Posted 04/07/09 at 07:13:28 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Netbooks and Linux were supposed to be a match made in heaven. However, Linux has failed to capture the imagination of netbook users. Microsoft is elated to have made short work of Linux’s challenge in the netbook segment. Brandon LeBlanc, who earns his bread blogging on the official Windowsteamblog, reviewed the past year that saw Windows become the most popular netbook OS.

He imputed Windows emphatic surge on netbooks in the past year to its ease of use and people’s familiarity with the OS besides a host of other factors. Since the time Windows first appeared on netbooks, it has nearly wiped out all competition and now sits pretty with more than 90% market share.

“Looking forward, we can confidently say that no matter how netbook PC hardware evolves, we’re gearing up to ensure that Windows 7 will run great on them,” a sanguine LeBlanc wrote on the Windowsteamblog.

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Posted 01/07/09 at 10:23:48 AM by Paul Lilly

Can Google be held responsible for remarks left by bloggers on the search engine company's Blogger publishing service? That's one of the questions being raised as Liskula Cohen, a Canadian model, sues Google over an anonymous blogger calling her "our #1 skanky superstar," along with calling her an "old hag" and other unflattering remarks.

"We think we have a case," said Steven Wagner, Cohen's laywer. "This is libelous, it's defamatory and you shouldn't just get away with this."

Cohen isn't sueing Google for any financial compensation, and instead wants the search giant to reveal the anonymous blogger's identity, who posted the offending remarks in a blog titled 'Skanks in New York.' The site appears to be entirely devoted to slamming Cohen through captions left under several candid pics of the 36-year-old model.

Does Cohen have a case? Hit the jump and tell us if you think the thin model has a legal leg to stand on.

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Posted 10/03/08 at 06:29:30 PM by Pulkit Chandna

At first glance, Bankaholic.com appears to be an ordinary blog that betrays not even the slightest hint of its true worth. The Wordpress-based blog has been just bought by Bankrate, a financial information and service website, for an unbelievable amount of $15 million. Its solitary employee John Wu is going to stay aboard for a while.

Although the blog is not insanely popular, it ranks well on search engines for several high-paying keywords. This acquisition will ensure that there is no dearth of get-rich-from-blogging literature that is strewn across the internet.

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Posted 07/27/08 at 11:22:34 PM by Paul Lilly

Not surprisingly, malware infections are at an all-time high, but what's shocking is just how fast the infection rate has risen. According to antivirus vendor Sophos, the company says it detects one webpage containing malicious content every 5 seconds, a rate that represents a whopping 300 percent jump from 2007.

That breaks down to over 16,000 malicious sites each day, most of which are victims of SQL-injection attacks. One of the more common tricks entails using SQL-injection to place a dirty 1x1 pixel element on an infected page. And because many of the sites are legitimate, security vendors are having a tough time keeping up with blocking the sites.

There also exists a fair number of illegitimate sites, and Sophos claims Google-owned Blogger accounts for nearly 2 percent of all malware hosts, making it an unflattering number one offender.

Responding to the report, a spokesperson for Google said "Google takes the security of our users very seriously, and we work hard to protect them from malware. Using Blogger, or any Google product, to serve or host malware is a violation of our product policies. We actively work to detect and remove sites that serve malware from our network."

How comforting.

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Posted 07/13/08 at 01:54:13 AM by Norman Chan

Let's get the obvious out the way: yes, I bought the new iPhone 3G. Max PC's ex-podcast producer Jeremy Williams and I waited outside the Stonestown Galleria mall in San Francisco for three hours this afternoon to get ahold of Steve Job's latest shiny gadget. Both of us were existing iPhone owners and have no shame about it.

The wait was about three hours long, and we had to do most of the waiting outside the mall to prevent clogging up foot traffic in front of the Apple store. Every half an hour, 10 to 15 people would be led inside to stand in another line before finally making it inside the store to make their purchase. Maybe it was because I was wearing an ironed buttoned-down shirt and carrying a laptop, but many people passing by stopped to ask me what the line was for. More than a few of them had no idea that a new iPhone had been released when I told them, which was pretty shocking for me to hear. Even my tech-phobic parents who couldn't send email if their lives depended on it knew about the iPhone; I genuinely could not imagine being so out of the tech-news loop. Then I decided to just start lying.

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Posted 06/19/08 at 02:56:51 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Ace corporate raider Carl Icahn - who has been vigorously pressing upon Yahoo’s board for a deal with Microsoft - has launched his blog The Icahn Report. He might use his blog to announce his course of action in the Microsoft-Yahoo takeover saga.

Although his blog doesn't currently feature anything regarding his on-going proxy battle with Yahoo, it does have fervid posts like "Corporate Democracy is a Myth" with Carl Icahn stamped all over them. Only time - and perhaps his blog - will tell whether he still favors a deal with Microsoft or is statisfied with the recent deal between Yahoo and Google.

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Posted 06/02/08 at 07:08:31 PM by Norman Chan

Tech’s mightiest heroes (that’d be us) are looking for a few good writers to join our online ranks. Do you have what it takes to become a Maximum PC writer? Heed the call and read on for more details.

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Posted 02/29/08 at 06:54:56 PM by Chris "MantaBase" Adcock

You've modded everything in the house except the pets. What's a modder to do now?

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