Yahoo Inc. Chairman Terry Semel stepped down as chief executive in a surprise move Monday, ending his increasingly ineffectual pursuit of online search leader Google Inc. - a losing battle that had demoralized Yahoo’s shareholders and employees.

The Sunnyvale-based company appointed co-founder Jerry Yang as its new CEO and named Susan Decker as its president. Decker, who had been touted as Semel’s heir apparent, was recently promoted from Yahoo’s chief financial officer to oversee the company’s advertising operations.

Semel, 64, will remain chairman in a non-executive role after spending the past six years running the company.

Researcher Ermanno Pietrosemoli has set what appears to be a new record for the longest communication link with Wi-Fi.

Pietrosemoli, president of the Escuela Latinoamerica de Redes (which means networking school of Latin America) established a Wi-Fi link between two computers located in El Aguila and Platillon Mountain, Venezuela. That’s a distance of 382 kilometers, or 238 miles. He used technology from Intel, which is concocting its own long-range Wi-Fi equipment, and some off-the-shelf parts. Pietrosemoli gets about 3 megabits per second in each direction on his long-range connections.

Most Wi-Fi signals only go only a few meters before petering out. Conventional Wi-Fi transmitters, however, send signals in all directions. By directing the signal to a specific point, range can be increased.

Without any sort of fanfare, AT&T Inc. has started offering a broadband Internet service for $10 a month, half the price of its cheapest advertised plan.

The DSL, or digital subscriber line, plan introduced Saturday is part of the concessions made by AT&T to the
Federal Communications Commission to get its $86 billion acquisition of BellSouth Corp. approved last December.

The $10 offer is available to customers in the 22-state AT&T service region, which includes former BellSouth areas, who have never had AT&T or BellSouth broadband, spokesman Michael Coe confirmed Monday. Local phone service and a one-year contract are required. The modem is free.

Just weeks after social network MySpace asked for advice on how to legally hand over information about sex offenders using its pages, law enforcement authorities have started to make arrests.

In Texas, a total of seven convicted sex offenders have been taken into custody. Six were registered sex offenders, arrested for parole violation. All six had MySpace profiles, despite the terms of their probation barring them from using the internet.

A seventh man was arrested for failing to register as an offender after his profile turned up on the social networking site.

Checkpoint has released an updated ZoneAlarm 7.1 that’s designed to work with Windows Vista’s architecture. This is the first true two-way firewall for the Windows Vista environment. Windows Vista includes the Windows Firewall, however, it blocks only inbound traffic, allowing all “except where excepted” outbound traffic. This may seem like a fine distinction, but it can be huge. If you acquire a remote-access Trojan on your Windows Vista machine, Microsoft may not flag the outbound traffic.

Checkpoint explained its delay in releasing this product in an e-mail. “Rather than rush to market with a patchwork solution when only a small fraction of our users were actually using Vista,” the company said, “we decided to invest in the long-term.” This includes building the product on Microsoft’s Windows Filtering Platform API, rather than continuing to use the soon-to-be outdated TDI API. Not only does this provide ZoneAlarm with more stability under Windows Vista, but it means Checkpoint won’t have to rewrite its code when TDI does expire.

Download ZoneAlarm Free For Vista

Virus writers have created a proof-of-concept virus that targets a widely-used computer forensics tool.

Vred-A infects WinHex scripts, preventing these additions to forensics and data recovery tools from doing anything except infecting other scripts. The virus has not been seen in the wild, and probably never will be.

Only Inspector Clouseau-style levels of incompetency would permit a forensics examiner to infect a system he was working on with the virus. WinHex shows a warning before running any script, so the virus can not spread without a user’s consent.

Blu-ray is extending its early lead in the high-def video wars.

Blockbuster Inc. announced on Monday that it would rent only Blu-ray discs, and not HD DVDs, in its 1,700 company-owned stores. That’s supposed to take effect by mid-July.

The company said the decision was based on Blu-ray rentals “significantly outpacing” HD DVD rentals, and added that both formats will be available through its Web site.

Microsoft Corp. unveiled on Sunday a new brand name for its Internet-based television platform, a service deployed by 10 companies including AT&T Inc.

Microsoft Mediaroom, formerly known as Microsoft Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), will link with computers found in the home to allow users to access a PC hard drive to listen to music or view photos on a TV screen, the company said.