E-Commerce Blog

Google released a respectable earnings report on Thursday, considered in absolute terms. However, the market had been expecting the search engine giant to deliver a stronger performance and promptly punished its stock for the shortfall. Revenue grew 39 percent to $5.37 billion, from $3.87 billion in the same period a year earlier. Google’s net income grew 35 percent to $1.25 billion, compared with the same period last year, when it registered $925 million. Stacked up against the previous quarter’s $1.31 billion, though, the numbers show a decline.

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Street Pounds Google for Less Than Stellar Q2

A City of San Francisco systems administrator is a living testimonial to the importance of preventing any one person in an organization from having too much power. Terry Childs, who is now in jail, holds in his brain the passwords that will let city officials access San Francisco’s Fiber Wide Area Network. Apparently, Childs was cheesed off that his supervisors tried to fire him for poor job performance, so he created an account that gave him exclusive access to the network, then refused to tell anyone the password.

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Network Held Hostage, Cyberterror Battle Plan, Evil Genius Wannabe

The punches are starting to fly fast as Yahoo and Carl Icahn duke it out over the company’s future. Yahoo shot down a new offer by Microsoft over the weekend to buy the search portion of its business and leave the remaining pieces under Icahn’s control. Now, Icahn and the current board of directors are in a heated war of words over who has the shareholders’ best interests in mind. Yahoo’s shareholders are set to meet in just under three weeks — on Aug. 1 — when they’ll decide whether or not to replace the current management with Icahn and his proposed team.

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Yahoo, Icahn Fire Broadsides as Shareholders’ Meeting Draws Near

If one were to look for sure bets in the online world, phishing would be right up there on the growing list of security concerns. The art of phishing has been a remarkable study in technology innovation. It started as a simple means of luring unsuspecting consumers to visit bogus Web sites to capture basic credit card information. Now it’s a highly sophisticated practice that’s growing exponentially — and attracting some very nasty, very organized players in the process. And it’s only going to get worse.

Continued here:
Bigger Phishers to Fry, Part 2: The Phuture of Phishing

As the heated Democratic primary race came to a conclusion last month, much discussion centered on presumptive nominee Barack Obama’s superior fundraising. Hillary Clinton started the race with an edge among deep-pocket donors, but Obama roared to the nomination finish line with a substantial fundraising lead. Much of that money came in through the Internet, a trend that experts say will figure prominently in the general election to come.

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Squeezing the Internet for Political Cash, Part 1: Follow the Leader