Google—Sauron of the internet, world, and soon: Middle Earth's tech scene—will soon have your life on file, especially with the advent of Google Wave, which is still in the invite-stage. People are now paying for invites.

Today was Kristin Kovner's last day at Google, after three years with the company in New York. And what better way for a YouTube marketer to say goodbye to cherished colleagues than with a serenade, uploaded to the intranet?

The uber-geeks who run Google don't seem like to think about the messy world of law and politics. But it can't be avoided. The latest example: A Bear Stearns manager done in by a GMail account he thought was closed.

Once upon a time, search engines were cluttered. A scrappy upstart called "Google" surpassed them with a minimalist interface. Ten years later, Google still has a minimalist interface... if you install a popular javascript bookmark. Progress!

Tech bloggers are in a tizzy over the prospect of tech giants Google or Microsoft getting real-time access to the thoughts of Twitterers, but Valleywag has learned that cash-hungry Twitter is already selling access to its "firehose" of data.

Google used to say its lavish perks bolstered productivity and, if anything, would only grow more posh. But a recession changes things. Now the official line is more like, just be happy you're working, you ungrateful fucking pigs.

• David Letterman appears to be through discussing the little sex scandal he now finds himself in. The subject doesn't come up on tonight's show. [NYP]
• Gourmet may have gone down, but the editor of Saveur says the mag is doing well (and that she's been flooded with resumes, not surprisingly). Meanwhile, while Condé Nast is laying off staff at Brides, a brand new bridal magazine is now preparing to launch. The dream lives on, clearly. [Forbes, NYO, Gawker]
• Related: Condé Nast's digital division is facing issues, as well. [NYO]
• The remaining bidders for BusinessWeek, now that Mort Zuckerman and a private equity firm have dropped out: Bloomberg LP and ZelnickMedia. [NYT]
• Barbra Streisand has scored her ninth No. 1 album, beating out Mariah's new record. It makes her the second-oldest living artist to top the charts. [Reuters]
• Famed fashion and celeb photographer Irving Penn has died at age 92. [AP]

Good news, jobless poors: The recession is over, according to the billionaire nerds who run Google. Their computers told them so, and now the executives are in New York to spread the word and count their gold bars.

Today Google celebrates the 57th anniversary of the bar code, a handy machine-readable code language designed for inventory management and population control.

The bad news is that 30,000 Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and other email accounts have had all their login info posted online, by hackers. The good news is, it's their own dumb fault.

Media mogul and grumpy old man Rupert Murdoch has developed a "personal antipathy to the Internet," biographer Michael Wolff writes. Murdoch even thinks MySpace, which he himself paid $580 million for, is kind of a criminal piece of garbage:

Each year starting in 2003, Microsoft has honored Jon Skeet for his extensive work helping people code in a Microsoft-developed programming language. But Skeet joined Google last year, and his new employer is apparently the jealous type.

All summer we kept hearing Eric Schmidt had resumed hanging out with onetime flame Marcy Simon, the killer flack at play-for-keeps Microsoft PR firm Burson-Marsteller. We're still hearing that. And now Simon's talking about the Google CEO in public.

Steve Jobs and Apple famously dissembled about the CEO's health, until Jobs took a six-month medical leave. And what did Jobs do on his return? Issued a controversial statement about Google that the search company has now flatly contradicted.

• As expected, ratings for Jay Leno's new show are falling fast. [THR]
• Bloomberg LP appears to now be in the lead to buy BusinessWeek. [NYP]
• Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol sold 1 million copies its first day. [NYT]
• Don't try to talk to Vogue publisher Tom Florio about what changes are in store for the mag now that those McKinsey consultants have finished their review. (He's not talking about it.) Meantime, McKinsey's final report will be handed over to Condé Nast's management next week. [NYO, WWD]
• Fox News boss Roger Ailes collected $24 million in compensation last year, which is $2 million more than his boss, Rupert Murdoch, took home. [BW]
• Jay-Z has his 11th No. 1 album. That puts him ahead of Elvis Presley as the solo artist with the most chart-toppers. But he's still behind the Beatles. [LAT]

Julie Hilden is not happy with Google. The company was "cowardly" and "fence sitting" in a lawsuit exposing an anonymous blogger who badmouthed a model, the lawyer wrote on FindLaw. In other words, Blogger.com doesn't have your back, namecallers.

Here's the stuff of conservative nightmares: The Obama administration wants to "mind map" America using computers, inspired by the Big Brother of Silicon Valley

Google was once happy to help us find things on the wild, wild web. The company has obviously grown past that point, but could it soon be savior of the entire world? Possibly and probably.

Foursquare has raised its first venture capital investment, and it couldn't have been easy: There are persistent rumors the social networking company stole its code from Google. Plus, it wanted to invest the money in a domain name. Ooof.

Monopoly is a terrible, depressing board game; as one expert famously said, it's all about "grinding your opponents into dust" while you cackle. But at least the gouging and economic ruin has been confined to cardboard. Until now.