NBC and the NFL will stream online the complete “Sunday Night Football” season, the first time a complete NFL game has ever been available on the Web in the United States.

“Sunday Night Football Extra,” as it’s being called, will offer the Al Michaels/John Madden audio stream as well as additional camera angles, the ability to watch multiple video streams and in-game highlights. It will begin with the Thursday night opening night, which will be televised on NBC.

The space tourism race marked a milestone Monday as British mogul Sir Richard Branson and American aerospace designer Burt Rutan waved to a crowd from inside the cabin of an exotic jet that will carry a passenger spaceship to launch altitude.

The photo-op was the public unveiling of the White Knight Two mothership before a crowd of engineers, dignitaries and space enthusiasts at the Mojave Air & Space Port in the high desert north of Los Angeles.

The four-engine jet, with its 140-foot single wing, is an engineering marvel. The space between its twin fuselages is where SpaceShipTwo, the passenger rocket being built for Branson’s Virgin Galactic, will be mounted.

White Knight Two, billed as the world’s largest all-carbon-composite airplane, is “one of the most beautiful and extraordinary aviation vehicles ever developed,” Branson proclaimed.

White Knight Two is the brainchild of Rutan, who made history in 2004 when his SpaceShipOne became the first private, manned craft to reach space. SpaceShipOne accomplished it with help from White Knight Two’s smaller predecessor, White Knight. After winning $10 million for the feat, Rutan partnered with Branson, chairman of Virgin Group, to commercialize the prototype.

White Knight Two’s long-awaited rollout, a year after a deadly explosion rocked Rutan’s test site, is the first tangible sign of progress toward making space tourism a reality. Despite the glitz surrounding the event, significant hurdles remain.

The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is the latest casualty of Google’s decision to remove open-source licenses from its popular code hosting service.

The search giant has said Google Code is no longer accepting projects licensed under MPL, although existing MPL-licensed code is allowed to stay.

The move comes two years after Google Code launched, when MPL was one of just seven licenses Google allowed developers to use. Others included Apache, BSD and the Free Software Foundation’s GPL and LGPL.

Google’s MPL ban follows the block on FSF’s Affero GPL. That decision’s seen a number of projects abandon Google Code for rival hosts.

Apple Inc CEO Steve Jobs, who has been dogged by investor concerns about his health, does not have recurrent cancer or a life-threatening health issue, The New York Times reported on Saturday.

“While his health problems amounted to a good deal more than ‘a common bug,’ they weren’t life-threatening and he doesn’t have a recurrence of cancer,” journalist Joe Nocera wrote in a column.

Nocera said he spoke to the Apple CEO about his health.

A start-up led by former star Google engineers on Sunday unveiled a new Web search service that aims to outdo the Internet search leader in size, but faces an uphill battle changing Web surfing habits.

Cuil Inc pronounced cool is offering a new search service at www.cuil.com that the company claims can index, faster and more cheaply, a far larger portion of the Web than Google, which boasts the largest online index.

The would-be Google rival says its service goes beyond prevailing search techniques that focus on Web links and audience traffic patterns and instead analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request.

Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user, Tom Costello, Cuil co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.

Danny Sullivan, a Web search analyst and editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, said Cuil can try to exploit complaints consumers may have with Google — namely, that it tries to do too much, that its results favor already popular sites, and that it leans heavily on certain authoritative sites such as Wikipedia.

The time may be right for a challenger, Sullivan says, but adds quickly: Competing with Google is still a very daunting task, as Microsoft will tell you.

Microsoft Corp, the No. 3 U.S. player in Web search has been seeking in vain, so far, to join forces with No. 2 Yahoo Inc to battle Google.

Cuil was founded by a group of search pioneers, including Costello, who built a prototype of Web Fountain, IBM s Web search analytics tool, and his wife, Anna Patterson, the architect of Google Inc s massive TeraGoogle index of Web pages. Patterson also designed the search system for global corporate document storage company Recall, a unit of Australia s Brambles Ltd

The two are joined by two former Google colleagues, Russell Power and Louis Monier. Previously, Monier led the redesign of ecommerce leader eBay Inc s search engine and was the founding chief technology officer of two 1990s Web milestones, AltaVista and BabelFish, the first language translation site.

They do have the talent that is used to building large, industrial-strength search engines, Sullivan says of Cuil.

Gmail now can be set to encrypt communications between a browser and Google’s servers by default, an option that makes the e-mail service harder to snoop on but also potentially slower.

Users already could encrypt communications with Gmail servers (by going to https://mail.google.com), but on Thursday, the company added an option to use that encrypted connection automatically.

“Your computer has to do extra work to decrypt all that data, and encrypted data doesn’t travel across the Internet as efficiently as unencrypted data,” Gmail engineer Ariel Rideout said in a blog post Thursday. “That’s why we leave the choice up to you.”

The encryption comes through use of HTTPS, a secure version of the HTTP protocol that governs how Web browsers fetch information from servers. It’s not simple to snoop on somebody else’s network traffic, but it can be done when the communications aren’t encrypted.

In a discovery that would probably send the Dr. Evil character of the “Austin Powers” movies into cardiac arrest, Google recently detected more than a trillion unique URLs on the Web.

This milestone awed Google search engineers, who are seeing the Web growing by several billion individual pages every day, company officials wrote in a blog post Friday.

In addition to announcing this finding, Google took the opportunity to promote the scope and magnitude of its index.

“We don’t index every one of those trillion pages– many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content… that isn’t very useful to searchers. But we’re proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and our goal always has been to index all the world’s data,” wrote Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj, software engineers in Google’s Web Search Infrastructure Team.

It had been a while since Google had made public pronouncements about the size of its index, a topic that routinely generated controversy and counterclaims among the major search engine players years ago.

AOL is shutting three data-storage services, including one of the Internet’s earliest photo-sharing sites, as it seeks to cut costs and focus resources on its advertising opportunities.

AOL Pictures, the year-old media-sharing site BlueString and the online backup service Xdrive will likely shut down by year’s end, though the company is looking to sell at least Xdrive, which AOL bought in 2005 for an undisclosed fee.

Company officials denied speculation Friday that the closures were meant to prime AOL for a sale. AOL parent Time Warner Inc. has been in continual discussions with both Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp., though the talks have been preliminary.

Google s Blogger service is responsible for 2% of the world s malware hosted on the web, according to a new report from security firm Sophos.

The security firm claims hackers are setting up pages on the free blogging service to host malicious code, or simply posting links to infected websites in other bloggers comments.

Blogger accounts for around 2% of malware, according to Sophos s senior technology consultant, Graham Cluley. It s head and shoulders above the rest [of the blogging services].

Cluley says Blogger is worse than other blogging services because of its close ties with the search behemoth. The attraction for the bad guys in targeting Blogger is that things pretty much get spidered instantly into Google, because it [Blogger] is part of Google, he says.

More than three-quarters of bank Web sites have design flaws that could expose bank customers to financial loss or identity theft, according to a University of Michigan study that will be presented this week at the Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy.

The study, “Analyzing Web Sites For User-Visible Security Design Flaws,” examined 214 bank Web sites in 2006. It was conducted by University of Michigan computer science professor Atul Prakash and doctoral students Laura Falk and Kevin Borders.

The vulnerabilities identified by the authors aren’t fixable with a simple patch. Rather, they are issues like login boxes, information submission forms, security information, and contact information placed on insecure pages; redirections outside the bank’s domain without warning; allowing insecure user IDs and passwords; and e-mailing sensitive information insecurely.

“To our surprise, design flaws that could compromise security were widespread and included some of the largest banks in the country,” Prakash said in a statement. “Our focus was on users who try to be careful, but unfortunately some bank sites make it hard for customers to make the right security decisions when doing online banking.”

The man who escaped from a federal prison in Florence after being convicted for sending spam e-mail killed his wife and one of their children before killing himself in an apparent murder-suicide on Thursday.

Eddie Davidson, 35, was serving a 21-month sentence for illegally sending spam over the Internet and escaped from a minimum security prison in Florence on July 20.

At around 11:15 a.m. Thursday, the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Department received a report of shots fired in the area of East Arkansas Place, at Davidson’s former home.

Around the same time, according to the sheriff’s department, a female teenager arrived at a neighbor’s house with a gunshot wound to the neck. She was taken to a hospital with serious injuries.

When sheriff’s deputies arrived at the house, located in the 43000 block of East Arkansas Place, they found a dead woman and a dead man lying next to a silver Toyota Sequoia in the driveway. They also found a dead 3-year-old girl inside the SUV.

The U.S. Attorney’s office says the man, Davidson, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The U.S. Attorney’s office says Davidson’s wife, Amy Hill, and their 3-year-old daughter were the other two who were killed and they both died from gunshot wounds.

Their infant son, about 7 to 8 months old, was found unharmed inside the back of the SUV still in a car seat. He was taken to a local hospital where he was treated for dehydration.

All of the deceased suffered from gunshot wounds, as did the teenage girl.
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“Wallace & Gromit” are going on a new adventure.

Telltale Games is creating an episodic video game based on Aardman Animations’ Oscar-winning animated film series titled “Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures.” The popular stop-motion clay animated franchise stars the cheese-loving, hair-brained inventor Wallace (voiced by Peter Sallis) and his long-suffering loyal pooch, Gromit.

“Grand Adventures” will allow gamers to play as both Wallace and Gromit, engaging in zany entrepreneurial schemes and tinkering with kooky contraptions. Connors said “Grand Adventures” will feature more physical and situation-based comedy and would likely follow the distribution model of Telltale’s episodic video game series “Sam & Max.”