Yahoo switches off search

Yahoo, which began life as a searchable list of the best Internet web sites, ended all Internet searching for users in the US and Canada - and soon, for the world; Shashi Seth, senior Yahoo president for vice, said he was thrilled and excited to announce that effective Aug 24, all Internet searches at yahoo.com - text, image, video, whatever - were automagically switched to Bing, the Microsoft search engine, "with more markets to come" presumably including Thailand; the end of Yahoo searches marked "great work and partnership" between Yahoo and Microsoft, apparently, and it was a "milestone" in Yahoo history; comment Number 1 at the blog where Mr Seth made the announcement asked for a moment of silence for the end of Yahoo as a search company, because "They have ceased to exist in the universe they created".

North Korea joined YouTube, Twitter and (for a short time) Facebook. The regime uses a Korean ID meaning ‘‘on our own as a nation’’ and allows no outsiders to access their pages.

In a report to stockholders, Microsoft said it was selling 30 million copies of Windows 7 monthly, worldwide; that is a higher rate - pure numbers and per-PC - than Windows Vista and Windows XP; XP remains in use on more than 70 per cent of corporate desktops but the old faithful is finally in decline as Windows 7 takes over, and it appears as of now that Windows 7 will be the dominant operating system in companies around the world in the foreseeable future.

Google stepped up its attempt to find out Everything You Do; it opened a new service to place phone calls from directly inside Google Mail; for now, you are too foreign to use the service, but it is something like the free phone calls from Skype in that you have to be on your computer and logged into Google Mail to use the service. Google stepped up its real-time searching of Everything On The Web in an effort to beat Microsoft Bing's pioneering work; with Google, a new website has been established to follow every mention of any searchable term and immediately update the search page in the user's browser; the sometimes functioning link is supposed to be at google.com/realtime or google.co.th/realtime, but an alternative is to click the Update link in the left sidebar at Google.com or Google.co.th

Google issued its automatic update of Google Chrome browser with 11 - count them, 11 - security holes patched, 10 of them high risk; Google pays hackers an average fee of $1,337 for uncovering browser vulnerabilities.

Mozilla issued the fourth beta of Firefox 4 web browser, including hardware-accelerated graphics to certain Windows users with the graphics card to handle it; the final version of Firefox 4 was due as Database went to press, including major interface changes to the way tabs are displayed.

Geeks in the IBM nanotechnology lab in Zurich carved a three-dimensional world globe 22 micrometres east-west by 11 micrometres north-south; they used a silicon needle tip about 1/10,000th the size of an ant to produce the map, which is about 1/1,000th as large as a grain of sand.

It turns out that the horrible rape and molestation charges lodged and then withdrawn against paranoid Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is the way that Swedish prosecutors actually do their work; Assange naturally tried to make himself the victim of a worldwide plot manipulated by the Pentagon, whose documents he stole and posted on his website along with other stolen material; in fact, two women came to the police separately and lodged charges against Assange and, as in any such case, an arrest warrant was immediately issued; the women's charges of illegal molesting are still under investigation.

If you still wonder about the future of computing, it's time you start wondering where you are actually going to buy a "real" personal computer in the foreseeable future; the world's two biggest PC makers entered an expensive war over who could get out of the PC business fastest and get people computer in "the cloud" on cute little machines that don't do much unless they are connected to the Internet; Dell Inc offered $1.1 billion to buy 3Par, which makes those cute little data-storage machines; Hewlett-Packard upped the offer to $1.5 billion. Dell Inc began peddling its first entry into the phone business - a 3.5-inch Android that Dell calls Aero; it costs $300, or about 6,350 baht in real money.

Yesterday was the fifth Tuesday (following the fifth Sunday and fifth Monday) this month, and a currently prominent Internet urban legend circulating by email claims it happens only once every 823 years; that's wrong; it happened in 2004 and it will next happen in 2021.