claims

Benjamin Edelman,  assistant professor at Harvard Business School, claims Google and partners are inflating PPC conversion rates and increasing advertiser cost via four specific channels, including Google’s own Chrome browser. Google makes money by charging advertisers every time a user clicks on a Google advertisement, but in the instances described and documented by Edelman, he makes it appear Google and partners are colluding to intercept traffic to websites that would be navigated directly (and for free) rather than by searching.

Can spam cause damage to the environment and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions? That's what a study from McAfee and climate-change researchers ICF have concluded. The study "Carbon Footprint of Spam" released today, found the global annual energy used to transmit, process and filter spam totals 33 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), or 33 terawatt hours (TWh). That's equal to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes, with the same green-house gas as 3.1 million passenger cars using 2 billion gallons of gas.

It would be hard to be more embarrassed than the guy caught with his pants down at the ski lift—whose photos are at SmokingGun—but if there’s a contender, it’s “Crystal” at Twitter, whose admin support account was hacked by a standard “dictionary” attack.

After a slew of political ads from the McCain-Palin campaign were taken down from YouTube because of copyright holder DMCA complaints, the campaign sent a letter to YouTube (PDF) urging the company to be less immediate with its compliance with the letters and to subject videos to full legal review.

It’s not been a good week, online or off, for the McCain campaign, but it’s been especially brutal online. The biggest news, aside from the obvious fundamentally strong economic crisis occurring Monday, has been the hacking of Sarah Palin’s email account.

The Food and Drug Administration is alerting consumers not to purchase products on the Internet that fraudulently claim to cure cancer.The FDA has sent warning letters to 23 U.S. companies, 1 Canadian, and 1 Australian company asking them to stop selling 125 products that claim to cure, treat or prevent cancer."Although promotions of bogus cancer 'cures' have always been a problem, the Internet has provided a mechanism for them to flourish," said Margaret O'K. Glavin, the FDA's associate commissioner for regulatory affairs.

The discovery that some Adobe products phone home to analytics firm Omniture brought out the tinfoil hat crowd, and a raised eyebrow from Adobe's John Nack.

You’d think that at some point, Google would have so much that it couldn’t possibly grow any further, but despite having a lock on the top spot, Google continues to claim a larger slice of the pie month after month.