The car maker BMW has had its German website bmw.de delisted from Google. The delisting was punishment for using deceptive means to boost page ranking, which has now been set to zero for BMW. Matt Cutts, a Google employee who works to stop unethical search manipulation, originally reported the delisting in his blog and suggests that camera maker Ricoh is not far behind.

Aside from speed, one crucial difference between e-mail and snail mail is that e-mail is free. That's about to change, as AOL and Yahoo are going to start charging anywhere from 1/4¢ to 1¢ to guarantee that messages will wind up in the inboxes of the recipients. Free e-mail will still be accepted, but there will be no guarantee that it will find its way through the spam filters and into users' inboxes.

Both companies are defending the surcharge, pitching it as a way to guarantee reputable companies (i.e., those willing to pony up the cost per message) that their messages will make it to their intended audience.

And just like the post office, AOL and Yahoo will be making money on the whole venture. The payments will be made to a third party, a company called Goodmail that says its mission is "to bring safety and reliability to e-mail for the benefit of all participants." Goodmail will keep half of the payments and pass the rest of the e-mail charges onto Yahoo and AOL.

In addition, AOL and Yahoo run the risk of angering their own subscribers if expected e-mail doesn't arrive because the sender decided not pay the surcharge. Cutting down on the volume of unwanted e-mail is a worthwhile goal, but AOL and Yahoo are going about it the wrong way by charging senders.

As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it's time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg's host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach's mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head.

The wasp slips her stinger through the roach's exoskeleton and directly into its brain.

She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.

From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach's antennae and leads it--in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex--like a dog on a leash.

The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp's burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside.

An independent security researcher has pinpointed a denial-of-service flaw in Microsoft's brand new Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview just moments after installing the security-centric browser makeover.

Tom Ferris said could hardly believe his eyes when the new browser crashed less than 15 minutes after he started using a homemade fuzz testing tool to poke around for potential security issues.

"I've confirmed a denial-of-service at this point, but I'm sure someone malicious could research this some more to control memory at some point to cause code execution," Ferris said in an interview with eWEEK.

The Redmond, Wash. software maker typically downplays a denial-of-service browser bug that fixes itself when the browser is restarted, but Ferris said it's dangerous to assume the risk cannot be escalated with additional research.

An 18-year-old drug dealing master criminal is languishing in Utah County Jail after reporting the theft of his stash to police, the Deseret Morning News reports.

He rang the cops to complain that someone had broken into his Orem home and made off with the "quarter-pound of marijuana he had been trying to sell". The burglar "had broken a window and apparently cut himself while crawling into the home" and a "trail of blood indicated that the thief's efforts were concentrated on the 18-year-old's bedroom, where the drugs had been kept".

The cops soon tracked the Provo man to his mother's house where they found six ounces of marijana and "a pair of blood-soaked pants" - a result of a large cut on his arm. He was quickly booked into Utah County Jail on "multiple burglary, theft and possession of marijuana in a drug-free zone with the intent to distribute" raps.

Police then asked the owner of the drugs to pop down to the Orem Public Safety Building to identify his property. He duly did, and was cuffed for his trouble. He faces a charge of "possession of marijuana in a drug-free zone with intent to distribute".

Marie Lindor, a home health aide who has never bought, used, or even turned on a computer in her life, but was nevertheless sued by the RIAA in Brooklyn federal court for using an "online distribution system" to "download, distribute, and/or make available for distribution" plaintiff's music files, has requested a pre-motion conference in anticipation of making a summary judgment motion dismissing the complaint and awarding her attorneys fees under the Copyright Act.

"According to an article in Information Week, Microsoft is aware that the 'Kama Sutra/Blackworm/MyWife' worm will hit on Friday, overwriting office documents, but will not release a patch until its regular monthly patch release on February 14th. Unless, that is, you subscribe to one of Microsoft's pay security services, in which case your machine will have the worm removed in advance." From the article: "The blog offered no explanation why the tool wouldn't be updated earlier, nor did Microsoft immediately respond to questions. Each month, Microsoft pushes a revised tool to Windows users who have Automatic Update enabled for Windows Update or Microsoft Update. The Redmond, Wash.-based company has released the Malicious Software Removal Tool off-schedule once before, in August 2005, shortly after the Zotob worm began striking Windows 2000 systems."

US politicians have been caught defacing entries on Wikipedia which they do not agree with, or say nasty things about them.

According to News.com, the latest case involves Marty Meehan, a Massachusetts Democrat who deleted references to his broken term-limits pledges and massive campaign war chest on Wikipedia. Obviously he didn’t do it himself, his aides did it for him.

However, Wikipedia editors have compiled a list of more than 1,000 edits made by Internet addresses allocated to the US Senate and House of Representatives. Apparently they are so childish that Wikipedia has blocked the US Senate and House of Representatives IP addresses.

A Wakefield man lost his appetite when he found "dog sh*t" listed among the ingredients on a packet of ham.

Mick Woods, 34, examined another of the 300g containers and saw the same 'additive' listed on the label.

The dad-of-three added: "We spent 40 minutes laughing. But we haven't put any in the kids' sandwiches and we had something else for our tea."

Manufacturer H R Hargreaves & Son said it axed an employee over the labeling prank and was trying to recall the ham.

A spokesman for the Manchester firm said: "We can't have people fooling about with food products. A number of packs are affected. We're trying to find out what shops they're in."

Microsoft and Cisco have turned down an invite to attend a Feb. 1 Congressional briefing on freedom of speech and the Internet in China, according to a report from AFP News. Google and Yahoo have not yet given a final answer on whether they will attend, according to the report.

An investigation published Thursday by CNET News.com showed that Google's new China search engine not only censored criticisms of the Chinese government, but went further than similar services from Microsoft and Yahoo by targeting sites related to teen pregnancy, alcohol, dating and homosexuality.

The Internet "is contributing to Chinese political engagement" as "access to the outside world is preventing more censorship," Gates was quoted as saying in an article in The Times Online.