: Feb 25, 2009 6:00:45 AM
Proving itself a staggering 42 times faster at rendering JavaScript than IE 7, our benchmarks confirm Apple's Safari 4 browser, released in beta Tuesday, is the fastest browser on the planet. In fact, it beat Google's Chrome, Firefox 3, Opera 9.6 and even Mozilla's developmental Minefield browser.
We used the SunSpider suite of JavaScript tests to determine which browser was the quickest, and the Safari 4 beat every browser (more...)

(Adds lawyer comment.)
-(Dow Jones)- U.S. software giant
Microsoft Corp.
(MSFT) could be
forced to include its competitors' Web browsers in its Windows software to
address antitrust concerns, the European Commission said Tuesday.
of abusing its market position
by bundling its Internet Explorer software in the Windows operating package,
harming competition between Web browsers, undermining innovation and ultimately
reducing consumer choice.
(more...)

The French coastal town of Eu has been suffering a drop in tourism and thinks it has found the culprit: the Internet.
avoir. The Times'
Paris correspondent, Charles Bremner, helpfully points out that
.
EU, of course, also stands for European Union in English, which sends search engines scurrying off in yet another direction.
So the town of 8,000 is considering changing its name to Mairie de la Ville d’Eu (...of the Town of Eu), or  (more...)

Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Teenagers who are preoccupied with their Internet time may be more prone to aggressive behavior, researchers reported Monday.
In a study of more than 9,400 Taiwanese teenagers, the researchers found that those with signs of Internet "addiction" were more likely to say they had hit, shoved or threatened someone in the past year.
The link remained when the investigators accounted for several other factors — including (more...)

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — HBO on your PC? It could happen sooner than you think.
Wary of the growing number of consumers watching TV shows online for free — and yet reluctant to upset viewers by yanking shows from the Internet — the nation's largest cable operators are in talks with media conglomerates to take back control. They would create a platform to release cable TV shows online, but exclusively for paying subscribers.
It's (more...)

A U.S. District Court has ordered seven Internet-based lending operations to halt some of their practices after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the state of Nevada complained that the companies failed to disclose key loan terms and used abusive collection tactics.
The companies charged in the complaint by the FTC and Nevada were accused of threatening customers with arrest if they did not repay loans, repeatedly calling customers at work, (more...)

Hulu, the PR-darling video portal owned by NBCU and News Corp, pulled all of its content from CBS’s newly re-launched TV.com. They also removed their programming from the Boxee application (an open source social media player and content management platform).
Everyone seems to think they know why this is a good idea or a bad idea. It’s neither. It’s just a business decision. And, it is way too early to tell whether it is a good (more...)

Associated Press - February 22, 2009 3:15 AM ET
SAUGERTIES, N.Y. (AP) - A prostitution sting in the lower Hudson Valley snares eight women from as far away as Albany and Schenectady.
Police in Ulster County say the women were making house calls as part of an Internet-based prostitution business that advertised on Craigslist, a classified listing site.
Undercover officers from the Ulster Regional Gang Enforcement Narcotics Team ordered the alleged (more...)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp on Sunday announced the creation of a website, Elevate America, aimed at improving access to job training tools.
The site,
, provides resources to help individuals gain the technical skills needed for acquiring jobs, the world's largest software company said.
The economy has shed 3.6 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007 with about half of the decline occurring in the past three months, (more...)

A Charleston police officer arrested on charges he solicited sex with a minor may have been the target of an FBI Internet sting.
Sean Phillip Patrick, 30, allegedly propositioned over the Internet someone he understood to be a 14-year-old girl from Loudoun County, Va., according to the county's Web site.
The FBI joined the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office Internet Crimes Against Children Unit to arrest Patrick Friday evening at the Charleston (more...)