Google has removed over 11 million .co.cc websites from its search engine results pages on the basis that most of them are far too "spammy".



The .co.cc space is not an officially authorised second-level domain like .co.uk or .com.au. Rather, it's offered independently by a Korean company (http://co.cc/) that just happens to own the domain name .co.cc.

Google classes the firm as a "freehost", and has exercised its right to block the whole domain "if we see a very large fraction of sites on a specific freehost are spammy or low-quality", according to Matt Cutts, head of Google's web spam team.

The company said in a recent blog post: "To help protect users we recently modified those [malware-scanning] systems to identify bulk subdomain services which are being abused. In some severe cases our systems may now flag the whole bulk domain."

According to a recent report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group, the .cc top-level domain hosted 4,963 phishing attacks in the second half of 2010, almost twice the number found under any other extension.

That was due to a large number of attacks originating from .co.cc addresses, the APWG said.

The .co.cc "registry" offers single sub-domains for free, and enables customers to bulk-register 15,000 addresses at a time for a mere $1,000, or about seven cents a name.

The company claims to have 11,383,736 registered domains and 5,731,278 user accounts. That would make it one of the largest domain extensions in the world, bigger than both .org and .uk by over two million domains.

The .cc top-level domain belongs to the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, a small Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. Regular .cc websites are unaffected by Google's changes.

In my Google+ feature published yesterday, I had mentioned towards the end, that Facebook needs to be proactive in order to combat the new social networking rival. FB responded swiftly by unveiling a new feature that allows you to make video calls right through the browser interface, just like Google+ does with its Hangout feature. We finally know what CEO Mark Zuckerberg meant, when he had announced last week that the company had planned to "...launch something awesome" this week. I tried my hands at Google+ yesterday, and today I am going to try to find out if this new video calling feature in FB is a fitting retaliation.

The new video calling feature has been made possible, thanks to the partnership between FB and Skype. Of course, you don't need to install Skype; a small plug-in takes care of the software requirements. On the hardware front, you need a webcam, a headset \ speakers, and a microphone.


Let's start with the basics, beginning with opening www.facebook.com/videocalling. The main page has a video on the right, explaining the feature. The Skype logo at the bottom of the screen reinforces the fact that it is powered by theVoIP provider.

FB Videocalling main page

To get started, you can click on the green Get Started button on the left of the screen. Assuming that you have already logged into Facebook, a chat window will pop up on the right hand side, listing all your online FB contacts. Click on one of them to proceed

Alternatively, you can start the chat directly from your online friend's profile by clicking on the Call button located on the right hand side of the screen near the top.

Calls can be initiated directly from your friend's profile

Once the chat window is open, you can click on the camera icon present on the title bar towards the left to initiate a video call

Sony will reportedly begin production of the PlayStation 4 by the end of this year according to a report by DigiTimes, a Taiwanese daily newspaper for semiconductor, electronics, computer, and communications industries. This fits well with an earlier report stating that the PS4 was in active R&D according to a statement by Masaru Kato, Sony's Chief Financial Officer.