Facebook has hit 100 million active users. No formal press release has been issued, so you’re going to have to believe the guy who built the site.

The news came straight from the source: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and several of his fellow executives put it in their status messages on the social network, and platform manager Dave Morin broadcast it in his Twitter feed. At least one of them referred to the number being “active users,” the statistic that Facebook prefers to use, rather than registered accounts overall.

The growth of shared Wi-Fi and other wireless computer networks has increased the risk of eavesdropping on Internet communications, but researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have devised a low-cost system that can thwart these “Man-in-the-Middle” (MitM) attacks.

The system, called Perspectives, also can protect against attacks related to a recently disclosed software flaw in the Domain Name System (DNS), the Internet phone book used to route messages between computers.

The researchers — David Andersen, assistant professor of computer science, Adrian Perrig, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and public policy, and Dan Wendlandt, a Ph.D. student in computer science — have incorporated Perspectives into an extension for the popular Mozilla Firefox v3 browser than can be downloaded free of charge.

Perspectives employs a set of friendly sites, or “notaries,” that can aid in authenticating Web sites for financial services, online retailers and other transactions requiring secure communications. By independently querying the desired target site, the notaries can check whether each is receiving the same authentication information (a digital certificate), in response. If one or more notaries report authentication information that is different than that received by the browser or other notaries, a computer user would have reason to suspect that an attacker has compromised the connection.

Certificate authorities, such as VeriSign, Comodo and GoDaddy, already help authenticate Web sites and reduce the risk of MitM attacks. The Perspectives system provides an extra measure of security in those cases but will be especially useful for the growing number of sites that do not use certificate authorities and instead use less expensive “self-signed” certificates.

Google dropped Bluetooth and the GTalkService instant messaging APIs (application program interfaces) from the set of tools for the first version of the mobile phone OS, Android 1.0, according to the Android Developers Blog.

But the company made clear that handsets using the Android OS will work with other Bluetooth devices such as headsets, for example.

Dropping the Bluetooth API means software developers won’t be able to create applications that utilize Bluetooth for the Android OS. Bluetooth is a short-range radio technology that allows devices to work and communicate together wirelessly. An API is a set of tools and protocols designed to help programmers build new software applications.

The company opted to drop the Bluetooth API because “we plain ran out of time,” said Nick Pelly, one of the Android engineers responsible for the Bluetooth API, on the blog posting.

“The Android Bluetooth API was pretty far along, but needs some clean-up before we can commit to it for the SDK (software developer’s kit),” he added.

Google promised to support a Bluetooth API in a future release of Android, “although we don’t know exactly when that will be.”

Online electronics retailer Newegg has stopped charging sales tax to its New York customers, according to a posting on the Consumerist.com.

The move by Newegg reverses action the online retailer took in June, in which it began to charge applicable sales tax for all shipments to New York, following passage of a new state law that required certain companies to charge sales tax on shipments to New York state.

Effective August 21, however, Newegg discontinued the practice and is leaving it up to New York residents to pay that sales tax themselves. That policy basically returns the responsibility of paying sales tax for online purchases back to the New York consumer, which was the case prior to the New York legislature passing its law earlier this year.