Popular search engines pay millions for illegal ads

Illegal ads affiliated with gambling actions have been under investigation by the FBI, IRS, and others, since 2000, and only now they have reached an agreement with the 3 biggest search engines to pay what they deserve.

- Who are the big 3? Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.
- How much are they going to pay, in total? $31.5 million.
- How much per each? Microsoft - $21 million, Yahoo - $7,5 million, Google - $3 million.

Since we are currently on the Christmas season, and people are feeling generous, some part of the money will be donated to the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and also for public service ads.

Orkut gets attacked

Orkut, which is owned by Google, and is also the most popular social network website in Brazil (maybe bigger than MySpace/Facebook on the US) has recently been attacked by a worm.

The shabby worm used JavaScript and Flash in order to be propagated on the network, via scrapbook entries on profiles of plenty of users. Basically it was only a message related to New Year, but later on it infected all the friends of the first infected user, which results in 400,000 personas getting hit by a worm.

I have seen similar things happen in a social network (hi5) that is popular in Europe, but never thought it could be a worm, always had in mind that were stupid messages sent by “stupid” friends.

Source - CNet

Guest post by Tiago of Gadgetizer