A federal judge orders YouTube to disclose who watches which video clips and when to Viacom and other copyright holders involved in a $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit against the video-sharing service.

Not even ICANN and IANA are safe from domain hijacking. Those pesky Turkish hackers strike again.

A relaxation of rules by the internet's oversight agency means that .com and .net may soon be joined by a slew of new domain names. What's behind it? Like most things, money.

The PC industry's two largest graphics companies released new top-of-the-line models this week. The new graphics processors will bring not just better videogame performance, but will also turn ordinary desktop PCs into the equivalent of supercomputers -- if programmers can figure out how to take advantage of the chips' massively parallel architectures.

"We're talking about every man, woman and child basically having a supercomputer on their desk," says Jon Peddie, a graphics-industry veteran and president of Jon Peddie Research.

AMD, which acquired graphics maker ATI in 2006, released two new chips, the Radeon HD 4850 and the Radeon HD 4870. Nvidia, the other dominant player in the space, unveiled its new GeForce GTX 260 and GeForce GTX 280 processors.

According to both companies, the new series of chips feature performance measured in teraflops (that's a trillion floating point operations per second), billions of transistors, hundreds of cores and new architectures that, according to industry analysts, could have a staggering effect on not only Crysis frame rates, but also how and what we use our computers for.

Indeed, cheap access to such formidable computing power could mean that, over the next few years, we will see an explosion of new independent research along with profound new discoveries, analysts say. Additionally, new consumer applications will be able to draw on the graphics processing unit (GPU) for even more eye-watering special effects and even occasionally useful visual information.

"We'll start to get things like real-time mapping from Google that incorporates all manner of real world information," says Bob O'Donnell, an analyst at IDC. "All of this is going to bubble up more and more."

As Peddie observes, it was only 11 years ago that the U.S. government spent approximately $33 million to build ASCI Red, one of the first supercomputers to achieve 1 teraflop. The new graphics chips offer similar power to the 1997-era supercomputer for a fraction of the cost.

"Now we can go down to Fry's or Best Buy and buy a graphics board that has 1 teraflop of processing power for $600 or less," says Peddie.

Getting that processing power to work for the average computer user, however, remains a challenge.

With the exception of a few games, most applications still aren't made to take advantage of the GPU's power. That's because GPUs are made for parallel processing (crunching lots of bits of data at the same time, then assembling the results all at once), whereas most current software programs are written to be executed serially (operating on one piece of data at a time, then proceeding to the next step).

That is starting change, albeit slowly, thanks to new initiatives designed to spur parallel processing.

Just last week, Khronos, the industry consortium behind the OpenGL standard, announced what it calls Open Computing Language, or OpenCL. With this new heterogeneous computing initiative, the group hopes to come up with a standardized (and universal) way of programming parallel computing tasks.

In many ways, it's the Holy Grail developers have been waiting for: a hardware-agnostic standard that unleashes the power of multi-core CPUs and GPUs using a familiar language.

Apple is throwing its weight behind parallel processing too, and last week committed to using the OpenCL specification as part of its next operating system release, Snow Leopard.

Other companies, including AMD, Nvidia, ARM, Freescale, IBM, Imagination, Nokia, Motorola, Qualcomm, Samsung and Texas Instruments have joined the OpenCL working group.

If initiatives like OpenCL gain momentum, the days of researchers applying for grants and traveling across the country to use a given university or research facility's super computer may well be at an end. Similarly, distributed computing projects like Folding@Home and Seti@Home may see an huge boost in performance by using hundreds of thousand of computers equipped with these new powerful processors.

Of course, if curing cancer or looking for aliens isn't your thing, we can also be fairly certain that Crysis will really scream on any system equipped with these new GPUs.

Verizon customers in 10 more states who have the need for speed get their prayers answered with a FiOS upgrade offering 50 mbps downloads and 20 mbps uploads. Congratulations California, Delaware, Indiana, Maryland, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington -- you get the chance to pay $140 a month for internet.

The maker of Photoshop design software and the Acrobat publishing tool reports net income of $214.9 million, or 40 cents per share.

Just one day after Yahoo's announcement of its plan to outsource some of its ad business to Google, marketers say they plan to cut their spending on Yahoo and take their business elsewhere.

The Federal Trade Commission, under new leadership, reverses course and begins a formal investigation of Intel and alleged anti-competitive practices. Intel says it's been cooperating with the FTC for years and that its business practices "are well within U.S. law."

Intel's Atom processor is so economical that the cost of getting on the internet is suddenly in reach for millions more people, the company says.

The primary season is drawing to a close. The general election looms. And that roaring sound in your ears? It's the hurricane of predictions swirling around the process. Some of the forecasts come from self-proclaimed experts, some from polls. Here's another prophecy: This year, you'll also be hearing a lot more from the latest trendy political handicapping tool — the prediction market.

As you've no doubt heard, prediction markets are online trading sites that let people buy and sell shares tied to, among myriad other things, the fortunes of candidates and parties. The price of these shares, in turn, reveals which candidates are most likely to win in a real election. For the 2008 political season, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the National Journal have all started running their own trading sites. These join the ranks of established political markets such as Intrade, founded in 1999, and the venerable Iowa Electronic Markets, launched in 1988.

Prediction markets can be spookily accurate. The Iowa Electronic Markets, for example, has proven more accurate than the polls at least 75 percent of the time since its inception. But like the Democrats, prediction markets will come into the 2008 general election battered from a tough primary season. The big blow came in January, when the markets gave Barack Obama a 91 percent chance of beating Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire. Clinton won, leaving prediction-market boosters looking every bit as chuckleheaded as the pollsters and 24-hour-news blowhards. "Nobody Knows Anything," New York Times columnist Paul Krugman titled a blog post the next day. "But to be more specific, the prediction markets — which you see, again and again, touted as having some mystical power to aggregate information — know no more than the conventional wisdom."

What went wrong? After all, markets are renowned for picking up on last-minute swings like the one that swept Clinton to victory. That's why they are so useful and why they seem to have cropped up everywhere in the past few years. Corporations from Google to Chrysler are running markets to tap the collective knowledge of employees. There are trading sites for sports, Hollywood, even avian flu. Have we all been led astray?

Sort of. Like financial markets, prediction markets are big information processors, distilling the collective wisdom of their traders. But the success of any market depends upon the stakes and the pool of traders. Most prediction markets aren't anywhere near as robust as those they emulate on Wall Street. "They are thin, trading volumes are anemic, and the dollar amounts at risk are pitifully small," market analyst Barry Ritholtz wrote in January. That opens them up to all kinds of problems as information processors. Political markets, for example, have a lot of political junkies but few real insiders or outsiders, so they're not very good at catching something the polls might miss. This is a problem in other markets as well. When Justin Wolfers, a Wharton School economist and leading prediction-market specialist, and two other economists studied Google's employee market, they found that traders tended to make choices similar to those of their pod-mates and neighbors.

So how can prediction markets be rectified? For starters, they need to have real stakes. There is some debate about whether this means money (Wolfers suggests it might not be necessary) or something else, like reputation. But cash is definitely the surest way to grease a market. In June 2007, 25 economists signed a letter urging legislators to grant these markets "safe harbor" from Internet gambling regulations, given the sites' value as forecasting tools.

Beyond this, it's important to improve the pool of traders. According to economists, this requires a certain alchemy of expertise and stupidity. With more experts and insiders, the markets can get out ahead of conventional wisdom. But forecasting also needs more so-called noise traders, who do business with almost no information. Noise traders boost accuracy by increasing volume and the potential profits of informed traders.

Diversity helps, too. If you can get different types of people to play, experts say, not only do you get a bigger pool and more information, but differing random guesses will cancel each other out, leaving real signals to rise above the noise. Plus, if you have a critical mass of investors with a variety of backgrounds, locations, and interests, they are less likely to move as a herd.

As the presidential election draws near and the pundits start talking about the magic of prediction markets, pay attention to whether a given market is likely to have a good variety of traders and that they're playing for something meaningful. If not, stay away. Unless, of course, you happen to have some inside information yourself. In that case, by all means jump in and clean up.

John McQuaid (jmcquaid1@gmail.com) is coauthor of Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms.

Even as it agreed in January to plunk down $1.23 billion to buy a promising but problematic search company in Norway, Microsoft knew that the company had some accounting matters to address.

Now, it appears, the acquired company, Fast Search & Transfer, may have some criminal matters to work out: Suspicions about the Norwegian search-engine company's revenue reporting are now in the hands of the Oslo police.

Norway's financial supervisory authority, Kredittilsynet, said its review of Fast Search's previously disclosed accounting problems not only appeared to have violated accounting standards, they may have broken the law too.

The development is bad news for Microsoft, which snapped up Fast Search as a potential Google-buster. Fast Search, which for a while was also known as the Google of Norway, had search-engine technology that industry experts said was better than Google's and could handle truly massive corporate projects.

Goldman Sachs estimated last year that the company would grow its revenue 27 percent in 2007. Over the years, Fast Search appeared to benefit from big contracts with customers such as AT&T, Comcast, and the Walt Disney Co.

At one point, Intel was interested in buying the Norwegian rising star, but Microsoft grabbed the prize. At the time, Microsoft was still digesting it $6 billion acquisition of the digital-advertising company aQuantive—a deal that came just one month after Google said it would pay $3.1 billion for DoubleClick.

In its haste to grab Fast Search, however, Microsoft looked past the company's problems: They include, but aren't limited to, accounting irregularities that began to appear as Microsoft began to look over its books.

In the second quarter of 2007, Fast Search reported an operating loss of $38 million on revenue of only $35 million—a full $20 million below forecasts. The loss widened in the following quarter, leading the Norwegian stock exchange to delist Fast Search on December 12.

That same day, Fast Search said it would review its accounting for all of 2006 and 2007. The latest unaudited results show revenue growth of 7 percent for last year, which is far below Goldman's forecast.

Still, Microsoft pursued the acquisition, completing the deal on April 28.

Kredittilsynet, the supervisory agency, was equally determined. It referred Fast Search to investigators at Økokrim, the Norwegian National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime.

Økokrim last week concurred that the nature of the irregularities and the amount by which Fast Search apparently inflated its accounts were serious matters warranting prosecution. But the agency said it was too busy to open a criminal investigation.

Rather than let the matter rest, the market supervisor turned it over to the Oslo police for investigation. Aftenposten, a Norwegian newspaper, characterized Kredittilsynet's decision to involve the police as an unprecedented step in that country.

As of now, it's unclear what the Oslo police have in store for Fast Search—or for former company C.E.O. John Markus Lervik, who is now the vice president for enterprise search at Microsoft.

Information technology stocks overtake the financial sector for the first time since the bubble broke. But soaring oil prices have the energy sector running a close third.

The rollout of fiber connections to the internet is creating a new digital divide between "haves" and "have-nots." Fiber is something like 10 times faster -- and can easily be 100 times faster -- than plain vanilla broadband. But the only major carrier swapping out the copper is Verizon, whose FIOS service is or will be in only 17 states.

Figuring out what Apple might be up to in 18 days is child's play. What about Apple 2013? Forrester Research takes a stab at this favorite Valley parlor game and sees Apple in every room -- and hallway, for that matter.

Lenovo, the world's 4th largest PC maker, sees earnings increase 133% in its Q4 and says it will growth in Europe and China offsets a slowdown in the U.S. The company -- which includes the former IBM PC unit -- will focus its attention on developing countries, CEO William J. Amelio

Though known best for bringing the Internet to the masses, AOL is beginning to shift its focus toward serving niche audiences with the launch of dozens of specialty websites.

It's about friggin' time. That's what you'll say to yourself at some point in the next few months when you realize you can finally surf the Web from seat 17C. Alaska, American, Southwest, and Virgin America all plan to roll out airborne Wi-Fi this summer. The price to you: about $6 to $13 a flight. The services will work in one of two ways — Southwest and Alaska are using satellite-based broadband from Row 44, a California company, while American and Virgin are opting for a cell phone tower system from Aircell in Illinois. Cell towers? Yep, turns out cell signals don't necessarily interfere with instrumentation — you can't use mobile phones on planes because they cause network headaches and annoy fellow passengers. Here's how Vi@gra spam and photos of grammatically challenged cats will find you on the red-eye.

... Via Cell Tower (Aircell) Data is transmitted over a patchwork of 92 existing cell towers covering the continental US. Because there's nothing blocking the signal, each tower offers a coverage radius of up to 250 miles. The downsides: a paltry (buffering ... buffering ...) 3-Mbps throughput for each plane. Plus the cost to passengers is $12.95 per flight — more than Row 44's service — and at launch the system will work only in the lower 48.

... Via Satellite (Row 44) Signals are beamed from geosynchronous satellites orbiting 22,500 miles up. The data rate is roughly 30 Mbps per plane (expect low-end DSL speeds once a few dozen passengers log on), and the system works across international borders and over oceans (though it will be available only in North America at first). And even though it costs the airlines more than Aircell's system to install, passengers pay less — as little as $6 per flight.

Five years ago, if Hewlett-Packard bought EDS, everyone would've thought it was pretty much like when IBM bought PwC -- a play to create a powerful data processing consulting business that could coexist with a computer hardware business. In fact, that's been a great model for IBM.

But with HP today buying EDS for $12 billion, the smart thinking goes in a different direction. It's looking like a red-hot area going forward for IBM, Amazon and Google will be so-called cloud computing -- a.k.a. hardware as a service.

If you're a startup or a corporate IT manager, you increasingly won't have to buy computers to run your business. You just rent capabilities from some computing giant and move the information there and back over the internet. If something crashes, the data is always backed up and stored somewhere out there in the cloud. This is the ubiquitous computing idea IBM has pushed for a decade -- making computer power something like electric power.

If you tack together some of HP's other purchases under CEO Mark Hurd -- as Om Malik did -- it seems even more obvious that HP is at least as interested in cloud computing as consulting. And EDS is a solid cloud-computing play because a core business is owning and running giant data centers.

As part of the interview I did with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (the video is now on Portfolio.com), we discussed Amazon's push into cloud computing.

"We've been working on our Infrastructure Web Services for four years," Bezos said. "We launched our first one two years ago, the Simple Storage Service, and I am astonished -- I rarely meet a startup company these days who isn't using our web services and now we're starting to get, you know, deployment inside Enterprise level data centers as well. So it's a very exciting."

Asked about Google's plans to get into a similar business, Bezos said: "Well ... we really do have a practice of not talking about other companies. But this, like our retail business, (there) is not going to be one winner. I think there are going to be multiple winners pursuing different flavors or strategies, different kinds of products.... I think our web services business is going to be part of what becomes an important industry. And ... important industries are rarely made by single companies."

So maybe there is room for HP, Amazon, IBM, Google and others to play in the cloud computing space. The HP deal is telling us that the concept is ready for prime time.

From way over in Indonesia, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates let it be known that Microsoft never needed to buy Yahoo to make headway in search and advertising. It just kind of wanted to.

"We have always felt we could do very well on our own and now that's the path we are focused on," Gates told AP in Jakarta on Friday. "The standard strategy for us is to just hire great engineers and surprise people at how well we can compete, even with a company that's got a strong lead."

Actually, that may be the first bit of sense out of Microsoft since the Yahoo thing first emerged. That is exactly what Microsoft is good at: identifying market leaders in interesting new tech markets, then systematically destroying them. In fact, Microsoft is probably better at it than maybe any company in history. Netscape, Lotus, WordPerfect, Novell, Real Networks ... there's a long list of companies that invented something that Microsoft then copied and took down. And Windows, of course, was a copy of what Apple and Xerox were doing. Now Microsoft's Zune is taking aim at the iPod.

Microsoft is at its best when it does this. It spends billions of dollars a year on Microsoft Research, but has yet to invent an entirely new business. (Microsoft did once get out in front of a tech development, creating travel site Expedia early on. So surprised was Microsoft that it did this, the company soon thereafter spun out Expedia -- perhaps so Expedia would not contaminate the Microsoft culture with actual market innovation.)

The thing is, though -- search so far is looking like Microsoft's Waterloo. Yeah, it's won every big battle so far, but Microsoft has spent vast amounts of time and money trying to crack search -- and so far has failed. Can it beat Google at Google's own game? That seems unlikely. Can it outwit Google and create an innovative new version of search that Google never thought of? That would be very un-Microsoftian.

So ... now what?

In a survey of corporations' responsiveness to climate change, IBM scored well, Microsoft did middling, and Apple came in near the bottom of the pack.

Cisco's Q3 profit beats analyst forecasts by 2 cents per share and its Q4 guidance in line with projections. But the tech darling is still down more than 20 percent from its 52-week high of $34.24 on Nov. 6, when the company had a market value of about $207 billion.

Deutsche Telekom AG is in the preliminary stages of considering a bid for Sprint Nextel, according to the Wall Street Journal. DT had no comment, but such a deal would make T-Mobile the biggest wireless carrier in the U.S. market.

Amazon is suing New York over a new law that requires out-of-state online companies to collect sales tax from shoppers in New York. Officials estimate the state would gain about $50 million by requiring Internet giants such as Amazon to collect state sales tax.

Microsoft dangles a higher takeover bid in front of Yahoo, hoping to reach a friendly deal after weeks of saber rattling.

My brothers and I didn't know Dad had a problem. We knew he had an insanely large collection of computers and related paraphernalia. I was living in Washington, DC, and somehow Alex and Andrew, back home in Seattle, had failed to notice that Dad could barely move around his apartment and was navigating from room to room via narrow, oyster-gray corridors formed entirely by PC towers.

But now it all had to go. His building was being demolished. Dad had to be out in three months. Alex and Andrew called me for assistance.

The biggest problem, they told me, wasn't just volume.

In ecofriendly Seattle, garbage collectors won't take computer hardware — filled as it is with PVC and phthalates. Dad persisted in holding on to the notion that somewhere out there was a charity desperately in need of a half ton of mid-1990s computers. It was not the case.

I did what I could to help coordinate. Alex posted an ad on craigslist for a two-day event: "Huge stash of PC equipment, for free or for a dollar." He was in charge of our online strategy because he knows nothing about computers. He could lure people in with jazzy, noninformational emails. "Yes, they work," he wrote to one mark. "Most of them. Picture the scene inside the Jawa sandcrawler in Star Wars, with all the obsolete droids."

Dad's landlord let them borrow a vacant apartment upstairs, a cramped one-bedroom with dirty carpeting and a sticky kitchenette. They filled it. Tupperware bins overflowed with cables. Scanners, monitors, and printers claimed the corners. Dad rubber-banded software and drivers to sundry peripherals.

It was an emotional time: We were trying to transfer stuff from Dad — a nut we know and love — to a bunch of nuts we neither knew nor loved. One man immediately called his wife in a paroxysm of excitement. When he told her to bring an additional vehicle for hauling, it seemed our savior had come. Then she exercised her veto.

Dad took the whole thing pretty well. He chatted with fellow hoarders about the best places to score unopened Windows 95s, and he hid a few favorite pieces. He still rents two storage lockers, at $127 a month each, for the stuff "too valuable to throw away." My brothers probably set aside a few items, too. Judging by their bedrooms and car trunks, Dad's behavior might be genetic.

After two days of solid crowds, there was still too much crap. I phoned every e-waste hauler in Washington state before I found Computer Equipment Resources, out of Carnation. A guy named Vince met Dad and my brothers on the appointed day.

At first, everyone, including Vince, observed this weird, unspoken protocol that they were to handle the equipment as fragile objects of considerable worth. By the end of the day, even Dad was hurling monitors into the back of the truck and listening to them crack. The bill was $630, which my brothers and I split. Dad is chronically broke, a condition likely not unrelated to his stashing disorder.

He was always a collector. When I interviewed him for this story, he told me that in the mid-'70s he owned 25 Volkswagen Bugs, which he kept parked on San Francisco streets. That made me think of Alex's accumulated Japanese model kits, so I asked my brother how he knew he would never turn into a hoarder like Dad.

"The short answer? I don't," Alex said. "But the stuff I collect is actually worth something. Some of the Super Nintendo games I have are worth, like, 60 bucks."

A fight between two robotics companies (one the maker of the Roomba) over plans for military battle bots involves a disgruntled former employee who starts his own company.

Internet service providers are beginning to roll out the second wave of U.S. broadband services, which are 25 times faster than current broadband offerings.