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Add-ons are one of the biggest advantages of Firefox over the competition and Mozilla has grown a healthy ecosystem of developers centered on its popular open source browser over the years. But while longtime Firefox users probably have the browsers packed with their favorite extensions already, the lineup can be overwhelming to newcomers.

To simplify things, the company has just launched Fashion Your Firefox, a version of the add-on library that is edited and maintained by Mozilla staffers, based on the extension’s popularity, functionality and ease of use. The site is divided up into categories, which include social networking sites, music, data, shopping, news and searching, each with just a handful of add-ons.

There are many other great extensions not found in the categories currently listed at the site, but this is nonetheless a simple way for those unfamiliar with extensions to get started with some good ones.

Cloud computing may be the future, but it is a future that few seem to be embracing as of yet. Google Docs, the current largest online office suite, has managed to only scoop up around one percent of users, and those users still used a standard office suite alongside it to supplement.

In a study done between May and November, it was discovered that not only did relatively few people make use of online office suites, those who did also used a far less diverse suite of functions and don't see these online suites as “competition” for standard office apps right now. Still, the number of people making actual use of online office programs was zero not long ago.

This is the second study done in recent history which demonstrates how few people are using online office suites. Some may look at it as bad, but I see it in a different light. Google Docs, for example, has an extremely small set of tools available to it. A document or spreadsheet editor from 15 years ago would be far more functional. The fact people are making use of it at all shows their willingness to experiment and I think the only real hurdle Google and others have to overcome, aside from the trust factor, is feature richness. Every once in a while I will login to Google Docs and see they've added some new feature – and with every feature they add, more users will come.

In a move shocking to absolutely no one, Netflix has confirmed that very soon they will no longer be offering HD DVD movies for rental through their system. The official date is set for December 15th. For those who have already queued movies up and may still have them queued in HD DVD format, Netflix will be substituting regular DVDs for those.

Since the “death” of HD DVD, many companies that adopted early, including Netflix, have been wondering what to do with the inventory they'd acquired that was quickly becoming useless. Netflix isn't mentioning if they will be selling off their HD DVDs, particularly since they plan to stop selling used DVDs in the near future as well. They might end up just trashing all the media, which could be costly.

Following a soft launch in the UK earlier this year, Microsoft has debuted its online store in the United States. Simply titled the Microsoft Store, the outlet promises to become a one-stop-shop for all your favorite Microsoft gear from first-party software to hardware and PC/Xbox video games.

Purchases can either be shipped as regular boxed versions or downloaded, and users will be allowed to re-download a product until mainstream support for it ends (typically five years). Sounds handy, indeed, but the store apparently still has some way to go, with multiple sites reporting substantially higher prices compared to Amazon for example.

Microsoft has been testing the electronic-software-distribution concept for several years via its Windows Marketplace effort, whether the Microsoft Store will replace the former remains to be seen. In any case, the new store is now open for business alongside German, Korean and UK editions. Stores for France, Japan, Netherlands and Spain will be available in the near future while other countries will be covered “throughout the year.”

It’s no secret that Google purges dangerous pages from its index of searchable sites, but apparently that hasn’t stopped the company from selling text ads to a known malware purveyor and placing them on a number of websites affiliated to the AdWords service.

The link was listed as “Antivirus XP 2008,” which is the name of one of the most widespread and obnoxious bits of malware floating around the internet. The bogus antivirus program hides itself in your system and pops up at intervals with an alarming message that claims your computer is infected with all sorts of bad things. It then recommends that you buy the pro version of the program to clean up the mess, but of course this pro version also does nothing except rip you off.

Google reportedly shut down the ad when notified but probably not before it fooled many non-experienced users. The oversight is particularly surprising, considering the search giant could simply cross-reference the list of purged sites with the list of advertisers to avoid this kind of mishaps.

Have you noticed any less spam in your inbox recently? You should, according to a Washington Post report, which claims the volume of junk mail sent worldwide has dropped drastically since the shadowy web hosting firm responsible for much of it was taken offline by two major ISPs yesterday.

Apparently, security experts have been gathering information the past few months about a San Jose-based hosting company called McColo, only to discover it was responsible for coordinating roughly 75 percent of all spam sent each day. More seriously, the newspaper reports that the company was also hosting child pornography web sites for criminal organizations.

Enlisting ISPs in the battle against spam may prove successful for now, but the shutdown is not expected to affect the levels of spam in the long or even medium term, as the activities previously hosted by McColo are likely to be revived elsewhere. Bringing the people behind McColo and other similar operations to justice would make a bigger impact, though that’s certainly easier said than done.

In its ongoing effort to finally turn YouTube into a profit machine, Google is preparing to rent out search terms on the site. The concept is simple: a company has a video they want everybody to see (or at least everybody searching for a particular word), they pay Google, and in exchange people searching for that term on YouTube will see their video pop up first.

You'd think Google would have done this long ago – when they realized how much money they were sinking into YouTube. After all, that very same concept is what makes Google searching so profitable for them. The delay in implementation, according to a YouTube product manager, was apparently technical in nature, and they've had it in mind for some time.

The big question that remains now is, will it be enough? Combined with the numerous other steps Google has taken to make YouTube a revenue generator, such as advertisements in videos and AdWords, I'd certainly hope so. I don't want to see YouTube become a tirade of never-ending ads.

Microsoft may beat out Google to become the default search provider on Internet-enabled phones used by Verizon Wireless customers. If a report in the Wall Street Journal is right, then Microsoft is about to close the search deal with the wireless carrier by promising payments of approximately $550 to $650 million over five years – about twice what Google offered.

The agreement would call for Microsoft to share search advertising revenue with Verizon. Searching information on mobile phones is relatively new for many, but the practice is expected to expand quickly, and of course Microsoft’s super aggressive offer shows just how worried it is about Google seizing the market.

In separate negotiations, Microsoft is also trying to have its Windows Mobile software installed in more Verizon devices.

Gone are the days when email was just text with an occasional embedded image. Google is bringing modern VoIP features into Gmail, introducing voice and video chatting into the email suite which is becoming ever more popular, in an obvious attempt to make it more of a communications center rather than just email.

The new service is available via a plug-in, currently compatible with Mac OS X, Windows XP and Windows Vista. While it won't (yet) support Linux users, they are offering a variety of browser support, including Firefox 2 and 3, Safari 3, IE7 and of course Google Chrome. Opera isn't mentioned so it may have been left out at first.

This is certainly a very interesting endeavor – and it's easy to speculate on where it could go from here. Perhaps smartphones and PDAs of the near future could be used to video chat via Gmail as well, or maybe Google has the Android platform in mind as a target for a “Gmail communication device.”

By hijacking a working spam network, a group of researchers have discovered that it takes 12.5 million spam emails to get just one response. So why do spammers keep on sending junk mail in spite of the miserable response rates? Apparently because even though the vast majority of people ignore them, those who actually order products via unsolicited mail end up making it a profitable activity.

The research team managed to hijack part of the Storm network earlier this year for a month-long period, and used it to send spam campaigns from over 75,000 compromised machines. Despite sending almost 350 million email messages, only 28 sales resulted, though scaling things up to the full Storm network capacity the researchers estimate spammers are netting about $7,000 a day or more than $2 million per year – apparently not as much as earlier predicted but still well above operating costs.

Improved filtering technology has done a lot to lessen the burden of unsolicited mail, but spammers keep working on new techniques, and in the end the only way to stop spam completely is to stop responding to it. The full PDF version of the study is available here.

Late last week rumors began to emerge about which movie studios would start offering content on YouTube. Now, after spending months sweet-talking movie executives and rebuilding relationships in Hollywood, it has been confirmed that MGM will be the first studio on board.

While the initial lineup may not be all that compelling, the deal is a crucial step forward for YouTube, which dominates user-generated content (and copyright infringing content as well) but has also been facing stiff competition from premium content sites such as Hulu. The partnership will kick off with a channel featuring episodes from American Gladiators and films like Bulletproof Monk, and The Magnificent Seven.

As a part of the agreement, MGM will also monitor its copyrighted clips uploaded by users, and have the option of pulling them down or letting them be and share the ad revenue.

When it comes to video websites YouTube undeniably leads the pack in terms of traffic, but it has struggled to find a workable advertising scheme to bring in revenue. Furthermore, its dominance could be compromised in the long run, with the rise of Hulu and others offering premium TV and movie content. Thus, is not surprising to hear that its parent company, Google, has been talking to movie studios about bringing full-length feature films on board.

The company recently signed a deal with CBS to begin showing full TV episodes and has also added a bunch of features to make longer viewing more comfortable, such as a widescreen viewing option and a “lights-off” feature. But the site’s inferior video quality and spotty audio still leave much to be desired. There’s no word yet on which studio is looking to add its movies to the site, but sources claim the new content should arrive in the next 30 to 90 days if all goes well.

Security researchers Erik Tews and Martin Beck say they’ve developed a way to partially crack the WPA encryption standard used to protect data on many wireless networks – and they claim it only takes 12 to 15 minutes. Details will be discussed at the sixth annual PacSec conference in Tokyo next week, which reportedly involve a “mathematical breakthrough” rather than a dictionary attack.

Tews is no stranger to cracking Wi-Fi encryption. Last year, he broke the WEP encryption standard and ironically enough suggested a switch to WPA. The new method described by the researchers only compromises data sent from a router to a laptop, not the other way around, but could well mark the downfall of WPA as a reliable Wi-Fi security measure. The more recent WPA2 encryption scheme is not vulnerable to the attack, though not all wireless devices support it yet.

It’s official, Google has pulled the plug on its planned search advertising partnership with Yahoo after facing the threat of an antitrust lawsuit by federal regulators. The decision, while a blow for both companies, is particularly painful to Yahoo, whose stock has plunged since Microsoft withdrew its buyout offer and currently has a $400 million cost-cutting plan under way that includes cutting at least 10 percent of its global staff before the year ends.

When the companies announced the deal back in June, Yahoo said it could generate up to $800 million in incremental operating cash flow in the first 12 months of operation. Under the partnership, Yahoo would have placed Google ads on some of its search results and the companies would have shared the resulting revenue.

Google's decision to drop the deal comes as a bit of a surprise, given earlier statements made by CEO Eric Schmidt that the company would move forward with the partnership in October, with or without approval from the Justice Department. The search giant has changed its tune, however, and now says that “pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners.”

Comcast has conducted their first major trial on P4P technology – a new more efficient peer-to-peer protocol being developed by a coalition of ISPs, researchers and Pando networks – and the results point to a massive improvement in network usage and download speeds. Specifically, the tests involved a 21MB media file and “iTracker” servers, which provided an 80 percent speed boost for users while heavily reducing the amount of inbound and outbound traffic for the cable provider.

The new system works by localizing peer-to-peer file sharing, instead of just downloading or uploading data from and to people all over the world, so that peers within an ISP’s network are prioritized and data is routed internally across such network when possible. This is actually expected to (slightly) increase an ISP's local network traffic, but the real benefit comes from cutting the financial hit they take from sending traffic over transit links.

While these initial findings look promising, it is important to note that this was only a preliminary test and surely there will be other important concerns ISPs will want to address before making P4P use widespread, such as anti-piracy measures and filters.

No longer just a little player, Firefox has become a very popular browser around the world and has been adopted by individuals and businesses alike. Mozilla's browser is nearing another milestone, with it falling just a tad short of a 20% market share.

According to recent statistics, the average take of Firefox for October was 19.97%, a small increase over months prior. That gain seems to come directly at the expense of Internet Explorer, which dropped from 71.52% to 71.27%, and continues to follow a trend in which Firefox is making small gains and IE is suffering small losses. With IE7 failing to wow the world and IE8 still in beta, Mozilla has a definite chance to hit that 20% soon.

Following Comcast and others, another major ISP in the U.S. is playing with the idea of bandwidth transfer limits for their Internet customers. AT&T is considering imposing tiered bandwidth caps, with the intent of improving quality of service. They have tossed out some initial figures, with their lowest-priced packages coming with a 20GB limit per month and their highest-priced packages having 150GB limits.

These plans fall short of the 250GB limit Comcast has imposed. To avoid irate customers, AT&T has claimed they will contact people who exceed 80%. That would definitely be important, as once they hit the cap a customer can be expected to pay $1 per gigabyte for additional bandwidth.

While all of these companies make similar claims – that a small percentage of users consume most of the bandwidth – most of them blatantly ignore the fact that the Internet as a medium is changing. In a few years, streaming video is likely to be the norm, rather than the exception.

Anticipating a negative answer from U.S. antitrust regulators, Google and Yahoo have proposed substantial structural changes to their advertising agreement that would let Yahoo use Google's more advanced and better performing ad platform to generate extra revenue from its search traffic and content websites.

The most visible changes in the updated agreement are caps that would limit Yahoo from generating over 25 percent of its revenue off the Google agreement. The new proposal has also reduced the term of the contract from ten years to just two.

For Yahoo this is just the continuance of a very intense year in which Microsoft heavily pursued the company for a billionaire takeover. The number two search engine finally rejected the offer alienating some of its investors. Meanwhile the company continued to lose ground to main competitor Google with whom is now almost forced into an agreement if they want to make room for a strong comeback.

Shortly after Comcast announced plans to incorporate DOCSIS 3.0 with speeds approaching 50Mbps and higher, Verizon is seeking to retain their DSL customers with faster speeds as well. Verizon will be expanding their fastest-tier DSL service, making it available to around 6.6 million people, significantly more than the less than 1 million it was available to prior.

The increased DSL speeds will go as high as 7mbps, and apparently is only being targeted in areas where FIOS isn't available. Those speeds still fall short of most cable offerings.

From a global perspective, even these speeds are rather unimpressive. The U.S. is still ranked fairly low for average broadband speeds worldwide along with Internet propagation. The size and layout of the U.S. makes broadband for everyone hard to accomplish however, so the stats looked at as absolute numbers only paint one side of the picture.

Free content is always good, and content without DRM is good too, but free content without DRM is simply the best combination. The BBC is reaching out to Linux users who would like just that, launching on an experimental basis, a program to stream many radio shows along with other content.

They'll accomplish this via a plug-in, which will have a live feed that is updated with new content, and will offer a host of things that BBC normally airs on the radio. They're planning on using multiple types of content in the future, all of which they claim will use freely-accessible codecs. Some content will not appear through this free medium, and even the BBC has admitted that this is an evaluation platform for them to see how this and other platforms could be used in the future.