A Malaysian tycoon, Ananda Krishnan, plans to buy out the country’s largest mobile phone operator, Maxis Communications, the company said on Monday, in a deal that could be worth at least $5 billion. Maxis gave no reason for the buyout plan, but industry analysts speculated that Mr. Krishnan, left, might want to relist Maxis offshore and raise foreign capital to finance international expansion. Maxis, which faces a price war and a maturing market at home, is expanding into larger and less-developed Asian markets to drive growth. Chong Tjen San, a telecom analyst at Malaysia’s Aseambankers, said the buyout plan could be a first step toward raising money to finance major investments in India and Indonesia. Usaha Tegas, which is controlled by Mr. Krishnan and is a major shareholder in Maxis, has notified the company that it and its affiliates will make an offer by Thursday, Maxis said.

Alibaba.com could raise $1 billion in what would be the biggest initial public offering ever for a Chinese Internet company.

Responding to Viacom’s $1 billion copyright infringement suit, Google said that it would not back off, declaring that the law was on its side.

Tim Lee points us to an LA Times article on the growing success of The Pirate Bay's political movement, noting that its membership is growing in Sweden and is nearly equal to that of the country's Green Party. This is ironic for a few reasons -- most of all being that the entertainment industry was so proud over the raids on the Pirate Bay's servers last year, insisting that it had killed off the site. Instead, the site was back up in days, and the attention propelled what had been a fairly minor search engine for BitTorrent trackers into the limelight -- helping to get it many more users and to get the political movement some traction. In fact, we've now seen other political parties take on some of the Pirate Bay's platform. To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this. I don't support the Pirate Bay's position that unauthorized downloads are defensible. Instead, I think that copyright holders need to come to the realization that they're actually better off by letting people download content -- not that it needs to be forced upon them by users taking matters into their own hands. That said, by taking such an extreme position (and having it get some attention), perhaps it's more likely that content holders will come to this realization. They'll simply be forced to adapt and will start coming up with more successful business models that actually benefit from free downloads rather than trying to block them and sue their best customers.

The folks behind the public encyclopedia launch Wikia, a project to develop open-source search tools.

Filed under: Household

Continuing on in the grand tradition of products designed to let you be a lazy as possible, the "All-Sound-Catch Cubic Pillow" doesn't look particularly comfortable, but that doesn't appear to be the point. The cushion lattice allows you to stretch out on the couch without muffling any sound, allowing you use the smallest possible amount of energy to, say, talk on the phone. We're just worried that the Lazy Wii Guy will get a hold of one and cause, like, a negative energy vortex that destroys the universe.

[Via TokyoMango]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Chief software architect Ray Ozzie says everything Microsoft does will include an online services component.