Cuil is not cool

A new search engine has been set up. It's called 'Cuil' (pronounced 'cool'), has $33m in backing and it doesn't collect information about the surfing tendencies of users. Stories about it point out pluses like the size of its massive index (120 billion Web pages) and minuses like fewer total hits than what Google turns up when searching the same thing.

Formed by ex-Googlers, Cuil has been in development for the last three years and has attracted a huge amount of interest, coverage and upon launch - searches.

"Anybody who thought Cuil was this Google killer can really see now that no, that's not going to happen today — and the likelihood is that's not going to happen a year from now," says Danny Sullivan, internet search guru and editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.

Cuil's distinctive design, in which results appear in three columns across the page, also allows for longer previews of each site's content. But the acid test of any search site is the results it generates, and for now, anyway, Cuil falls way short of the industry's leaders, and even for that matter, of many startups.

Cuil has a distinctive, if old-fashioned, approach to indexing websites. Instead of ranking them based on popularity, as Google does, it focuses on the content of each page. That may make sense in theory — after all, the most popular restaurants, for example, rarely serve the best food — but it is precisely the model that Google broke away from in order to give users more relevant results.

"Obviously, there's a lot of interest in any stealth startup that's going to be a search engine. ... Everyone wants to know, 'Who's the next Google?'" said Erick Schonfeld, co-editor of Silicon Valley tech blog TechCrunch. "There's no way any startup in the world can outperform Google. The question really is whether or not Cuil can produce better results than Google can."

Google SMS (The Vacationeers)

Another eerie Google tale from The Vacationeers. A young man uses Google SMS and gets more than just movie times.

Yahoo! rejects Microsoft's latest offer

Yahoo!’s board met over the weekend and rejected a new proposal from Microsoft that would have seen the Internet company broken up.

The proposal, which the board of Yahoo rejected at a meeting Saturday, would have given Microsoft Yahoo's search business, with the rest of the company going to investor Carl Icahn.

The search giant said it had received the joint proposal from Microsoft and Mr Icahn late on Friday and was given less than 24 hours to accept. It said Microsoft and Mr Icahn made clear they were unwilling to negotiate the fundamental terms, which included the immediate replacement of Yahoo!'s board and removal of top management.

"This odd and opportunistic alliance of Microsoft and Carl Icahn has anything but the interests of Yahoo!'s stockholders in mind," Yahoo! chairman Roy Bostock said.

"Clearly Microsoft, having failed to advance in search, is aligning with the short-term objectives of Mr Icahn to coerce Yahoo! into selling its core strategic search assets, on terms that are highly advantageous to Microsoft but disadvantageous to Yahoo! stockholders," Mr Bostock said.

The move comes a few weeks before Yahoo!'s annual meeting on August 1, when Mr Icahn, who owns nearly 5 percent of Yahoo!, is seeking to oust chief executive Jerry Yang and replace the nine-member board with his own slate of directors.

Major internet security flaw disclosed

A security researcher Tuesday revealed a flaw that makes it possible for hackers to take control of the Internet.

The flaw is in the design of the Internet's Domain Name System(DNS), a fundamental feature of the Internet that makes it possible for computers to find Web sites.

Details of how the flaw works were not revealed, but it allows Internet users to be redirected anywhere an attacker chooses, said Dan Kaminsky, the director of penetration testing for IOActive, who discovered the flaw by accident six months ago.

According to a bulletin from the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), the vulnerability (VU#800113) could allow cache poisoning and misdirection of Web requests, sending users to unknown Web sites.

Web poisoning exploits are well-known, but because the new vulnerability lies in the basic design of the protocol, it is potentially more dangerous than previous problems. If the vulnerability is exploited, “you would have the Internet, but it wouldn’t be the Internet you expect,” Kaminsky said.

A group of 16 security researchers met on Microsoft’s campus in March to coordinate a response.

Major vendors of Domain Name System (DNS) servers are making an unprecedented coordinated release of patches.

By withholding details and using a patch that does not directly fix the vulnerability, the researchers hope to make it as difficult as possible for hackers to find the vulnerability.