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Elections Boost Web Traffic
What Web sites were you surfing to get your political news on Election Day? According to Nielsen/NetRatings, more of you were hitting Yahoo News than any other site.
The research company reported the Yahoo News site had almost 6.3 million unique visitors on Nov. 7, followed by CNNs site, with almost 6 million.
Rounding out the top five were MSNBC, with just over 5 million visitors; AOL News—Web only—with 3.7 million; and Internet Broadcasting Web sites, with 2.2 million.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings, on the day after the elections, when it was announced that the Democrats had taken over both the Senate and the House of Representatives, the Associated Press was the fastest growing online news destination, growing from 810,000 to 1.9 million visitors, or 137 percent. CBS News Digital Network saw the number of visitors grow 89 percent, and washingtonpost.com saw the number jump 65 percent.
Setting Duke Free
Not only is Sun open-sourcing Java, but it now is letting the technologys mascot go free.
Duke, a regular at Suns annual JavaOne events and the accompanying icon representing Java, is now freely available for use by developers and Java users at large.
“What does Open Source Duke mean?” Sun officials asked on a Web page announcing the move. “It means all you Duke fans have the original mascot for Java technology to play with. … All we ask is that you treat Duke with the same respect that Sun has.”
Joe Palrang originally created Duke to be the “agent” for the “Green Project” at Sun. That project spawned Java. Duke became the Java mascot when Java technology was first announced, right around the same time that the first Java cup logo was commissioned, according to Sun officials in Santa Clara, Calif.
Phishing for Money
The number of phishing e-mails sent to adults in the United States has almost doubled since 2004, and while fewer people are reporting that they have lost money to the scams, those who have lost money are losing more, according to a report from research company Gartner.
The report, issued Nov. 9, said about 109 million U.S. adults have received phishing e-mails this year, up from about 57 million in 2004. In addition, the average amount of money lost by victims has grown from $257 to $1,244.
According to Gartner analysts, the scammers seem to be targeting people with higher incomes—those with annual earnings of more than $100,000—who tend to perform more transactions on the Web. Those people received an average of 112 phishing e-mails this year, as opposed to an average of 74 e-mails across all income segments.
The phishing e-mails seem to be moving away from impersonating banks and toward impersonating online businesses such as eBay and PayPal.
By the Numbers: Dumping the PC
512 million: The number of PCs consumers and businesses will dispose of over the next five years; of those, 73 percent will end up in landfills or stored, rather than recycled
Source: Gartner