Although you can win or lose real money, BringIt.com is not considered online gambling, and it’s legal in 39 states.

The site, which lets players challenge other gamers for money, says it is different from online poker and other games of chance because video games are considered a game of skill.

BringIt is set to emerge from its “beta” test version in the next few days. It’s free to sign up, provided you are at least 18. The site makes money by taking a 10 percent cut from people’s wagers and a $4 fee from winners when they withdraw their loot.

Founder and CEO Woody Levin, 30, said most of the players on BringIt play for small amounts of money, $5 or $10. It’s not really for “hardcore, crazy gamers,” he said, but rather, people who “want to put their money where their mouth is, a little bit.”

To ensure that first-time players don’t go pawning engagement rings, BringIt limits players’ entry fees to $25 for the first 10 games they play. The limit increases in steps until it reaches $500.

BringIt supports the PlayStation 2, the PS3, the Xbox 360 and the Wii. Players challenge each other on the site, but play on their consoles. BringIt holds players’ entry fees until the game is finished. After the game is done, it verifies the results and credits the winner, minus the service fee.

Microsoft Corp and Yahoo Inc have launched a 10-year Web search deal to challenge market leader Google but stopped short of combining other advertising businesses or suggesting any deeper ties.

The long-expected deal means Microsoft’s new Bing search engine will be combined with Yahoo’s experience attracting advertisers in the first serious threat to Google Inc — if the companies get regulatory approval and can make the partnership work.

Yahoo shares fell 12 percent as some investors were disappointed by the limited scope of the deal, which did not include up-front payments for Yahoo. Some investors had expected up to $3 billion up-front, according to a Bernstein report.

A Mac security expert has uncovered a technique that hackers could use to take control of Apple Inc computers and steal data that is scrambled to protect it from identity thieves.

Prominent Mac researcher Dino Dai Zovi disclosed the software flaw at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, one of the world’s top forums for exchanging information on Internet threats.

About 4,000 security professionals are in attendance, including some who are really hackers. While experts ferret out software flaws to fix them and protect users, hackers use the same information to devise pranks or commit crimes.

It is not illegal to publish software that can be used to hack into computer systems, though it is against the law to use it to break into them.

Time Warner Inc. bought back Google Inc.’s 5 percent stake in struggling Internet company AOL LLC for $283 million, according to a regulatory filing by AOL on Monday.

The price paid on July 8 is close to what Google estimated its stake at earlier this year.

Mountain View-based Google bought the stake for $1 billion in 2006, but in January estimated the investment had sunk by more than 70 percent to $274 million - giving AOL a market value of about $5.5 billion. Time Warner agreed to buy back the stake earlier this year.

Verizon will provide its medium-and-faster-speed DSL and fiber (FiOS) customers with free national Wi-Fi hotspot access: The service, provided by Boingo and rumored to be in the works earlier this year, allows Verizon to match some of Cablevision’s offer in overlapping territory, but to also compete with cable operators and future competitive services elsewhere.

Microsoft announces plans to shut down Soapbox, its online video competitor to YouTube, by the end of August. Despite Soapbox, Microsoft had only 2 percent of the online video market, placing it fifth behind Yahoo, Hulu, Fox Interactive Media and Google. As Microsoft readjusts its corporate strategy during the recession, it has been killing a number of legacy programs, including Popfly, Encarta and Money Plus.

Google on Thursday released a version of its Latitude mobile application for the iPhone. But Apple, curiously, has decreed that it be a Web-based app and not a native iPhone app, which has raised some eyebrows.

In announcing Latitude for iPhone, a Google blog post noted that the application works much the same way as on other platforms like Android, Symbian, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile. It allows you to show your location on a map so that friends may find you.

The big exception for the iPhone version is that you have to use the service in the Safari Web browser. As for why, Google put it this way: “We worked closely with Apple to bring Latitude to the iPhone in a way Apple thought would be best for iPhone users. After we developed a Latitude application for the iPhone, Apple requested we release Latitude as a Web application in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone, which uses Google to serve maps tiles.”

“The way Apple thought would be best for iPhone users” isn’t a new concept: The company has tightly controlled what kind of applications are allowed access to the App Store–albeit sometimes without clear policy. But Apple telling Google what to do? Now that’s interesting. The companies have a history together, such as when Google was allowed access to unpublished iPhone APIs for its Mobile app. And of course, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on Apple’s board of directors.

Two researchers for Hewlett-Packard have created a browser-based darknet, an idea that could make it easier for businesses to keep eavesdroppers from uncovering confidential information.

Darknets are encrypted peer-to-peer networks normally used to communicate files between closed groups of people. Most darknets require a certain level of technological literacy to set up and maintain, including taking care of the necessary servers. However, HP researchers Billy Hoffman and Matt Wood plan next week to demonstrate a browser-based darknet called “Veiled,” which they claim requires little proficiency to set up and run.

“This will really lower the barriers to participation,” Wood told ZDNet UK. “If you want to create a darknet, you can send an encrypted e-mail saying, ‘Here’s the URL.’ When (the recipient visits) the Web site, the browser can just get (the darknet application) going.”

Hoffman and Wood are scheduled to demonstrate the technology next week at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

Wood said HP does not want to turn the project into a commercial product. While the company does not plan to make the source code available, the researchers do plan to open source their idea, so to speak, so other security researchers can “pick up the baton.”

“HP has no desire to patent or copyright or release any code,” Wood said. “Black Hat is one of the top security conferences, and we want to get this cool idea into the hands of people who are really smart.”

Businesses could use browser-based darknets to set up workgroups to exchange commercially sensitive information, or to have a means of making anonymous suggestions to management, Wood said. “I like the idea of a suggestions box on the Web,” he said. “It provides an anonymous way to make suggestions to your boss.”

HP’s darknet research came about when the researchers realized the potential of new browser technologies, according to Wood.

Browsers with HTML 5 support–such as recent versions of Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer–allow files to be stored “persistently” on the client, for working on them when offline. This feature, coupled with the distributed grid-computing nature of a darknet, means files can be effectively uploaded in perpetuity, even when the initial browser has been shut down. It also makes the darknet resilient, said Wood.

“One of the benefits of a darknet is that they are distributed,” said Wood. “To destroy it, you would have to take down all of the clients, because if one server gets compromised, you just shift to a different server. They can hop around.”

Palm passive-aggressively fired back at Apple in its 1.1.0 update to the Pre’s webOS Thursday night. Among the handful of changes that came with the point update, the software restores syncing functionality with iTunes after Apple unceremoniously “fixed” the “problem” last week. The move is the latest in this high-profile cat-and-mouse game between Apple and Palm, and Palm seems to be willing to keep poking the fate bear—but to what end?

When you upgrade you version of Firefox some extension might stop working, however most of the times they will work fine with the new version of Firefox. There is an easy way to make Firefox stop checking for compatibility.


1. Open Firefox and type about:config in the address bar. Then click the button promising to be careful.

2. Right-click anywhere on the screen, choose: New > Boolean and name this boolean:

extensions.checkCompatibility

Press OK. Then set it to false and press OK again.

3. Now right-click again anywhere choose New > Boolean and make the name of this one:

extensions.checkUpdateSecurity

and set the value of that one to false.

When Apollo 11’s Lunar Module landed on the Moon 40 years ago today, the software that helped take humans to another celestial body was essentially built using paper-tape rolls and thick cardstock that was punched with special holes.

It wasn’t open source in the sense we know today, but it was built for NASA under contract, then was tested, modified and fine-tuned by NASA engineers in ways that are similar to open source projects nowadays.

“Well, in today’s definition it was open source–the source code was publicly available” to mission engineers, said John “Jack” Garman, who was a 24-year-old NASA computer engineer when Apollo 11 lifted off July 16, 1969, on its way to the Moon. “But ‘open source’ in the Linux sense generally means that anyone can contribute additions and improvements, and of course that wasn’t the case for the Apollo software.”

Garman helped test and re-write the software before Apollo 11 ever left the ground, then continued to monitor it while it was used in the onboard computers. “The software was programmed on IBM punch cards. They had 80-columns and were ‘assembled’ to instruction binary on mainframes… and it took hours.”

During the mission, most of the software code couldn’t be changed because it was hard- coded into the hardware, like ROM today, he said. But during pre-launch design simulations, problems that came up in the code could sometimes be finessed by Garman and the other computer engineers using a small amount of erasable memory that was available for the programs.

“Some of us NASA engineers who also worked in Mission Control would [literally guess and] ‘make up’ minor changes to the software to work around [hypothetical] ‘failures’ that were thrown at the flight control team during simulations,” Garman said. “In a sense, that fits the ‘open source’ model, but only within the NASA and NASA Contractor domain.” NASA staff members had full access to the program code through their contracts with the Apollo hardware vendors, so they were able to change the code to make the program behave differently as needed.

Highly sensitive financial information, including credit card details, bank account numbers, telephone numbers, and even PINs are available to the highest bidder.

The information being traded on the Web has been intercepted by a British company and collated into a single database for the first time. The Lucid Intelligence database contains the records of 40 million people worldwide, mostly Americans; four million are Britons. Security experts described the database as the largest of its kind in the world.

The database is in the hands of Colin Holder, a retired senior Metropolitan police officer who served on the fraud squad. He has collected the information over the past four years. His sources include law enforcement from around the world, such as British police and the FBI, anti-phishing and hacking campaigners, and members of the public.

Mr. Holder said he has invested £160,000 in the venture so far. He plans to offset the cost by charging members of the public for access to his database to check whether their data security has been breached.