One of yesterday's most commented stories was the report that MySpace.com has recently topped the charts for at least one measure of Internet popularity — site visits, as measured by Web-metrics company Hitwise. Along with a hefty dose of scorn for the actual content driving those page views (and some challenges to the conventional wisdom about MySpace's audience), readers expressed respect — not all of it grudging — for the reasons that MySpace has succeeded as it has. The 360-plus comments readers contributed to the story add interesting insights as well as information about the backend system which supports all those pageviews. Read on for the Backslash summary of the conversation.

An anonymous reader writes "Wired reports that Google is making some effort to put a crack in the practice of click-fraud. Because of the pernicious abuse of the company's advertising business, it simply can't be sure that anyone is actually looking at the ads. Bruce Schneier talks about the problems of ensuring that people are really people, and Google's solution." From the article: "Google is testing a new advertising model to deal with click fraud: cost-per-action ads. Advertisers don't pay unless the customer performs a certain action: buys a product, fills out a survey, whatever. It's a hard model to make work — Google would become more of a partner in the final sale instead of an indifferent displayer of advertising — but it's the right security response to click fraud: Change the rules of the game so that click fraud doesn't matter."

Barbie Dollar writes "Researchers at Microsoft are working on an ambitious new project to hunt down and neutralize large-scale search engine spammers. The project, called Strider Search Defender, automates the discovery of search spammers through non-content analysis. The project integrates technology from two previous Microsoft Research prototypes (Strider HoneyMonkey and Strider URL Tracer) and promises a new approach to removing junk results from search engine queries."

Though Microsoft's 'Argo' (now known to be bearing the name 'Zune') is most assuredly a shot at the iPod, it may not be going after the handheld gaming market. Gamespot explores rumours stating that the 'Zune' is simply a first step on Microsoft's road into that particular sector of the games industry. From the article: "The Zune could also just be the first step towards something bigger. People are already speculating about Xbox 360 integration with the device, beginning with streaming audio, like the iPod currently does. But add a few buttons, a thumbstick, and a little more horsepower, and the Zune could soon be singing gamers' tunes." I'd imagine we'll see some simple Xbox Live Arcade style games, which will impact your Xbox gamertag via Live Anywhere. With Vista pushed out to January, they've got to have something to show this Christmas.

An anonymous reader writes "Apple has decided not to appeal the decision against it in it in its case against the product-information leaking bloggers. News.com discusses the ramifications of this decision, which may make future online journalists bolder in their actions." From the article: "Court documents show the company's investigators interviewed 29 employees who had access to a key confidential document — but Apple did not examine them under oath or examine their computers. That's one reason, the appeals court said, to grant the online journalists the protective order they requested. 'Apple has failed to establish that it adequately pursued other possible means to identify the source of the information in question,' the judges said."

Electronic Arts has confirmed they are 100% committed to the Nintendo Wii, reports Gamasutra. The largest game publisher in the U.S. has revealed six games currently in production for the console, which is scheduled to launch sometime in the Fall. From the article: "The EA statement on the matter comments: 'Each title will remain true to the hallmarks of its franchise but is being designed to maximize the power of the Wii hardware and take full advantage of the uniqueness and innovation of its one-of-a-kind controller.'"

tomtechie writes "OSWeekly.com talks about net neutrality and how it would impact the world of operating systems, both online and offline. The author states, 'I know of a couple of people who support the legislation despite the fact that it could possibly enable ISPs to restrict access for those who are not willing to pay a premium fee for broader access. They have a strong belief that it is needed in order to make sure that ISPs have the tools and funds to expand their already overtaxed networks. Keeping in line with their belief system, this allows ISPs to make sure that developing connectivity can in fact, keep up with the explosive demand for broadband in more places. In other words, it allows for fatter pipes.'"

H4x0r Jim Duggan writes "When Free Software Foundation Europe organised the recent GPLv3 conference in Barcelona, they recorded the whole two days on video, and have now put online the video and audio recordings. There's also a transcript of Richard Stallman's presentation, and of Eben Moglen's presentation, both of which include the Q&A sessions. The videos are all available by BitTorrent, so a slashdotting should be okay. Enjoy!"

datafr0g writes "New Scientist has an overview of a project that maps emotional responses to geographic locations. Emotions are read from an individual using a Galvanic Skin Response Sensor. This data is combined with that from a GPS Receiver and the results can be viewed with mapping software such as Google Earth to show where the emotional highs and lows of the day traveling were spent. Points of significance on the map could also be tagged with more info by the user, which could make the information even more useful for town planners, architects, etc. From the project site: 'Bio Mapping is a research project which explores new ways that we as individuals can make use of the information we can gather about our own bodies. Instead of security technologies that are designed to control our behaviour, this project envisages new tools that allows people to selectively share and interpret their own bio data.'" I like the concept of architecture designed with emotion in mind, but galvanic skin response might not be the most accurate way to read "emotion" -- it might show that joggers are just as happy as sunbathers.

rdelon writes "TurboGears was previously mentioned here as "Python on Rails". It has since made tremendous progress and is now a popular Python web MVC framework (along with Django). IBM developerWorks just published a great article about TurboGears and a book is on the way. Unlike Rails and Django, TurboGears is made up of several pre-existing subprojects. One of the great features of TurboGears is the 'toolbox,' which allows you to configure and check various aspects of your application and database in a browser."

electric_mongoose writes "NewScientistTech has a fascinating story about a paralysed man who can control a computer and robot arm using electrodes implanted in his brain. The electrodes measure neural signals generated when he concentrates on trying to move one of his paralysed limbs and software translates these imagined gestures into the movement of an on-screen cursor or a robotic arm. Other researchers have also revealed a way to dramatically boost the efficiency of similar brain implants in monkeys." If you don't have a handy human brain to play with, 9x320 writes points to a report on LiveScience of Wim van Eck's graduation project: a computer game similar to Pac-Man controlled, not by conventional computer code, but by the brain of an insect. From the article:"Instead of computer code, I wanted to have animals controlling the ghosts. To enable this, I built a real maze for the animals to walk around in, with its proportions and layout matching the maze of the computer game. The position of the animals in the maze is detected using colour-tracking via a camera, and linked to the ghosts in the game. This way, the real animals are directly controlling the virtual ghosts."

A user writes "With the anouncement of the release of SUSE Linux 10.2 Alpha 2 there is also an anouncement that SUSE Linux will be renamend to openSUSE. A very logical step to clear things up. The name went from S.u.S.E over SuSE to SUSE Linux and for many people it was not clear what the name realy was. It also points out the importance Novell gives the the openness of the whole openSUSE project."

An anonymous reader writes "The rootkit wars have started to escalate with a rootkit named Rustock which is able to remain hidden from all the popular anti-rootkit tools. It uses some new techniques including not only putting itself in a ADS (NTFS alternate data stream) which isn't seen by normal file system enumeration tools, but even blocks ADS aware tools from seeing the stream. Works in Vista, too! Analysis in both Symantec and F-Secure blogs."

An anonymous reader writes "From the beginning, Eclipse included tight integration with the Concurrent Versions System (CVS) in order to provide access to change-management capabilities. Now, many projects -- notably those run by the Apache Software Foundation -- are using a different change-management system: Subversion. This article demonstrates how to add Subversion support to Eclipse and how to perform basic version-control activities from the IDE."

An anonymous reader writes "NeoSmart Technologies has an incredibly detailed (6 long pages!) and mostly positive review of ReactOS, The Open Source Windows. The review covers the goals of ReactOS and how well it meets them, system stability, application compatibility, kernel design and development, and the networking stack. It discusses the use of WINE in ReactOS' kernel and the effect on both its compatibility and development times." For the visual learners, here are some screenshots."