iknowthe.net | Internet and Ecommerce Consultant

Apple Computer has announced a two-for-one share split as a result of its shares almost quadrupling in value over the last year.

This follows the success of its iPod music player, with sales accelerating after the introduction of cheaper versions of the music player.

The stock has been the best performer in the Nasdaq index over the past year.
Share splits also suggest that management has confidence in a company’s earnings prospects, which, inevitably, will result in another rise in its share price.

Apple’s last stock split took place in 2000, at the height of the technology boom. Before that it split its stock in 1987.
Over the last year, Apple’s share price has gone from $23 to an all-time high of $81.99 per share reached on Wednesday.

Shares hit that high on news that Sirius Satellite Radio had held talks with Apple chief executive Steve Jobs about adding satellite-radio service to iPods.
Under the share split, Apple shareholders will receive one additional share for every outstanding share held, increasing the amount of Apple shares in circulation to 1.8 billion from 900 million. Apple said trading on the split-adjusted basis will start on 28 February.

68k Classic Mac gaming on OS X Bit of a sideline – prince of persia on a g4 powerbook using Basilisk II.

Ask Jeeves has bought the Bloglines website to improve the way it handles content from web journals or blogs.

Ask Jeeves said it was not planning to change Bloglines but would use the 300 million articles it has archived to round out its index of the web.
How much Ask Jeeves paid for Bloglines was not revealed.

Bloglines has become popular because it lets users build a list of the blogs they want to follow without having to visit each journal site individually.

Jim Lanzone, vice president of search properties at Ask Jeeves in the US, said it did not acquire Bloglines just to get a foothold in the blog publishing world.

He said Ask Jeeves was much more interested in helping people find information they were looking for rather than helping them write it.
“The universe of readers is vastly larger than the universe of writers,” he said.

Mr Lanzone said the acquisition would sit well with Ask’s My Jeeves service which lets people customise their own web experience and build up a personal collection of useful links.

“Search engines are about discovering information for the first time and RSS is the ideal way to keep track of and monitor those sites,” he said.
It would also help drive information and entries from blogs to the portals that Ask Jeeves operates.

There would be no instant sweeping changes to Bloglines, said Mr Lanzone.
“Our intent is to take our time to figure out the right business model not to try to monetise it right away,” he said. Mr Lanzone added that Ask Jeeves would be helping organise the database of 300m blog entries Bloglines holds with its own net indexing technology.
“Being able to search the blogosphere as one corpus of information will be very useful in its own right,” said Mr Lanzone.

The information you give out when you visit a web page is quite interesting, and somewhat frightening if you are concerned about privacy. Check out I know who you are to see what others can see.

Security researchers have discovered a way to shut down or seriously impair a Google Adwords advertising campaign by artificially inflating the number of times an ad is displayed. By running searches against particular keywords from compromised hosts, attackers can cause click-through percentage rates to fall through the floor.
This, in turn, causes Google Adwords to automatically disable the affected campaign keywords and prevent ads from being displayed. By disabling campaign keywords using the technique, cybercrimals could give their preferred parties higher ad positions at reduced costs.

“By disabling targeted keywords across many advertisers’ campaigns simultaneously by artificially inflating the number of times an ad is displayed an attacker can secure a higher ad position,” explains Clickrisk.com.

The attack – dubbed keyword hijacking – is difficult to prevent because it takes advantage of a design feature of Google Adwords rather than a flaw, he added. Clickrisk came across the attack in investigating why the click through rates of one of its clients – which had been running at a steady rate – dropped to zero for no apparent reason. Subsequent monitoring and forensic testing revealed that a botnet made up of open proxies in China was responsible for the attack.

High—cost-per-click (CPC) advertisers in niche markets are particular vulnerable to the keyword hijacking attack. “Once keywords are disabled they can’t be re-enabled and attacks can go undetected for some time,” Sculthorpe told El Reg. When keywords are disabled an advertiser must erase all campaigns featuring the affected keywords and create a new campaign as a workaround.

Although the true scope of the problem remains unclear, Clickrisk security analysts believe the keyword hijacking attack may be widely exploited. Clickrisk advises users to monitor click-through rates and traffic levels, log into Google Adwords campaign frequently and check that keywords are not disabled.