Blue Security, which debuted its spam-fighting service last summerand built up a user base of more than 500,000, decided to wave the white flag after its servers were knocked offline by an aggressive denial-of-service (DoS) attack it claimed was launched by a deep-pocket Russian spammer tagged as "PharmaMaster."

May 3, in an attempt to get out the word about the DoS, Blue Security repointed its domain to an unused blog on Six Apart's TypePad blogging service. Within minutes, PharmaMaster attacked the blog with another DoS, which brought down Six Apart and left millions without access to their blogs. Blue Security's domain name service provider, Tucows, was also hit with a DoS and knocked offline for several hours; Tucows going down took thousands of Web sites it hosts with it.

Wednesday, Blue Security said it had to give up because it couldn't sustain the fight against spammers. "Several leading spammers viewed [us] as a strategic threat to their spam business," Eran Reshef, Blue Security chief executive wrote in the message posted to the company's site.

"After recovering from the attack, we determined that once we reactivated the Blue Community, spammers would resume their attacks. We cannot take the responsibility for an ever-escalating cyber war through our continued operations.

Google charges users nothing to search the internet; neither does Yahoo nor Microsoft MSN. E-mail? Instant messaging? Blogging? Free. Skype, the Luxembourg-based company that is now a multibillion-dollar division of Ebay, offers free VOIP - Voice Over Internet Protocols - telephone calls worldwide. San Francisco-based Craigslist provides free online classified advertising around the world.

In America, the Progressive insurance group gives comparison-minded shoppers free vehicle insurance quotes from its competitors. Innumerable financial service companies offer clients free tax advice, online bill payments and investment research. Michael O'Leary, Ryanair's colourful founder, predicts his discount carrier may soon offer free tickets to his cost-conscious euro-flyers.

Of course, Milton Friedman, the Nobel economist, is right: just as "there's no such thing as a free lunch", there is also no such thing as a "free innovation". These "free" offerings are all creatures of creative subsidy. Free search engines have keyword-driven advertisers. Financial companies use cash flow from profitable core businesses to cost-effectively support alluringly "free" money management services. Ryanair counts on the lucrative introduction of in-flight gambling to make its "free tickets" scenario a commercial reality. Innovative companies increasingly recognise that innovative subsidy transforms the pace at which markets embrace innovation. "Free" inherently reduces customer risk in exploring the new or improved -- and bestows competitive advantage. To the extent that business models can be defined as the artful mix of "what companies profitably charge for" versus "what they give away free", successful innovators are branding and bundling ever-cleverer subsidies into their market offerings. The right "free" fuels growth and profit. Technology has successfully upgraded King Gillette's classic "razor & blades" business model.

inform your customers

give more information about merchandise

give your auctions/store items greater page rank

attract customers

earn money via affiliate marketing

combine all selling efforts in one place

The beauty of this is that I am able to link to each item in my store in my blog as well. This allows me to generate greater exposure and page rank (relevance) for the search engines, because my items are being linked from another relevant place on the Internet. If a customer does not find my mugs through my online store, they may find it through my blog.

Calling it a "digital lifestyle aggregator," Canter promises that individuals will need just one login and password to check news feeds, publish blog posts, manage social networks and swap photos or music online -- all while being able to access the same services they currently use.

GoingOn will also have its own social-networking component built in, but Canter is adamant that he's not trying to get other products to run on his platform. Instead, his goal is interoperability; in his words, "We will become an identity hub."

According to their vision, a company like Amazon.com would no longer demand that you hand over tons of personal information before giving you an account and selling you a book. Instead, you, as the would-be purchaser, would offer Amazon whatever information you feel comfortable giving out -- such as your name, address and payment details -- and the retailer would be put in the position of accepting or rejecting your purchase.

One in five kids has been bullied or threatened via their mobile phone or computer, according to a study by U.K. children's charity NCH.

Bullying by text message was the most common form of abuse reported, with 14 percent of kids interviewed saying they had received upsetting messages on their mobile phones.

The survey, titled "Putting U in the Picture (PDF file)," collated responses from 770 youngsters ages 11 to 19. One in 10 said someone had used a camera phone to snap their picture in a way that made them feel uncomfortable, embarrassed or threatened. Of those, 17 percent believed the images had been forwarded to others.

Not everything about blogging is a good thing. Blogging has led to a rise in cyberbullying in schools where blogging allows kids to easily bully other kids and mock them. They also use digital photos for the humiliation of classmates. Kids are quick with technology and have little trouble with the latest photo sharing and blogging tools.

"What these social networks have shown is that you can use the viral capabilities of the Internet to grow a site very quickly, but I'm not even sure that anybody has proven yet that these businesses by themselves are sustainable, stand-alone businesses," said David Card, an analyst at Jupiter Research.

Friendster was the first popular social networking site, which typically offers users ways to create personal pages, post digital pictures, and invite people to link with them on the Website.

Friendster logged 703,000 visitors to its site in April, a 15 percent drop from the year-ago month and the average visitor spent 14 minutes on the site that month, down 65 percent year over year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. By contrast, MySpace boasted 8.2 million visitors in April, who spent an hour and 23 minutes on the site.

Currently, Google's news search returns results based on how recently a story was posted online and how closely the story appears to align with the keywords in related stories. However, the search giant has filed for a patent on an improvement that seeks to filter stories by certain measures of quality as well.

Critics are already noting that the approach might be flawed or at least misleading. Short of having news stories read by experts who could rank them based on quality, the technology will instead rely on pre-determined factors such as the reputation of a news site, how much Web traffic it generates and how old and large the organization that produced the story is in terms of news bureaus and employees.

It's one matter when the search engine caches a page you can't get anymore; that's a copyright violation but an all-in-all benign one in the sense that it's only giving you content you could not otherwise see (no different from, say, the web archive).

But it's quite another matter for Google to get in the way of serving current content. This means that the page is served from Google rather than from a publisher's server, which means that the publisher cannot count the traffic and serve targeted and dynamic advertising.

It also means that Google is copying content on its servers and serving it from there and thus is violating copyright.

And it means that Google is in a position to snoop on data on consumers' usage of sites that Google does not own: That is, Google will know what the consumers on my site are doing better than I will for these "accelerated" pages.

Google's Labs and API were held up as exemplars of a modern internet business, while Yahoo was seen as floundering in a sea of accountants, pop-up ads, and Britney Spears. But Yahoo has learned its lesson. Research.yahoo.com, launched last month, is the same idea as labs.google.com - a showcase for new and interesting projects - but it's better. Unlike Google, Yahoo publishes its papers, names its researchers and says what it is up to. One-nil to Yahoo.

I personally find it ironic that our right to .US privacy was stripped away, without due process, by a federal government agency -- an agency that should be looking out for our individual rights. For the NTIA to choose the .US extension is the ultimate slap in your face. .US is the only domain name that is specifically intended for Americans (and also those who have a physical presence in our great country). So think about this for a moment. These bureaucrats stripped away the privacy that you're entitled to as an American, on the only domain name that says that you are an American. I am outraged by this -- you should be also.