Week 16 del.icio.us links April 18, 2007

del.icio.us links for April 18, 2007

1. Single-victim spam attacks skyrocket

   MessageLabs Ltd. said it intercepted 716 messages from 249 targeted attacks last month. Last year the company was seeing two a day on average. “Two years ago it was two attacks a week, last year two a day,” he said.

2. BBC to open up archive for trial

   The BBC is to open up its vast archive of video and audio in an on-demand trial involving more than 20,000 people in the UK. Full-length programmes, as well as scripts and notes, will be available for download from the BBC’s website.

3. A closer look at Apple’s new ProRes 422 video format

   The new RED One camera, for example, compresses a 4000-pixel wide or “4K” video image into a 200 megabit per second stream. By contrast, a high-quality 1920×1080 ProRes clip (roughly a quarter the size of the 4K video) is larger at 220Mbps.

4. Microsoft pays $180m to Iowa in suit

   The result of a class-action lawsuit, the deal will ask Microsoft to refund a set amount of money to private buyers who picked up a copy between 1994 and 2006, ranging from $10 for Word to $29 for the complete Office suite. No proof of the sale needed

5. iTunes hosts first album sale, new iPod game spotted

   The Apple 2.0 blog notes that on Wednesday, Apple’s iTunes Store launched its first known album sale (though it is actually the second), offering nearly 100 albums for just $7.99 each. (An image link is accessible off the iTunes Store main page).

6. Sling in talks to stream TV to iPhones

   Sling Media has actively discussed the possibility of streaming media to its upcoming iPhone, the former company’s CEO Blake Krikorian revealed this week during a speech at the NAB expo in Las Vegas.

11 more articles after the jump

1. Open Letter: A Lesson Learned Twittering

   How not to use Twitter if you work in PR – “The following is an open letter to Jim Louderback, Editor-in-Chief of PC Magazine, as well as any of the several hundred employees who work for Ziff Davis Media.”

2. Toronto’s road repair bill for 2007: $230 million

   Not sure if this is on your route home from the airport – “The first big road closure of the season takes place this weekend, when the Gardiner Expressway will be shut down Sunday from Carlaw Ave. to the Humber Bridge.”

3. Your Blackberry Isn’t Working

   WNBC is reporting a major Blackberry outage that affects 100% of the Blackberries in the US.

4. Geil launches carbon-fibre RAM

   They plan to cater to the racing car addicts, because the heat-spreaders feature carbon-fibre. This is not a typo – Vorsteiner, German tuner of BMW cars is in charge for manufacturing according carbon-fibre elements.

5. Jack Thompson continues his “crusade” after VT shooting

   Jack Thompson talking about a possible link to violent video games after the VT shooting and how they may help police understand why the shooting took place.

6. Participation on Web 2.0 sites remains weak

   A tiny 0.16 percent of visits to Google’s top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch, according to a study of online surfing data by Bill Tancer, an analyst with Web audience measurement firm Hitwise.

7. Microsoft Can’t Use Own Software To Pay Washington State Taxes — Windows Vista

   Microsoft and other businesses headquartered in Washington State can’t use Windows Vista-based PCs to pay their unemployment insurance taxes online because the operating system is incompatible with the state’s electronic filing system

8. Tellme Unveils Mobile Search At Web 2.0 — Speech Recognition

   The company has a current beta download for testing The final version release date hasn’t been named. The company is demonstrating its service at the Web 2.0 Expo this week. Only a month after it said it would be acquired by Microsoft.

9. ‘Killer Ecosystem’ Needed For Mobile Web 2.0 not Killer App — Mobile Web

   The panel, which included Ajit Joakar of Open Gardens and Mike McCune from Tellme, made its recommendations during a morning session at the Web 2.0 Expo, which is in San Francisco this week. The consensus is that customers need a “killer ecosystem”

10. Hitwise Predicts Which Web 2.0 Firms Will Win — Web 2.0

    Based on an extensive filter of 25 million Internet users and some 860,000 Web sites, Bill Tancer, the general manager of Hitwise, said Yelp, StumbleUpon, Veoh, WeeWorld, Imeem, and Piczo have the potential to be the next YouTube, Wikipedia, or Flickr.

11. Microsoft, Adobe, Yahoo, Tout Web 2.0 Hybrid Apps — Web 2.0

    That’s not to say the core technology in Web browsers will disappear. In fact, rich Internet applications like the Joost Internet video player are being developed on top of Mozilla’s code base. What’s in danger is the browser as default online application