features of social networks and online groups, incorporating Google and Yahoo Groups products.

The latest version of Grouply, which currently hosts 1.6 million groups, has been enhanced to provide many more customization tools for Grouply groups, giving users the ability to transform the simple appearance of any Google or Yahoo Group into a modern, sleek, colorful website. Grouply provides built-in themes and well as custom templates that can be tweaked easily and without any programming knowledge.

Fake Steve is rustling some feathers this week with his Operation Chokehold, a planned bit of corporate disobedience against AT&T. He’s telling iPhone users to go nuts with the data on Friday, December 18, just to show AT&T’s CEO De La Vega, the man who suggested education would encourage users not to use his network so much, what uneducated users really can do to his preciously twee airwaves.

The call to action:

Subject: Operation Chokehold
On Friday, December 18, at noon Pacific time, we will attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees. The goal is to have every iPhone user (or as many as we can) turn on a data intensive app and run that app for one solid hour. Send the message to AT&T that we are sick of their substandard network and sick of their abusive comments. THe idea is we’ll create a digital flash mob. We’re calling it in Operation Chokehold. Join us and speak truth to power!

Earlier this month, we reported that Google would be replacing Russian search leader Yandex as the default search engine and ad server on Mail.ru, the most popular online destination in the country with more than 50 million unique monthly users.

This morning, Mail.ru confirmed (in Russian) that it will be replacing Yandex with Google as its default search provider starting January 2010.

The second annual TechCrunch Europe ChristmasCrunch combines our annual TechCrunch Europe meetup and Festive Christmas party, in one handy gift-wrapped package.

This year we’re basing it the hot theme of realtime streams and the event in London features some of the hottest realtime startups in the world today, many of which are in fact based in London. Our ‘realtime’ live video stream is after the jumo as is information on our speaker and sponsors. If you want to follow the Twitter stream tune in to #XmasCrunch

The recently released e-book reader from Barnes & Noble, the Nook, has been rooted by the community of enthusiasts at nookdevs.com. The complete instructions for hacking the device and obtaining root access are detailed on the site. The Nook went on sale in late November and aims to compete with the dominant Amazon Kindle, a device which has spurred its own community of hackers and modifiers.

The Nook retails for $259, and is an Android-powered device with built in AT&T 3G service and WiFi, along with an e-ink screen that is found in most other readers. The instructions for rooting the device require that the device is opened up and that the SD card which stores the operating system be removed. The process seems a little too simple, almost as if the device was designed to be hacked. The storage is on a removable card, which can then be loaded in another machine where the process of acquiring root access to the operating system is carried out.

Earlier today news spread that social application site RockYou had suffered a data breached that resulted in the exposure of over 32 Million user accounts. To compound the severity of the security breach, it was found that RockYou are storing all user account data in plain text in their database, exposing all that information to attackers. RockYou have yet to inform users of the breach, and their blog is eerily silent – but the details of the security breach are going from bad to worse.

The first issue is that RockYou attempted to downplay the entire incident, first by covering it up by not notifying users and then downplaying it in an official statement as being an issue that only affected ‘older’ applications. The hacker responsible for the initial breach published a small portion of the dataset he had retrieved and was able to show that not only did he have access to their entire database, but also passwords were stored in the clear. This matter now appears worse than originally suspected as the dataset also contains a table where RockYou have stored user credentials for social networks and other partner sites.

Back before Brazil was the darling economy of Latin America, all eyes were on Argentina—or at least the dot com “eyeballs?were. In the late 1990s, when VCs, private equity houses and wealthy individuals where throwing Internet money around the globe, Argentina got more than its fair share. The relatively small country was home to the fifth-largest number of registered Internet domain names in the world, and in early 2000 the now-defunct Industry Standard estimated that some 50% of the Latin America’s Web startups were concentrated in Argentina.

Of course, when the Nasdaq crashed, most of those global investments did as well. Just like in India, investors bailed on funding commitments happy to write off their far-flung bets and move on. Left in a lurch, most of these Latin American companies went out of business, many others sold, and one?em>just one—went public on the Nasdaq.

I think we can agree that helping charities is a great thing. Browse For A Cause is extending the giving through the web browser. Browse For A Cause is a browser add-on that collects affiliate revenue (usually 3-5%) from sites like Amazon to help charities. For example, if you buy a $20 DVD, the affiliate revenue equates to about $1 which is donated to the charity of your choice. You can support as many charities as you’d like, and revenue will be split between them.

Currently, Browse For A Cause is only a Firefox plugin, with a Chrome extension in the works as well. The group also currently has a white label solution for charities to create a branded add-on, so they can feature a custom version of Browse For A Cause to people on their own site.

Early this morning we wrote about what appears to be a blatant rip off of Plurk by Microsoft China. Microsoft’s Juku product looks almost exactly like Plurk, and the code appears to almost identical.

Now, more than twelve hours later, Microsoft still has no real response to the situation. It was the middle of the night in China when the story broke, and Microsoft says that they are just now working with their team there to “track down the information.” In the meantime, Juku is being taken down:

A lot has been said recently about Facebook’s decision to re-write its privacy rulebook to encourage users to be more open about what they share. Privacy implications aside, at least it appears that Facebook is eating its own dogfood. First CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a bunch of person images, and now comes a big new feature that everyone should appreciate: Posting individual status updates to Twitter.

Yes, at some point this week, Facebook will roll out the ability to send your status updates to its rival, Twitter, we’ve confirmed. This will be built-in directly to its UI and not through some separate app you have to install, we’re told. It will be similar to the functionality it rolled out for its Pages feature in August, but this will be available on all profiles.

The short gloves are off. Earlier today, both Google and Facebook got into the URL shortening game with goo.gl and fb.me. Google’s move in particular is a direct challenge to bit.ly, the rising independent standard among link shortening services. Bit.ly’s response is in effect to ask publishers and consumers who they trust with all their data: Google or the rest of the Web?

To that effect, it is rolling out a new service called bit.ly Pro, which allows Web publishers to bit.ly to send out short links with their own branded (short) domain names such as nyti.ms, 4sq.com, mee.bo, or tcrn.ch. Publishers in the beta include AOL, Bing, foursquare, Hot Potato, the Huffington Post, Meebo, MSN, the New York Times, the Onion, TechCrunch, and the Wall Street Journal. What bit.ly is offering these publishers (us included) is a way to use a branded, trusted short URL which is powered by bit.ly. Publishers also get an analytics dashboard which shows realtime stats like the total number of clicks, and their distribution by geography and referring sites. Pro accounts is where all the money is, although bit.ly is not yet charging.

It’s no secret that most people use the same password over and over again for most of the services they sign up for. While it’s obviously convenient, this becomes a major problem if one of those services is compromised. And that looks to be the case with RockYou, the social network app maker.

Over the weekend, the security firm Imperva issued a warning to RockYou that there was a serious SQL Injection flaw in their database. Such a flaw could grant hackers access to the the service’s entire list of user names and passwords in the database, they warned. Imperva said that after it notified RockYou about the flaw, it was apparently fixed over the weekend. But that’s not before at least one hacker gained access to what they claim is all of the 32 million accounts. 32,603,388 to be exact. The best part? The database included a full list of unprotected plain text passwords. And email addresses. Wow.

Thanks largely to its search deals with Bing and Google, Twitter is already making revenue. But that income is not the where Twitter expects its true business model to lie. Instead, it believes that will come from premium features given to businesses that wish to use Twitter. Thus far, Twitter has yet to enable such features. But starting today, it’s beginning to test what is likely to be one of them.

As it notes on its blog, Twitter is testing a new feature it calls “Contributors.” Basically, this allows business accounts to be controlled by multiple Twitter users. Yes, it’s a form of multi-account support. For example, if any of us who work for TechCrunch were given the proper permission by the account owner, we could control this account from our own individual Twitter accounts. This includes the ability to DM people, follow new users, and most importantly, tweet from it. And if you were to tweet from it using your own account, your Twitter name would be appended onto the bottom of that tweet (see image).

For quite a while now now, one of the biggest problems with Android has been its app support. In particular, the Facebook application has been quite limited: you could read your News Feed, but many of the app’s functions actually kicked you into a separate browser window and weren’t done in the native app. Today, that changes.

A new version of Facebook for Android is now live on Android Market, and it’s a big improvement. I’m still playing around with it to find the various changes, but the app’s description points out two big ones: you can browse your friend’s profiles and photo albums natively. Given how core both of those features are to the Facebook experience, it’s surprising that they weren’t there to begin with. Suffice to say, this is a big leap forward for the app, and users are already expressing their delight on Twitter and the Market’s integrated reviews.