EU Approves Google’s DoubleClick Buy

Google announced their intention to acquire ad service company DoubleClick back in April last year. Today, Reuters reports:

Google won unconditional approval from the European Commission on Tuesday to buy rival Web advertiser DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, despite objections from rivals and privacy advocates.

Google has already won approval from United States antitrust authorities.

Reuters quotes the European Commission saying that “despite the concerns of competitors, the transaction would not close off access to rivals because of such alternatives as Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL.”

Source…

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Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Google

Every time I turn around, Google‘s come up with something new, cool, or innovative. It’s no wonder it has Microsoft on the run.

Nifty Google Features

Calculate This: You can use Google Calculator to crunch numbers and figure out conversions. Try entering 12*12 and see what happens; you can also run more complex equations, like G*(6e24 kg)/(4000 miles)^2). Google Calculator handles conversions of all types, such as 3 ounces in tablespoons, 16 dollars in euros, or 19999GB to MB.

Find That Number: You can track FedEx, UPS, and U.S. Postal Service shipments just by sticking the tracking number into Google’s search field; do the same with zip and area codes, vehicle IDs, patent numbers, airplane registration numbers, and even UPC codes.

Make Me Special: Google has special search sites just for you. There’s one for Firefox users, another for Linux users, and a spot for those of you who can’t get enough of Microsoft.

Dig This: This is one flight I’m glad I missed. [Thanks to MCraig.] The other video had me going until the passengers started jumping out of the plane.

Dig This, Too: So you need to move a palm tree? Watch this safety video first. Step one: Hire a professional. [Thanks, Brad.]

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Mozilla Introduces Firefox 3 Beta 4

Mozilla introduced Beta 4 of Firefox 3 , with a boatload of stability fixes and a few improvements to the user interface. Mozilla says the beta — like all the pre-release browser versions — is for developers and testers only, but I’ve been using it as my primary browser since December and it works just fine.
Get it here.

The What’s New section of the release notes lists the major improvements in beta 4 (which was released today): “Firefox 3 Beta 4 includes more than 900 enhancements from the previous beta, including drastic improvements to performance and memory usage, as well as fixes for stability, platform enhancements and user interface improvements.”

Specific improvements in this beta: Download manager, full-page zoom, Vista integration with Vista-specific icons and native user inteface widgets in the browser and Web forms, Mac integration to make the browser look more like a native OS X application, and integration with Linux.

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10 Killer Firefox Extensions That You Probably Don’t Know About

The best Firefox Extensions out there, right here.

This isn’t the usual list of extensions that everyone is used to using, but 10 add-ons that many may not know about, but can be very useful for everyday web browsing.

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Active exploitation of Excel vulnerability

The US-CERT has published a warning on active exploitation of a vulnerability in Microsoft Excel, described in Microsoft Security Advisory 947563. We can confirm these attacks and have been tracking several exploits over the last few days.

It should be noted that the incidents we are aware of have been limited to a very specific targeted attack and were not widespread. In total, we established approximately 21 reports of attacks using only 8 different files, from within the same two communities, so far.

Below are the md5sum’s for the individual exploits:

d03254bbcb124a20478287a77199a001
718e4ff4691f8cefcf296607b3b53b6c
3b4409efea04c003e91b38ed8b428706
2511f821af2d5bea80899bf2ce716b34
15a10055acbc901504708249848228fb
51b3d57064e182eee8a702abd4ee43fe
9983c89a4c148f8aee0a80271ad0a584
69014e152d93f4bc09ce5894d5e793aa

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