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One billion people worldwide visited Google in May, the first time ever that a site has drawn that many visitors in one month, according to data from ComScore.

The number of unique visitors to Google's sites rose by 8.4 percent from 931 million a year ago to just over a billion--1,009,699,000 to be more exact.

Across the world, market researcher ComScore said yesterday, Google saw its greatest numbers in India and South Africa, which accounted for 14.3 percent and 13.5 percent of its visitors, respectively. The lowest numbers were in South Korea and … Read more

The New York Post is now blocking iPad owners from accessing its Web site through mobile Safari, trying to instead force them to download and use the paper's own iPad app.

iPad-owning New Yorkers looking for their daily Post fix online will see nothing but a message directing them to download the paper's $1.99 iPad app where after 30 days of free access they must pay for a monthly or annual subscription to read the content--$6.99 for one month, $39.99 for six months, or $74.99 for a year.

But the block seems limited … Read more

A security researcher in Italy has discovered a flaw in Internet Explorer that he says could enable hackers to steal cookies from a PC and then log onto password-protected Web sites.

Referring to the exploit as "cookiejacking," Rosario Valotta claims that a zero-day vulnerability found in every version of Microsoft's IE under any version of Windows allows an attacker to hijack any cookie for any Web site.

Demonstrating his findings at security conferences this month in Switzerland and Amsterdam, Valotta acknowledges that to exploit the hole, the hacker must employ a bit of social engineering because the … Read more

Within days of Facebook rolling out new security features designed to block spam, several new social-engineering attacks were spreading that somehow managed to get by the company's antispam defenses.

The spammers have modified their handiwork so it will get past Facebook's scam detection system, company spokesman Fred Wolens told CNET today.

"There are new methods they've picked up after we put out the protections on Thursday," he said. "It's an arms race. We put out new protections and they come up with new campaigns...When we announced the new security features, they were … Read more

Google's Blogger service has been offline or unreliable for much of the day, with Blogger-hosted blogs changed to read-only mode, and posts and comments made after 7:37 a.m. PDT on May 11, 2011, removed.

In a post on the Blogger help forum, the product team said that it had rolled back a scheduled maintenance release from last night and that its "engineers are working hard to return Blogger to normal and restore your posts and comments."

Google's reply for a request for comment was, "The team is working on this." The company … Read more

Facebook is launching several new security features today designed to protect users from malware and from getting their accounts hijacked.

First, the site will display warnings when users are about to be duped by clickjacking and cross-site scripting attacks in which they think they are following a link to an interesting news story or taking action to see a video and instead end up spamming their friends.

For example, a scam was circulating yesterday in which Facebook users were inadvertently commenting on what looked like a news site with details of the iPhone 5. Clicking on the link leads to … Read more

Amazon.com is threatening to cut ties with affiliates in any states that decide to collect sales tax, CEO Jeff Bezos said yesterday.

"We will continue to drop states who pass those affiliate laws, from the affiliate program," Bezos said at the ShopSmart Shopping Summit in New York, according to Reuters.

The company recently cut ties with affiliates in Illinois and has also done so in Colorado, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. Amazon is threatening to do likewise in California.

As on online company, Amazon itself isn't required to collect taxes in states where the company is … Read more

An update rolled out yesterday to Avast's antivirus product contained a bug that flags legitimate Web sites as malware infected.

In a blog post late yesterday, Avast acknowledged the false positive glitch in an update known as 110411-1, which was automatically rolled out to Avast AV users earlier that day. The error has specifically affected versions 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x of Avast's antivirus software.

In an e-mail to CNET, an Avast spokesman said today that the update was downloaded by around 5 million users, mostly on the Western Hemisphere due to the time in which … Read more

I live in New Mexico, land of the atomic bomb. The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History is a few miles from my house. The state is chock full of nuclear reminders like the Trinity Site and Los Alamos National Lab.

One thing we don't have is a nuclear power plant. I know this handy little tidbit thanks to the new Nuclear Site Locator app for iPhone and Android. It comes from developer LogSat Software, the same company that brought you Sex Offenders Search and Family Tracker.

For $1.99, you can see where the closest nuclear plant is to your location, check up on the proximity of nuclear power to people in your contact list or just simply browse a stream of nuclear sites around the world. The closest plant to me is 500 miles away: the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station just outside of Phoenix. I don't think that will fly as an excuse to cancel my next blazing-hot summer trip to Arizona.

There is a little more than just mapping involved with Nuclear Site Locator. Clicking on a nuclear site's name pops up a picture and lists the total number of reactors, how many are active, when they were built, and what their capacity is.… Read more