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A Directory Of Wonderful
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Alicia Silverstone is, like, totally married. The 28-year-old "Clueless" star wed longtime boyfriend Christopher Jarecki at Lake Tahoe on Saturday, said Silverstone's publicist, Elizabeth Much, confirming a report in People magazine. It's the first marriage for both Silverstone and Jarecki, lead singer of the band S.T.U.N. The pair have been together for eight years.
http://www.speedyspider.com/Alicia-Silverstone-Wedding.html
LIVE 8 is part of a day of action across the world which kick-starts The Long Walk to Justice that calls on the leaders of the world’s richest countries to act when they meet in Gleneagles on 6th-9th July. On July 2nd in London, Edinburgh, Washington, Berlin, Paris and Rome.
http://www.speedyspider.com/live-8-concerts.html
Nike has a message for shoppers looking for the hottest shoe design: Just do it -- yourself. The world's largest athletic shoemaker has relaunched a Web site where shoppers design their own shoes, choosing everything from the color of the famous Nike swoosh to personalizing the tongue with a word or phrase.
http://www.speedyspider.com/Nike-says-just-do-it-yourself.html
A contemporary retelling of H.G. Wells's seminal classic, the sci-fi adventure thriller reveals the extraordinary battle for the future of humankind through the eyes of one American family fighting to
survive it.
Agence France Presse has sued Google, alleging the Web search leader includes AFP's photos, news headlines and stories on its news site without permission.
The French news service is seeking damages of at least $17.5 million and an order barring Google News from displaying AFP photographs, news headlines or story leads, according to the suit filed on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Internet bloggers should enjoy traditional press freedoms and not face regulation as political groups, lawmakers and online journalists said on Friday. In separate letters, Democratic lawmakers and Internet commentators urged the Federal Election Commission to make sure that political Web sites that serve as focal points for political discussion, like Wonkette.com and Freerepublic.com, don't have to comply with campaign-finance rules
Yahoo is likely to build and buy tools that help its users create, publish and search blogs, Susquehanna Financial Group Marianne Wolk said in a note on Friday. Wolk also said she also expects the company to expand into social networking software, which lets users share and organize content.
A dozen Cuban centenarians described their daily diets and lifestyles Wednesday to health specialists exploring the secrets of longevity, including the personal physician of 78-year-old President Fidel Castro. ()... But to do so, he said, six basic elements must be fulfilled: motivation to live, appropriate diet, medical attention, intense physical activity, cultural activities and a healthy environment.
Singing in the Rain 2005 Remix (Video/5MB).
Yahoo
and Microsoft's MSN have made significant gains in popularity
since May 2004, according to a study by Keynote Systems. Yahoo
and MSN made significant gains in the Future Usage Index
relative to their performance in the last study, published in
May 2004. Keynote also reported a jump in the number of users who call Yahoo and MSN their primary search engines, as primary Yahoo users jumped by 20 percent from the last study, and primary MSN users increased by 30 percent.
Samsung to unveil biggest-ever plasma TV. Samsung plans to release the 80-inch plasma TV in May but did not name a price. It bills the display as the world's largest plasma TV, though Samsung has actually demonstrated a prototype 102-inch set.
Microsoft debuts
security
tools
.
Microsoft is releasing tools that clean up PCs harbouring
viruses and spyware. The virus-fighting program will be updated
monthly and is a precursor to Microsoft releasing dedicated anti-virus software. Also being released is
a software utility that will help users find and remove any spyware on their home computer.
In
response to the recent earthquake and tsunamis devastating
entire countries in southern Asia and eastern Africa, the
American Red Cross is pleased to announce a generous $1
million donation from Sandra Bullock.
http://www.redcross.org
Microsoft has a built-in
booby-trap to discourage users from permanently adopting alternative browsers. It is the imbedded Internet Explorer
coding that you cannot shut off. Sure, you can designate another browser as the default browser.
Netcraft has released an Internet
Explorer plug-in that could help people avoid becoming victims
of online fraud. The Internet security company heralded
the plug-in toolbar, which displays information about the Web
sites a surfer is visiting, as a strong weapon against
phishing attacks.
"The Netcraft Toolbar provides you with
constantly updated information about the sites you visit as
well as blocking dangerous sites," the company,
best known for providing statistics on what software Web sites are running, stated in a
posting. "This information will help you make an informed choice about the integrity of those sites."
Few
things are more popular at the holidays than free money in the
form of a gift card ... unless it's redeemable at a store you
don't like.
Enter the secondary gift
card market. Sites like online auctioneer eBay Inc. and SwapAGift.com let recipients exchange their gift
cards for cash, usually less than face value of the card, or for another gift card.
It has
been an exciting, if strange, year for digital music as it
continues to lead a double life, finally embraced by the
mainstream music industry while continuing to thrive in the
underbelly of illegitimate downloads.
Digital music
players are selling faster than hot cakes and MP3, a once obscure audio
file format, is on everyone's lips and made many Christmas
lists. An MP3 player became a must-have, due largely to the cool value of Apple's iPod.
McDonald's has been hacked for listing
Taiwan as a separate country on its web site.
On Christmas night, the McDonald's Chinese home
page was turned into a black-and-white picture of a skull
bearing the words "protest McDonald's official Web site listing Taiwan as a country", the newspaper said.
Fancy a
$20,000 suit of armor under the Christmas tree? Or how about a
crystal-encrusted Mrs. Potato Head for $8,000? Or maybe a
$50,000 Ferrari go-cart?
While many U.S. retailers are
cutting prices to draw crowds and bolster holiday sales,
upscale U.S. retailers are having a merry time meeting strong demand for luxury gifts. The
International Council of Shopping Centers expects the
luxury market to be the retail story of 2004, with
strong sales at upscale Neiman Marcus Group Inc. and Nordstrom stores, and Coach handbags being snapped up.
Pop star
ends the year as the search engine's most-requested topic.
If the term "zeitgeist" is applied as it is defined -- an
era's intellectual, moral and cultural climate -- then it is
clear from Google's annual report bearing the same name that
the Web is a society dominated by suggestively gyrating
blondes.
The 2004 Year-End Google Zeitgeist statement was issued on Thursday.
It lists the terms most frequently entered
into the company's search engine over the past 12 months.
And, as was the case last year, pop diva Britney Spears was the most sought-after topic.
The
number of American consumers and businesses that subscribe to
high-speed Internet service, or broadband, jumped 38 percent
in the year ended June 30, 2004, according to new statistics released on Wednesday. About
32.5 million broadband lines connected homes and businesses to the Internet, up
from 23.5 million at the end of June 2003, the
U.S. Federal Communications Commission said in its semi-annual report of the
latest statistics. In the six months ended
June 30, the number of broadband lines rose 15 percent
while during the previous six months the number of lines rose 20 percent, the agency said.
Advertising on the Web could top $9
billion this year -- and there are lots of ways investors can
profit from the trend Sooner or later, advertisers had to
figure out the Internet. Here was a medium that was reaching
into nearly every office in America. And
at home, it was wresting millions of eyes away from
the TV. It could even count mouse clicks. Today, Net advertisers are finally hitting their stride.
Fiona
Apple fans wondering when the artist's third CD would see the
light of day might want to keep an eye on one enthusiast's
online petition. Dave Muscato, a Missouri musician and Apple
afficionado, founded the Web site
www.freefiona.com
last month in an
effort to pressure her record label to release "Extraordinary Machine."
Apple's follow-up to "Tidal" and "When the Pawn ..." reportedly has been finished since May 2003.
Google
Inc. said on Monday it has fixed a software flaw that could
allow hackers to view information contained on personal
computers running the No. 1 search engine's desktop search
software.
"We were made aware of this vulnerability with the Google
Desktop Search software and have since fixed the problem so
that all current and future users are secure," a Google spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement.
Commentary--My name is Ellen Simonetti,
but I am better known to Web surfers as
the Queen of
Sky
.
I had been a flight attendant for Delta Air Lines for
almost eight years when I started my blog, or online diary, in
January of this year. I entitled it "Diary of a Flight
Attendant."
On Saturday, Sept. 25, I came home to
flashing messages on my answering machine. "Ellen, I need you
to call me back. It's about your trip tomorrow," repeated the urgent-sounding voice on the tape.
Radio
had its golden age in the 1930s. In the
1950s, it was television's turn.
Historians may well date the golden age of the
blog from 2004—when Merriam-Webster.com's most searched-for definition was blog. How
long can it last? Who knows? Here's what we discovered about the new medium this year.
Only a
few are singing about them yet, but it could turn out that
diamonds are a computer's best friend.
Damon Jackson is one
researcher who sees the sparkling gems as a way to overcome
the limitations of the silicon chips that serve as the brains
of computers and the machines they run.
"It's not a
pie-in-the-sky idea," said Jackson, who works in the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory east of
San Francisco. "I would not be surprised at all,
as more people start to look into this, if five
or 10 years down the line that diamond would be a common material in a computer."
A
federal judge has awarded an Internet service provider more
than $1 billion in what is believed to be the largest judgment
ever against spammers.
Robert Kramer, whose company
provides e-mail service for about 5,000 subscribers in eastern
Iowa, filed suit against 300 spammers after his inbound mail
servers received up to 10 million spam e-mails a day in 2000, according to court documents.
Apple
is famously secretive about its future product launches while
Apple users are equally famous for speculating about new
technology from the company.
Fans have
speculated in recent weeks about the possibility of
a new type of iPod being announced at the MacWorld conference.
Self-proclaimed tomboy Eva Pigford
out-fierced her competition to win the third installment of
America's Next Top Model.
The 19-year-old student from Los
Angeles was left the
last pretty young thing standing on the season finale of Tyra Banks' catwalk-strutting reality show Tuesday night.
The
bug, which has been confirmed on a fully patched Windows XP
system with IE 6.0 and Service Pack 2, could allow a scammer
to display a
fake Web
site with all the attributes
of a genuine, secure site, including the URL and the icon indicating SSL security, according to researchers.
eBay
announced late Thursday that it had agreed to acquire the
apartment rental service
Rent.com for $415 million, the
latest move in its expansion beyond Internet auctions.
Rent.com,
based in Santa Monica, Calif., is
a privately held company
that matches landlords with tenants online, charging property owners for each lease produced through the Web site.
The
world's largest software company said it plans to make
available to Windows customers a "beta" test, or preliminary
version of a spyware protection and removal tool, based on the
Giant
AntiSpyware product, within one month.
The
upcoming
software
will scan
a customer's PC and locate spyware threats and help remove
them. It can also be set
up to block unwanted
software from being installed on a PC. The product will work with Windows 2000 and later versions.
An
attempt to launch an interceptor missile as part of the U.S.
missile defence shield failed early Wednesday in the first
test of the system in nearly two years.
The Missile Defense
Agency said the ground-based interceptor automatically
shutdown "due to an
unknown anomaly" shortly before it was to be launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean.
It took
nearly a year to sell 50 million songs, and then four months
to reach 100 million songs, which cost
99 cents each on the online
store. It required three
months for songs purchased to hit 150 million and then two months to reach 200 million songs.
Yahoo
is pushing one of the frontiers for search engines, with its
new test site for searching video content on the Web.
The
site, at
video.search.yahoo.com
, went
up on Wednesday, and pits Yahoo against competitors such as Singingfish, which is owned by America Online.
A new
virus strain masquerading as electronic Christmas cards is
accounting for
one in every 10
e-mails hitting in-boxes,
security experts warned Wednesday.
The W32/Zafi-D worm, which originated in Hungary, is
using mass-mailing and P2P (peer-to-peer) techniques to squirm through in-boxes and slow network traffic to a crawl.
Some
time soon high-speed Internet will go
high altitude, and people will be able to
connect to the Internet using wireless devices on commercial airline flights, as well use their cell phones.
Alek
Komarnitsky has
17,000 holiday
lights on his Lafayette, Colo., house and an
interactive site to let visitors turn the lights off and on with the click of a mouse.
Meet
the highly evolved community of
'A-listers' with growing
influence over the tech agenda. They show how radically power can shift in the age of the Internet.
MSN
Desktop Search Debuts.
Beta application is available as part of the new MSN Toolbar Suite.
Who
says "Solitaire" must be a lonely endeavor? Games tailored for
cell phones are increasingly adding community-oriented
elements, such as tournaments for top scores, head-to-head combat or chatting with other players.
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