Top Items:

180solutions sponsors Yapbrowser and... child porn? — My head is swimming and I feel ill. I just read the blogs about 180solutions' latest — Yapbrowser, installed from 180's servers no less, that directs all search requests to child porn sites. And this from a company that has made countless claims of cleaning up their act.
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Yapbrowser: serves up Zango and...child porn? — Looks like another bad day for 180 Solutions. — After Mike Burgess highlighted a new install doing the rounds, some of us in the security community have been playing with it and the results are pretty shocking, in an "oh no not again" kind of way.


State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth — Yes, another quarter has passed, and it is time to take a look at the numbers! — For historical perspective, you can see earlier State of the Blogosphere reports from February 2006, July 2005, from March 2005, and from October 2004.
Discussion:
Don Dodge on The Next …, The Blog Herald, Terry Heaton's Weblog, theory.isthereason, Venture Chronicles, Boing Boing, Message, Earthling, Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life, Investor Relations Blog, Bloggers Blog, michael parekh on IT, Church of the Customer Blog, Web Strategy, What's New, B.L. Ochman's weblog, IP Democracy, Between the Lines, gapingvoid, Somewhat Frank, The Social Software Weblog, Pito's Blog, Blackfriars' Marketing, The RSS Blog, rev2.org and InterMedia
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My Decade Of Writing About Search Engines — Ten years ago today, I first starting writing publicly about search engines. If we had blogs back then, I suppose I would have been a search blogger. But we didn't. We hand-coded our HTML, walked through the snow for eight miles to FTP files to our web servers, and we liked it :)
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Can you crack the code? — Posted by Wei-Hwa Huang, Software engineer and 4-time World Puzzle Championship Individual Winner — Back in college, I had this idea of an Internet-based puzzle extravaganza. It would have one thousand puzzles of various types, more than anyone could ever expect to solve in the time limit provided.
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GOOGLE, SONY AND DA SPONSORSHIP CODE — When news of this broke a week or so ago, I thought "Well, it was about time Google started to play ball with the movie folks, the way Yahoo has for years." Sure, it's interesting that Google is finally jumping into the cross promotion pool …


XP and Vista to get new media player — Microsoft plans to jazz up its music player in Windows Vista, the company's next operating system. But at least some of the new features will debut much sooner. — The software, which will be built into Vista, is designed to offer better synching …

Rootkit numbers rocketing up, McAfee says — Rootkits, used by hackers to hide malicious software, are on the rise and becoming more complex, according to security company McAfee. — In the first quarter, the number of rootkits seen by McAfee's Avert Labs grew by 700 percent …

Fathom Online Reports First Quarter Search Marketing Keyword Prices Ease — Average Bid is $1.39 for Keywords — San Francisco, April 17, 2006 - In the first quarter of 2006, the average price that advertisers bid for keywords on search engines dropped three percent to $1.39 from $1.43 at the end of 2005 …


Comparing the Mapping Services — Online mapping has come a long way in the last year. Google Maps entered the field and added satellite imagery to spring itself into the spotlight - challenging the colorful cartoon-like map images of longtime mapping frontrunner Mapquest.

Men Are From VoIP, Women From PSTN — A recent HarrisInteractive survey about VoIP awareness in the U.S. and Britain found this intriguing fact: Men are more aware of VoIP than women by about a two-to-one margin. And, one would assume, from those numbers, they're much more likely to use VoIP as well.
Discussion:
VoIP & Gadgets Blog, Screenwerk, Realtime-VoIP, IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband and IT Facts


Bandwidth Glut Almost Over? — Improbable as it may seem, but the bandwidth glut created by the telecom bubble of the late nineties might be coming to an end. Or there is at-least light at the end of the tunnel. Many of the major long haul service providers are in fact are in the process …

CNET to Distribute Video-on-Demand on TV — It's "back to the future for CNET Networks" said CNET EVP Joe Gillespie, who will today announce video-on-demand distribution and a Web destination for the company's technology-related video programming. The publisher previously produced shows …


Pictures of Sony Ericsson SE123 Leaked? — The boys and girls over at Pconline.com.cn have posted what appear to be the first pictures of the as of yet unannounced Sony Ericsson SE123. Now, these photos could just be concepts not fit for public consumption or outright fakes …


At LucasArts, No Playing Around in Quest to Be No. 1 — SAN FRANCISCO — In September 2004, Jim Ward met with the director George Lucas at his office at Skywalker Ranch near here. At the time, LucasArts, the video game company created by Mr. Lucas in 1982 and run by Mr. Ward, was in disarray.

Cable industry confab soft-pedals problems — LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Last week in Atlanta at the National Show, the cable industry's annual pep rally, a fragile but carefully cultivated suspension of reality permeated the air. This beleaguered business spins itself so thoroughly …