Obviously, none of dot-coms can claim it is absolutely vulnerable to the economic downturn, but it seems worse for eBay for its traffic is falling steadily even before the downturn as Nielsen's data show below. Traffic graph from Complete tells the same story and points out the acceleration in declines since the downturn hit US economy, no surprise however. "eBay's (EBAY) core business continues to fall apart.  Some of the decline is likely the result of the declining economy. The rest of ...

Chris Evans, Google's Information Security Engineer and Tech Lead, has rejected the Gmail vulnerability rumored widely that would cause domain thieves recently. After investigation, it is found that the cause was a rather simple phishing scheme that fooled domain's owners to visit fake websites such as "google-hosts.com" and collected usernames/passwords of Gmail accounts. After gaining the user credentials, the attacker set up mail filters specifically designed to forward messages from web domain providers and consequently gain the controls of the domains. There ...

Facebook has won $873 million judgment against Adam Guerbuez, a Canadian man who floods the popular online social network with millions of explicit spam messages. It is reported that Guerbuez fooled Facebook's users to provide him with their credentials either by phishing to gain login information or acquiring it from third parties. After gaining access to user's personal profiles, he used software to automatically send out more than 4 million messages advertising many "spammy" products, including marijuana and male enhancement ones. Max ...

The first sign of the downsizing fever was seen last week when Google announced to shut down 5-month old service: Lively. Now it is said that Google may be preparing to cut thousands of jobs. Probably as much as 10,000 workers (and counting) will no longer enjoy the air of Googleplex. In fact, according to internal source, Google has been quietly fired hundreds of employees in the past few months without reporting to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or publicizing the ...

Ruby on Rail (RoR), the popular web application framework, had an upgrade to version 2.2 last Friday. This version features better internationalization (i18n) framework and stronger HTTP validators. RoR now supports i18n by default - the feature developers have desired for long to create multi-language websites easier. The framework adds better supports for etag and last-modifed validators freeing expensive server-side processing if the client the client already has the latest contents. Also featured are thread safety and a connection pool for the ...

Struggling with less than 10% search share, Microsoft plans to rebrand Windows Live Search next year, according to an internal source. It is reported by LiveSide that Microsoft has taken over the Kumo.com domain and has started redirecting some of its servers to it (accessible to some internal employees only). Kumo means "cloud" and "spider" in Japanese, you can see the traditional men's kimono pictured below for a "Kumo" look-and-feel. [caption id="attachment_152" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Japanese man in traditional kimono named "Kumo""][/caption] So, does it ...

Personnel from Mogulus discovered Saturday that YouTube Live live concert event was streamed by Akamai's CDN (Content Delivery Network). By monitoring live stream metrics for full network published by Akamai, they found at the peak of the event at 9:10 EST YouTube Live served about 700,000 concurrent viewers. This is an excellent result for YouTube's first live streaming event indicating great potential of live streaming for the internet. Google, though having its own very good CDN for text/image contents, has to rely ...

Responding to recent losses, Palm announced to trim its workforce of 1050 employees. Lynn Fox, Palm Inc's spokeswoman, said the layoffs began this week, but she declined to specify how many jobs would be cut. "The goal (of the layoffs) is to consolidate resources and focus our efforts more effectively," said Fox while it is reported that the move comes as Palm focuses on its Linux-based "Nova" operating system, as well as a device on which the platform will run. Palm, maker ...

It was noticed today SearchWiki - new feature that allow users customizing Google search results at their own tastes - no longer appears. Though the feature is obviously useful for many people, some find it somewhat annoying and want the default search results back but it appeares there is no option to turn SearchWiki off unless users logged out from Google's account before performing searches. Mike Arrington, TechCrunch, e-mailed Google for a comment and received a reply explaining this was just a ...

Verizon Wireless reported on Thursday night that some of its employees have "accessed and viewed" President-elect Barack Obama's  personal cellphone account with no authorization. The account, said, has been inactive for several months and was tied to a flip phone, probably a Motorola Razr, not a smart phone like the BlackBerry Obama has also been spotted. "All employees who have accessed the account - whether authorized or not - have been put on immediate leave, with pay," Verizon announced. "As the ...