After last week's scuffle with filtered image results, we left our two major Web search engines in a tie-up, with the score Bing 3, Google 3 after six heats. For the tie breaker for this week, we're going to throw a curve ball.

A great search engine has to be responsive and helpful and informative for someone who is completely in the dark, not only about the topic he's interested in, but about the nature of the Internet. Some of our comments this week have taken us to task for not using the smartest queries -- for instance, one person asked, why couldn't someone have searched on IMDB.com for Rod Taylor instead of on Google or Bing? The answer there is, IMDB may be no better than either Bing or Google at helping someone locate an actor based on minimal information. We created a "backwards" query for this test because that's the type of query inquisitive folks may very well create for themselves.

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It's not as easy as it looks, is it? The key here was to come up with not only a better name for a search engine than "Bing" (among those who believe there is one), but a tagline that would help frame a marketing campaign for the product. We didn't care whether the .com name for the URL was already taken. That's never stopped Microsoft before, including with Live.com -- if the name's good enough, it would have the resources to put down serious money for it.

Six Betanews staff members cast votes for first, second, and third place, with first place getting three points, second place two, and third place one. After a week of intense competition (I have to exhaust my bucket of superlatives somewhere), here are the final results:

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In just a matter of hours, accused file sharer Joel Tenenbaum and his Harvard Law legal team will appear in the Boston Federal Courthouse for a hearing to decide the outcome of all his constitutional counterclaims against the Recording Industry Association of America.

Tenenbaum is being sued for more than one million dollars by the music industry for illegally downloading seven music files over P2P service KaZaa more than six years ago, when Joel was a teenager. Now a Boston University grad student backed by Charles Nesson of the Berkman Center and a legal counsel of nine Harvard law students, Tenenbaum stands at the center of a trial that has come to represent the "average David [versus] the corporate Goliath."

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In April, Vivendi and Google teamed up to create a new premium music video site called Vevo, which would be fully owned by Vivendi subsidiary Universal Music Group, and built upon the technology Google employs in YouTube. Some consider the project an attempt to create "The Hulu of Music Videos."

Yesterday, Sony announced that is the first of the remaining major labels besides Universal to sign up to provide content for the forthcoming site, which Sony describes as being "built for consumers, advertisers and content owners."

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Remember last autumn, when the McColo takedown made the spam go away and brought sweet, sweet (relative) peace to all our inboxes for a while? It's not likely that the closure of Pricewert will have that sort of direct effect on most of our lives, but a district court judge's ruling to have the plug pulled on the ISP will certainly improve the Internet in other ways.

The ruling was made at the request of the FTC, which has a long history of history with Pricewert. The ISP is believed to have engaged in a variety of offenses -- botnets, yes, but also malware distribution, fake pharma sites, investment scams, and some of the very worst kinds of pornography. (Yeah, they had that. Yeah, they had that too.) Takedown requests made to the ISP -- operating under a variety of names, including 3FN, Triple Fiber Network, APX Telecom, APS Telecom, and APS Communication -- have been either ignored or dodged by shifting the content to another bank of IP addresses under Pricewert's control.

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Here's an idea, see what you think: You remember that big Domain Name System cache poisoning warning we faced last year, the one where the whole Internet was threatened and every major vendor acted swiftly to prevent it from happening (with Apple bringing up the rear, again)? Well, even Microsoft was on top of this one, with the idea that if DNS servers used authentication, they could encrypt communications between each other and secure DNS servers from being spoofed or from having false entries inserted into their lookup tables. Not that it was Microsoft's idea, engineers had actually been considering it since the 1980s. So what if the US Government got in on the act? Maybe that might prevent a telecommunications disaster! Do you think?... The government gets wise later in WN|WN, but first, Adobe and Apple aren't getting any wiser.

Even now, no Flash for iPhone

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Who among us doesn't love a good hack? After putting forth a $10,000 come-and-get-us challenge, it's possible that StrongWebmail CEO Darren Berkovitz is rethinking his stance on that. The company, which makes voice-based authentication software, dared hackers to break into Mr. Berkovitz's Web-mail account and report back details from an upcoming date on his calendar. A week later, a team of high-profile security researchers contacted a reporter with precisely that information.

The contest even gave hackers a head start, providing the target e-mail address (Support@StrongWebmailCorp.com) and that account's password. The idea was to point out StrongWebmail's unique value proposition -- voice verification through a pre-registered mobile number. The idea is that one's account setup includes a phone number at which the system can reach you. When you attempt to login to check mail, the system phones you with a three-digit number, which acts as a final verification before you hop into the inbox. The authentication is provided by Beverly Hills-based Telesign, which offers similar services to various Web sites.

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The big problem which massive multimedia online indexes face today, which may only get worse before it can ever get better, is with their capability to shield certain viewers from content they do not want appearing on their computer. Regardless of the entire debate over whether the Internet should have content regulation, individuals should have the right not to see what they do not wish to see, and they should also have the right to prevent their children from seeing it as well. It may be everybody's Internet, but in the end, it's my computer and it's your computer.

Since we started our Face-off series with Google and Bing just last Monday, we've gotten a lot of very positive comments and accolades from readers (thank you so much), plus we've received suggestions that we pit the two search engines together to see which one is the most capable of filtering out the junk. What do you not want to see on your computer, and what things about you personally do you not want others to see on their computers -- and which search engine cares the most about answering those questions?

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On Thursday, the European Union undertook the second-largest election in the world, voting in 27 countries to fill 736 seats in the European Parliament. They've got Greens. They've got fascists. They've got countries that want into the system and countries that want out. But you know what they haven't got? They haven't got a whole lot of social networking drama about it.

Yet. According to a spring survey by Fleishman-Hillard, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are only just starting to see the point of extending their digital presence past having a Web site. That part they get -- 75% of MEPs surveyed have a Web site -- but just under one-quarter of the group blogs, and only about a quarter of those who do blog take the time to comment on other blogs. As for Twitter, 62% have either never heard of it or have no plans to use it.

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Late last night, The Windows Mobile team made the Windows Mobile 6.5 Developer Tool Kit available, which is not a standalone Software Development Kit, but an add-on component for the Windows Mobile 6 SDK.

The Toolkit includes emulator images, new touch and gesture APIs, and code samples for developing software for Windows Mobile 6.5. The team is most excited about widget development, and in its blog today provides a step-by-step guide for widget creation (essentially "write the code, package it, run it.")

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I've never been addicted to drugs, but watching Microsoft's seemingly never-ending drive to introduce a search engine that sticks helps me understand why the company simply can't say no.

First, the Redmond software giant's bread and butter, Windows and Office, are failing businesses. Although they're still hugely profitable, selling boxes of disc-based software is yesterday's business model. Microsoft needs to replace those revenue streams. Soon.

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As a recognized public utility already, Verizon may be one of the best suited organizations on the planet to provide a monthly billable service to businesses, that just happens to include computing. That's the basis of the US' number one carrier's announcement yesterday. But what is it that Verizon plans to sell? With something as nebulous as cloud computing, it's often difficult to determine just what it is that a service provider is actually offering, and whether it's on a par with competitive brands. And like much of its competition, Verizon "buries its lead" with paragraphs and paragraphs of introduction about how big the cloud is these days, and how competitive business is these days, and how crappy the economy is these days.

What's the news in all of this? A company that already has a huge connectivity infrastructure is leveraging it to deliver a service for businesses to offload not only their applications, but the administrative responsibility for those apps as well, to Verizon for a monthly fee.

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It's on, and most of the outlets we've seen so far compared Palm's new phone to -- what else? -- the iPhone. To summarize:

Pre beats iPhone: Associated Press, USA Today, TG Daily

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The life of a security auditor has its high points, of course -- travel, getting paid to break stuff, and more travel -- but there's a lot about that job that doesn't recommend it. You're going into someone else's place of business and trying to figure out what they're doing wrong, so you can write a big report that goes to their bosses? I don't care how personable you are, this isn't on the Dale Carnegie list of How To Win Friends.

Nor, in a disturbing number of situations, is it on the list of ways to Influence People. Take a pack of security auditors out for a beer sometime. (You will not have to ask twice, and if you get two beers in them they'll tell you about that mid-sized city whose network is end-to-end pwned right now and that international airport that has an ongoing problem with stolen IDs -- no names, of course, but plenty of other detail. After that, you'll want another beer just for yourself.) When they're done scaring you, they'll start trading tales of clients who simply refused to accept a bad audit.

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When the President of the United States grants authority to a private entity for it to conduct operations that he says are in the national interest, there typically is very little that a single federal judge can do to overturn that authority. So perhaps it should be no surprise that US District Court Judge Vaughn Walker yesterday upheld President Bush's grant of immunity from civil lawsuits to telecommunications companies including AT&T, for working with the National Security Agency in anti-terrorist operations. But did Judge Walker leave bread crumbs for plaintiffs in those suits to seek redress from the former president himself? This morning, the EFF has found some crumbs.

Federal judge tosses warrantless wiretap suits, but not too far

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