Up front: Another no-go for Adobe Flash on iPhone, and does Google beat the Pre?

Friday's tech headlines

Ars Technica

• John Timmer takes a more kindly look than some at Google Squared and explains how, if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need. Especially if you organize your thoughts in tabular form.

• The Left 4 Dead fanbase is whining because Valve is releasing a sequel too quickly for their tastes. Ben Kuchera talked to Valve's Chuck Falisek to figure out why the game's dropping so soon. (Your reporter suggests that next he should talk to some Wolfenstein fans to figure out a release schedule worth whining about.)

Federal Computer Week

• The Food and Drug Administration's building a system that would give consumers help identifying risks by matching data in their personal health histories with what the FDA knows about various medications and medical gear. It's called Sentinel and, according to a recent GAO report, it's really not secure.

• Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano gives a big thumbs-up to E-Verify, the DHS-Social Security Administration collaboration designed to let employers cross-check information on new employees against SSA and DHS records. The goal is to cut down on inadvertent hiring of undocumented workers.

GigaOm

• Ad-supported revenue isn't working out for a lot of projects, so new approaches to profit are turning up all over. Om Malik reports on the decision at Shozu, which previously offered its photo-sharing mobile app free, to switch over to a paid-software model.

• Did you know that Google has been hosting chalk-talk meetings for regulators and Congressional staffers, to explain some of the things that are on tech folks' minds? Wouldn't it be great if they'd Webcast those or at least post some video afterwards?

• AT&T has been talking a big game about wireless being their future and whatnot, but their U-verse rollout is now a full year behind its original schedule.

The Register

• Microsoft's got quick fixes to keep Bing from playing teh pr0ns with its Smart Motion Previews video-clip feature, but they're pretty inelegant.

• And Microsoft has settled a patent dispute with Paltalk, which bought a patent originated by the long-dead Mpath and now calls itself "the leading real-time, video-based community." The conflict was over Halo and the Xbox; settlement terms were not revealed.

• A UK court case that pitted a bank against a customer whose card may have been cloned by hackers who withdrew about $4,000 from his account has been decided in favor of the bank. The card used a "chip-and-pin" system that the banks have claimed is highly secure, though various security professionals have proven otherwise; the plaintiff said his card had been hacked, the bank said it hadn't, the judge went with the bank's version of events.

Gizmodo

• Engadget's crew in China has video of an Asus Eee with a touchscreen built into the keyboard. It's running a version of Windows XP, in case that's the first thing that comes to mind when you see "Eee touchscreen."

• The Xbox 360 is nowhere near the end of its lifecycle. John Schappert, Microsoft's VP of Interactive Entertainment, told Matt Buchanan that "when [they] need new hardware to deliver new experiences, that's when [they'll] start talking about new hardware."

• The headline "Palm Pre cuts the cheese" is funny if you're 12. Which, yeah. The commenters have fun with this one too.

Digg that crazy ad plan

The question is not, "Will Digg's ad-ratings system work." The question is, "How fast will we see a general improvement in online ads?"

Serious online readers have a far more fraught relationship with advertising than, say, people who read magazines. Things are placid in the print world, after all; relatively few publications permit those reeking ads for mass-market perfumes, the craze for sound-chipped ads appears to have died off, and of course no one's still buying ads in print media anyway.

Online, however, the ads cookie you and chatter at you and cover up the text you're trying to read and basically do all sorts of things that would be verboten if anyone knew how to actually make an ad that worked. Occasionally they're fun, but for the most part they're annoying and repetitive. Occasionally one rises up to what your reporter calls the Slim Jim level -- a commercial so annoying that I may a mental note to avoid that advertiser's products altogether.

Other than focus groups, consumers haven't traditionally been able to give much direct feedback on advertising -- we click it for whatever reasons, and the ads-sales guys and the creative folks ascribe to that whatever reasons they will. But Digg has a better idea -- and not only a better idea but a way to make the results matter to the advertising folk who inform and cajole and afflict and enlighten us with these things. If it pans out, it could redefine the relationship between the advertiser and the audience -- a rolled-up newspaper across the advertiser snout, if you will, only newspaper could never accomplish this.