Google has been competing with Microsoft on a number of products, but with their release of Google Chrome web browser they must have hit home with Microsoft. Since the Chrome browser release, Microsoft launched Bing.com which directly competes with Google’s core search business. Now, Google is firing back with Google Chrome OS; this has the makings of a great rivalry.
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This is a serious outage impacting both consumers and venders alike.  Authorize.net is used by hundreds of thousands of e-commerce business to process their online credit card and electronic check payments; this means that millions of transactions cannot be proccesed during this down time.

It’s unclear when the downtime started exactly, but the consensus is somewhere between 5 and 7 hours at this point (11 AM Eastern), with e-commerce vendors desperately looking for ways to contact the company or get any first-hand information about what’s going on and when the problems will be resolved. Twitter, meanwhile, is buzzing with the news as the United States wakes up.
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Facebook recently allowed users and page owners to register their own URL addresses such as http://www.facebook.com/rotilda to make it easier for people to share and find profiles and pages.  All normal user profiles were able to switch their URL addresses immediately but fan pages had restrictions.  Pages had to have at least 1000 fans in order to pick their unique URLs.  Facebook has significantly lowered the restriction to a minimum of 25 fans starting tonight at 11.59pm EDT.

The Facebook help section reads:

Your Facebook Page must meet two requirements: it must have been live on Facebook prior to the May 31, 2009 cut-off date and have had a minimum 1,000 fans at that time.

This limitation is temporary. All Pages created after May 31, 2009 or that had less than 1,000 fans on that day will be eligible to claim usernames on Sunday, June 28, 2009 if they have more than 25 fans.

Some very crafty crackers have figured out a way to circumvent Apple.com in order to purchase the new iPhone 3GS and have it delivered right to your house on July 19th, with free shipping to boot.  The process involves getting an add on for Firefox and using a little click and trick. This process does not allow you to get the subsidized price but it does let you skip right by having to sign up for a 2 year AT&T contract.  Note that this is still a carrier locked phone, but in theory you would be able to go month to month with your plan.  You can fully process your order including charging your card but I wonder if the Empire AT&T will figure out what is going on and get your orders canceled if they see there is not a contract associated with the sale.  You can find full instructions at iTalkiPhone.com

I don’t condone any of these actions but I’m really interested to hear how it goes if someone not related to Rotilda decides to try.  Strictly for information purposes.  If you try this, come back and leave a comment on how it worked.