Stephen Fry, the British actor and vocal Apple admirer, defended the company on Twitter against accounts of brutal working conditions in its contract factories. This did not sit well, at all, with Mike Daisey, creator of a critically-acclaimed one-man show about those very factories, and, now, of a blog post in which he says Fry "is being a total idiot" and calls him a "fanboy," "apologist" and "pathetic."

Ever get tired of ankle-biting haters on Twitter? Freshdesk did, and responded with a dedicated website that called the critics out for, variously, being racist, being jealous, shilling, and tolling. Thus the company went from boring business-services startup to flamewar champion of the month.

Federal prosecutors just jumped into a long running slapfight between eBay and Craigslist over how the former acquired a stake in the latter. As it turns out, they're on Craigslist's side: They've opened a criminal probe into whether eBay executives used their ownership to illicitly obtain competitive information.

Surprise, surprise: Michael Arrington is in another internal fight at AOL. But this time the TechCrunch founder isn't slamming a sibling blog; he's dissing his own, and what some mystery middle manager or sales guy has done to it.

The annual Yale-Harvard football game is almost upon us, and Yale's freshman class went right for the jugular with an official t-shirt mocking Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg as "antisocial." As opposed to, say, Yale freshmen.

Microsoft and its CEO Steve Ballmer vehemently oppose a state income tax, earmarked for schools and health care, on the richest 1.2 percent. Which is odd because Microsoft's founder, worth three times as much as Ballmer, is a big fan.

There's a melodramatic "war" brewing between Facebook and Google, and Facebook's CEO is seizing the opportunity to squeeze more work from his engineers, declaring a "lockdown," keeping the office open on weekends, and putting a neon sign on his door.

High revenues and relatively low costs have made TechCrunch 50 the envy of its rivals, competing tech conferences like Demo and the Wall Street Journal's D. If only its founders could stop fighting like rabid dogs.

If Steve Jobs keeps this up, he may yet set off the biggest corporate flamefest in Silicon Valley: Googlers past and present are pushing back against the Apple CEO's trashing of their corporate motto.

On Wednesday, the president's first State of the Union address faces off against a geek's infomercial for absurdly expensive pieces of plastic. The jobless, broke, physically ill citizenry of this country is, naturally, way into the shiny plastic bits.

You'd think tech bloggers would learn from the peacemaking founders of Skype, who just dropped lawsuits holding back the $2.8 billion sale of their former company. Instead the writers are calling one another inaccurate, spineless "toddlers."

The revenues of Jason Fried's scrappy Chicago startup are estimated at maybe $10 million annually. Twitter, meanwhile, is about to deposit ten times that in its already-stuffed bank account. Which helps explain why Fried's sniping has reached mocking extremes.

Another reason to be careful who you call an idiot on the internet: he might be hailed as a genius someday, making you look like the real fool.

Theirs was a lover's quarrel, startup style. But now Hollywood tech barker Jason Calacanis has kissed and made up with his Silicon Valley conference partner Mike Arrington. And in true Valley fashion, the couple is pretending nothing happened.

How did a group of private investors snag Skype for $2 billion+ when big public corporations like Google were too scared to bid, thanks to lawsuits? With stolen computer nerd sorcery, allegedly.

It should be a happy day for Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis. The tech nabobs just wrapped their latest TechCrunch 50 conference, which captivated venture capitalists and the press. But the moguls are locked in Northern California-Southern California civil war.

They say bickering intensifies as stakes diminish; this helps explain the enmity engulfing the U.S. Chess Federation. A struggle over board seats turned into a flurry of lawsuits, all rooted in the following obscene and allegedly faked internet postings.

Matt Mullenweg should be proud; his giant WordPress.com has reportedly earned him millions. But his blog-platform rival, Tumblr founder David Karp, just surpassed him in one key metric. Mullenweg can blame Brooklyn one-upsmanship.

Elon Musk has a very loose definition of the word "founder." The Tesla CEO calls himself a PayPal founder; he isn't. He calls himself a Tesla founder; today a court begins hearings over whether he should stop saying that.

The tech world is atwitter: Google just announced a new operating system, which will compete with Microsoft Windows. The only problem? It's not a new operating system, and it doesn't compete with Microsoft Windows.