Unholy Marriage: Spyware & Spam

Many have suspected that spammers keep track of which subject lines cause certain people to open emails, hoping to re-use key words with which those individuals may prove most susceptible. In this way, some people find themselves pelted with arbitrary... continue reading »

Google to Make Some Code Public

On a recruiting trip to Australia, Craig Nevill-Manning, a Google engineering group head, said that the search giant planned on opening up some of its code. Nevill-Manning said it was time to "give something back," and indicated that Craig Silverstein,... continue reading »

Anti-Spam Alliance Sets Guidelines, Wins Praise

Yesterday a consortium of ISPs including Yahoo, Microsoft, EarthLink and AOL published an email best practices document, which mostly rehashed some existing suggested policies. The main point centered on efforts to authenticate sender identities. As a new measure, the Anti-Spam... continue reading »

L.L. Bean Adware Suit Partly Settled

L.L. Bean, which sued four Claria clients for allegedly having sponsored pop-up or pop-under ads to run on its site, settled with two of them. Atkins Nutritionals and Gevalia Kaffe agreed to not sponsor such ads in the future and... continue reading »

Judge Blocks Utah Anti-Spyware Law

A Utah state judge granted adware firm WhenU's request for an injunction against a new Utah law that would have made a passel of adware-related activities illegal in the course of fighting spyware. The decision means that the law will... continue reading »

Presidential Online Efforts Heat Up

The Republicans are catching up to the Democrat's highly successful online efforts, creating their own parallel political grassroots structures online, including blog-like sites, Meet-up.com look-alikes and paid placements that, in sum, are impressing even Bush critics. Wired takes a look... continue reading »

Report: Google IPO to Break in July

Search Engine Lowdown reports that Google is looking for July to be the month it will finally go public. Citing Dow Jones reports, the site indicates the main timing issue has been the creation and testing of a new software... continue reading »

Canadians Tepid on E-commerce

The Vancouver Sun reports that Canadians still seem to be taking a wait-and-see attitude on e-commerce, a notion that bears out in the research numbers. But in a Heisenberg-like paradox, readers wishing to read the full Sun story linked here... continue reading »

Report: Internet Penetration at 'Saturation'

Mediamark Research reports that the remaining people in the U.S. not currently online may like it that way. The report suggests that the current level of penetration - just under two thirds of the population - might constitute saturation. A... continue reading »

BK Follows Viral Chicken with 'Ugoff'

Following on the significant awareness garnered through its Subservient Chicken viral campaign, Burger King launched a new effort that seems to be promoting its salads. The Ugoff site shows a caricature of a designer who makes odd audio comments as... continue reading »

eBay Expands Features for Affiliates

EBay has finally decided to stop shooting itself in the foot by asking its affiliates to pay to have the right to use its application programming interface. A few restrictions sprinkled in the program are presumably there to make sure... continue reading »