Blackhacker

BetaNews | EC clears Google + DoubleClick merger
The two largest players in the Internet advertising industry are now officially one this morning, as the final hurdle to their merger has been cleared, and the final lines on the papers have officially been signed, according to Google’s CEO.

In the meantime, we do have a statement from the EC, which includes the following: “The Commission’s in-depth market investigation found that Google and DoubleClick were not exerting major competitive constraints on each other’s activities and could, therefore, not be considered as competitors at the moment. Even if DoubleClick could become an effective competitor in online intermediation services, it is likely that other competitors would continue to exert sufficient competitive pressure after the merger. The Commission therefore concluded that the elimination of DoubleClick as a potential competitor would not have an adverse impact on competition in the online intermediation advertising services market.”

emphasis mine
All I can say that Google must have GREAT lobbyists.

It had to happen someday…

BetaNews | Spammers bypass Google’s Gmail signup security
An Internet research firm discovered spam bots are now able to register on Google’s Gmail for spamming purposes. This latest attempt by spammers has been the most sophisticated recorded attempt to get around CAPTCHA, using both humans and bots.

Microsoft offers $44.6 bln for Yahoo; targets ‘dominant player’ - MarketWatch
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Microsoft Corp. on Friday offered to buy search-engine operator Yahoo Inc. for $31 a share, or $44.6 billion, in an effort to better compete with online-advertising juggernaut Google Inc.

The article goes on to say that the point of the offer is so the MSFT can compete with Google.  Which makes sense, Yahoo! has been losing share price, just posted a quarterly loss, a announced layoffs, making it vulnerable to a take over bid.

Lots of times these deals are more trouble than they are worth, thins AOL(link) and Time Warner, HP and Compaq. Time will tell.

Netcraft: Google Fixes Gmail Cross-site Request Forgery Vulnerability
Google has fixed a vulnerability in their Gmail web based email service which would have allowed internet attackers to steal mail messages from users without being noticed.

Doctors using Google to diagnose illnesses | the Daily Mail
The internet search engine Google has added another impressive string to its bow - by helping doctors diagnose illnesses, according to a new study.

Researchers found that almost six-in-10 difficult cases can be solved by using the world wide web as a diagnostic aid.

It would be good to build dedicated health search index like for BSD,Linux, and the US Gov’t

Dap: /.

Google has rolled out a Webmaster Central site. A webmaster with a Google account to see some basic search related statistics and diagnostics as well as a single location to find links to services and blogs that would be useful to site owners.

I think it is a good thing. As much as I love Google they seem to have some arrogance about their “almighty” search algorithm. Getting people involved to improve the quality of there searches and rankings is a start. The only thing is the people involved are the webmasters. Google enventually will have to provide more support. Google has positioned itself as the defacto search engine. As such it is going to have to take responsibility to provide a friendlier, HUMAN voice, that the public can interface with. It will be necessary if they plan to live up to there motto of “do no evil.”

Dap: BetaNews

A new service has launched named Allpears. It is a firefox extension that allows “buddies” chat and share files securely and easily.

I have been waiting for the public release of this for quite some time. I Think I heard about i last year sometime, and they have finally released a public beta. Still downloading my copy, but test it out and provide a review later on.

Update:
Google apparently beat them to the punch. There’s a new GTalk as of the 8/16. File Sharing is a central feature of this new version.

Yahoo! and Microsoft Bridge Global Instant Messaging Communities: Beta testing of unprecedented interoperability between Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger with Voice lets users communicate across IM services.
SUNNYVALE, Calif., and REDMOND, Wash. — July 12, 2006 — Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: “YHOO”) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: “MSFT”) today will begin limited public beta testing of interoperability between their instant messaging (IM) services that enable users of Windows Live® Messenger, the next generation of MSN® Messenger, and Yahoo!® Messenger with Voice to connect with each other. This interoperability — the first of its kind between two distinct, global consumer IM providers — will form the world’s largest consumer IM community, approaching 350 million accounts.1

One of the most frustrating things about IM is that people on different systems can not communicate. AOL(link), Yahoo! and Microsoft have kept it this way. Only Google has opened it network in a standard way that allows interoperability. Unfortunatly NONE of the large IM services have taken GOOG up on the offer yet. Well YHOO and MSFT are holding a limited public beta to test interoperability between those two services. Naturally they wish to combine forces and take on AIM(link) which I believe is still the dominant IM and the ever looming threat of Google. Maybe someday ALL of the big IM services will embrace XMPP or some other open standard that allows any service to “talk” with any other service and we will have a truly ubiquities IM communication that would surpass the phone, the postal system and even email. And hopefully this will happen before I loose my sight to cataracts.

I remember them saying they weren’t doing this but it looks like they lied.
So like the Google shill that I am… here’s the commercial for Google Checkout!