Consumer content

In what's just the latest Facebook phishing scam, hackers on Thursday broke into accounts and sent e-mails to friends urging them to log on to fake Facebook sites, according to new reports and anecdotes from members.

The social-networking site is in the process of cleaning up from the hack and is blocking compromised accounts, Reuters reported. "Victims were directed to log back in to the site, but actually logged into the one controlled by the hackers, unwittingly giving away their passwords," Reuters said, adding that the fake domains include www.151.im, www.121.im and www.… Read more

Of all the sports leagues, Major League Baseball has the reputation of being the most technologically savvy. On Thursday, MLB proved it by winning its first tech patent.

The league's digital unit, Major League Baseball Advanced Media(MLBAM), announced on Thursday that it was granted patent No. 7,486,943 for a system that helps determine a subscriber's geographical location. MLBAM oversees MLB.tv, the online video distribution service that streams live and on-demand games, and is widely considered to be the most successful subscription business on the Internet.

Pinpointing where a subscriber is located when he or … Read more

Updated at 12:25 p.m. PDT with word that Google has confirmed an error on its end caused the outage, and at 3:30 p.m. PDT with Google's comment on McAfee's description of the events.

Widespread outages involving several Google services--including search, Google Docs, and Gmail--were caused by an upgrade gone awry inside of Google, according to engineers.

Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research for McAfee, said that Google this morning attempted to make changes to key Internet routing numbers--known as autonomous system numbers--as part of its ongoing transition from an older networking … Read more

Editor's note: Check CNET News' separate story for details about what caused the outage for Google and others.

Many people found Google's search site was extremely slow or inaccessible Thursday, and other reports pointed to troubles with other properties including YouTube, Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Maps, Google Docs, AdSense, and Blogger.

Judging by a Twitter search for #googlefail, the problem was international in scope, though it wasn't immediately clear how universal the problems were. Google didn't immediately comment for this story, though it did confirm an earlier Google News outage that lasted about three and a … Read more

Editors' note: Besides the Google News outage, there have been problems affecting other Google sites as well. Click here for the latest on those widespread Google outages. In addition, this story was corrected at 11:30 a.m. PDT to reflect that YouTube videos already had been available, but now are spotlighted as a part of a broader Google News facelift.

Google News was inaccessible for many on Thursday morning. But when it re-emerged, it sported newly prominent news videos hosted at YouTube.

Some news headlines now feature a small YouTube logo. Clicking on it triggers an embedded YouTube player … Read more

RealNetworks has accused the major film studios of antitrust violations in documents filed Wednesday with a federal court.

Real, a software company known best for the company's video and music player, has asked U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel for permission to file an amended second complaint against the six largest film studios as well as Viacom, the entertainment conglomerate and parent company of Parmount Pictures.

Real has been involved in a legal conflict with Hollywood over its release last year of RealDVD, a software that duplicates DVDs and stores the copies on a computer hard drive. The Motion … Read more

The biggest difference between Craigslist soon-to-be defunct "erotic services" and the new "adult services" sections will be human monitoring.

Craigslist on Wednesday announced that the Web classifieds site will do away with its controversial "erotic services" section and replace it with a new "adult services" section. The move comes after Craigslist managers were pressured by several state attorneys general to help remove from their site the posting of numerous ads for prostitution.

All the texts and photos within ads submitted to the adults section will be reviewed by a Craigslist employee before … Read more

Catherine, a 35-year-old sex worker in San Francisco, is disgusted with U.S. lawmakers for demanding that Craigslist abolish the "erotic services" section.

She says she knew something was amiss on Monday when she attempted to post an ad, offering a massage with "a happy ending." Catherine, who posts on Craigslist about eight times a month, was prevented from posting and couldn't understand why.

"This is ridiculous," Catherine told CNET News. "It is a sign of an immature society to repress sexuality. You're going to create more violence by doing this. … Read more

I logged into Slashdot this morning and saw this note:

This strikes me as an excellent balance between the different kinds of contributions to a service. I didn't mind the ads before on Slashdot, but I can imagine some would happily buy their way out of the ads. If I did mind the ads, however, I'd far prefer to contribute my way out of seeing them, rather than paying my way to this same end.

There's a potential lesson in this for others, including Twitter in its ongoing business model evolution. Cash is not the only value … Read more