Folio reports that Time Inc., the parent company of Business 2.0, will be making a decision on the fate of the magazine next week, according to a source. The article, however, then quotes a Time Inc. spokesperson saying that the company "absolutely will not" be making a decision next week. The spokesperson in question is, of course, fibbing flack Danielle Perissi, so take her statement with a very large grain of salt. Heck, store it away in a Morton's warehouse.

Skype has finally resolved the "outage" that the eBay-owned Internet telephony service experiences last week. The explanation provided: It's all Microsoft's fault. The software company has a regular schedule for downloading updates to its Windows operating system. Skype engineers claim that a large number of reboots following Microsoft's "Patch Tuesday" disrupted its network. Microsoft makes for a convenient scapegoat — especially considering the fact that it offers a competing VOIP service, Windows Live Messenger — but this excuse doesn't hold water.

In the comments to my piece raising questions about the deal between Indiana University and "human-powered" search engine ChaCha, PR flack Liza Dittoe says she'd like to point out some "errors." By which we assume she means her client's copious mistakes. Oh, but "inadvertent mistakes," she says. How exactly does a CFO and general counsel "inadvertently" make the mistake of signing and certifying as true a form being submitted to the SEC? Isn't it his job to be attentive to these matters? And how difficult is it to know whether or not someone's still on your board?

Tech behemoth Microsoft has signed, alas, not signed Australian beauty queen Erin McNaught as an IT spokeswoman this week, contrary to prior reports that she was going to promote the "sexy" image of IT professionals. McNaught, known to the Australian press as McNaughty, does have a few tech qualifications — more than many other beauty queens, anyway. She currently hosts the Aussie gaming show "Cyber Shack" and was a student at Queensland Institute of Technology before she left to pursue a modeling career. It turns out, however, that she was just a last-minute replacement speaker at a Microsoft-sponsored conference. Too bad. We were anxiously waiting to see how she would take on Google's right-wing Australian spokesman, Rob Shilkin.

An aside: While working on this morning's item about the back-from-the-brink reprieve of Business 2.0, I phoned Time Inc. flack Danielle Perissi, whose ostensible job is to represent the publisher's business titles. As usual, she issued a denial that any changes were afoot. Well, no, that's too kind: I should say, rather that she lied baldfacedly and, what's far worse, unconvincingly about the matter. I don't know why I bothered to call her. Or why colleagues at Time Inc., a company full of journalists with no patience for inept flacks, tolerate her. Oh, right — they don't.

There was a time, back in 1998 or so, when AOL was synonymous with email for most ordinary folks. That time, of course, is long past. But AOL's tireless flacks are trying to bring it back with a press release outlining which cities' residents are most addicted to email. Surprisingly, Washington, D.C. comes in first. But unsurprisingly, the release doesn't mention the reality AOL now faces: Today's email users, by the hundreds of millions, spurn AOL's offerings in favor of Yahoo Mail, Microsoft's Hotmail, and Google's Gmail.

Datacenter 365 Main released a self-congratulatory announcement celebrating two years of continuous uptime for client RedEnvelope, mere hours before today's drunken blackout.. [PR Newswire]