eBay will soon take over management of the affiliate programs for its core marketplace and for its Half.com site from ValueClick in the hopes that it can operate them more efficiently. In early April, EBay will begin to migrate the roughly 100,000 affiliates away from ValueClick’s Commission Junction to the new in-house platform
Demonoid, once one of the most popular BitTorrent trackers, has reappeared again, this time hosted in Ukraine. The web site is still down but the trackers are now fully operational again, perhaps a sign that Demonoid is crawling back up to speed?
Swedish courts will soon be able to force the country’s Internet providers to produce information on suspected file-sharers in a move to crackdown on piracy
A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a voiceless
phone call for the first time. With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice
Intel says it will ship quad-core chips designed specifically for laptops later this year. The quad-core chips, most likely for desktop replacement laptops, will be based on the Core 2 Duo microarchitecture and will ship in the third quarter. Intel declined comment on chip details, though enthusiast Web sites reported the chip is Intel’s Core 2 Extreme QX9300. The chips will be manufactured using the new 45-nanometer process
The notorious spammer authorities dubbed the King of Spam
is facing a possible 26-year jail sentence after pleading guilty in Seattle on Friday to charges of fraud and tax evasion. Robert Soloway, 28, had already been found guilty of spam charges in several civil cases — Microsoft won a US$7.8 million judgment against him in 2005 — but had avoided paying fines in those cases. The criminal charges to which he pleaded guilty on Friday followed his arrest in 2007 by the US Justice Department
Yahoo has announced its adoption of some of the key standards of the semantic web
. The technology is widely seen as the next step for the world wide web and it involves a much richer understanding of the masses of data placed online. The company said it would start to include some semantic web identifiers when indexing the web for Yahoo search. The move could mean a big boost for semantic web technologies which have struggled to win a big audience
From a windswept corner of Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, Japan Steel Works controls the fate of the global nuclear-energy renaissance. There stands the only plant in the world, a survivor of Allied bombing in World War II, capable of producing the central part of a nuclear reactor’s containment vessel in a single piece, reducing the risk of a radiation leak
Manufacturers of USB sticks and cards with fingerprint readers promise us that their data safes can only be opened with the right fingerprint. It turns out that an easy-to-find tool allows nosy parties to get around the protection in some products
Microsoft said it will acquire Kidaro, an Israel-based firm that has developed desktop virtualisation software to help enterprises more easily use and manage their virtual PCs
Google launched a free hosted service on Thursday that helps web site publishers sell advertising faster and fill unsold slots on their sites. Ad Manager, which Google said has already been tested by a few businesses, is designed to streamline how ads are placed on web sites and generate performance reports detailing how successful those ads are in reaching consumers, including click through-rates and revenue paid by the advertisers for those clicks
Mozilla has posted the fourth beta download of its next-generation Web browser. It includes improvements in performance and memory use, stability fixes, and user-interface improvements
Once the darling of Wall Street but more recently known as the burying ground for Netscape, Time Warner’s AOL is entering the social-networking arena with an $850 million acquisition of Bebo
Hackers looking to steal passwords used in popular online games have infected more than 10,000 web pages in recent days. The web attack, which appears to be a coordinated effort run out of servers in China, was first noticed by McAfee researchers on Wednesday morning. Within hours, the security company had tracked more than 10,000 Web pages infected on hundreds of web sites
Intel confirms that it is close to unveiling a new line of solid-state drives for laptop and notebook PCs that will feature a storage capacity up to 160GB. An Intel spokesman said that the chip maker will introduce 1.8″ and 2.5″ solid-state drives offering between 80GB and 160GB diskless storage during the second quarter of 2008. The spokesman declined to provide further details about the ship date or disclose the storage density of the drives
Wikileaks has 208 scanned pages (in one PDF) relating to the Church of Scientology and its former Office of Special Affairs
employee (and subsequent apostate) Frank Oliver. The documents are dated between 1986 and 1992 inclusive, when, according to the file, Frank Oliver was declared a suppressive person
and excommunicated. Frank Oliver should be able to verify the material and has appeared in the media before on subjects relating to the church. Starting on page 107, the document shows that at the time of writing the Church of Scientology was still actively engaged in black propaganda (especially concerning psychiatry), fair game
and infiltration
A new web service that lets users rate and comment on the uniformed police officers in their community is scrambling to restore service Tuesday, after hosting company GoDaddy unceremonious pulled-the-plug on the site in the wake of outrage from criticism-leery cops. RateMyCop founder Gino Sesto says he was given no notice of the suspension. When he called GoDaddy, the company told him that he’d been shut down for suspicious activity
. When Sesto got a supervisor on the phone, the company changed its story and claimed the site had surpassed its 3 terabyte bandwidth limit, a claim that Sesto says is nonsense. How can it be overloaded when it only had 8,000 page views today, and 400,000 yesterday?
Some of the largest book publishers in the world are stripping away the anticopying software on digital downloads of audio books
A bionic device the size of a pencil eraser — the labor of 20 years for a group of visionary Hub doctors and scientists — is offering hope that some forms of blindness could be alleviated within a few years. The Boston Retinal Implant Project, partially based at the VA Medical Center in Jamaica Plain, is one of 22 programs around the world working to restore vision to the degenerative blind. Their work: a bio-electronic implant that delivers images to the brain via a connector the width of a human hair
No sooner has the battle for the next-generation high-definition DVD format ended, with Blu-ray triumphing over HD DVD, than a new contender has emerged. A new system that is incompatible with Blu-ray, called HD VMD, for versatile multilayer disc, is trying to find a niche. New Medium Enterprises, the London company behind HD VMD, says its system’s quality is equal to Blu-ray’s, but it costs less
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