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Special-effects gurus of 'Tron' keep it real (Q&A)

VENICE, Calif.--Just a few blocks from Venice Beach in Southern California is a rather nondescript warehouse--a few windows, a parking lot decorated with an old basketball hoop. If you drove by, you might mistake it for the Public Storage building on the next block over.

But inside is special effects shop Digital Domain, and the only stored relics you'll find are movie prop miniatures like a replica of the Titanic and a 3-foot-tall Apollo space capsule. The rest of the building is made up of meeting rooms, gadget-filled workstations, two screening theaters, and a server farm that's … Read more

McAfee: Our shortened URLs are safer (podcast)

Anyone who has used Twitter has seen those shortened URLs from TinyURL.com, Bitly, and other such services. The advantage of those shortened URLs is that they take up less space, which can be very important on Twitter, where messages are limited to no more than 140 characters, but the disadvantage is that you don't know where you're going until you're already there.

Unlike regular URLs, which show the actual domain to which you're navigating, these are meaningless codes that give you no clue of the actual destination. As a result, there is the possibility that … Read more

MegaReader: 1.8 million e-books on your iPhone

If I'm ever stranded on a desert island, I hope I've got MegaReader on my iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch. And, um, a solar charger. And 3G. And a Starbucks would be nice.

Because MegaReader, you see, supplies enough reading material to last a lifetime. The app promises access to a whopping 1.8 million free e-books--far more than any other reader app I know.

Whether that count is accurate is difficult to say, but at the very least you'll have enough books to tide you over until rescue comes--or you get mixed up with The Others.

The … Read more

Tshirts.com fetches $1.26 million at auction

It didn't cost quite as much as the wallet-emptying $2.6 million that Pizza.com sold for back in 2008, but as of Wednesday evening, the domain Tshirts.com has a new owner.

Among the 934 domains up for grabs at domain auction company Moniker's live auction as part of the DOMAINfest conference in New York, just 19 were sold, including Tshirts.com, which fetched $1.265 million and included a handful of related domains like T-shirts.com and T-shirt.com. Following that was Disco.com, which sold for $255,000 and BigApple.com for a modest $70,… Read more

Baidu hacking lawsuit allowed to proceed

Baidu, China's leading Internet search company, has a "plausible" case against its U.S.-based domain registry for allegedly allowing a hacking attack that left the site disabled and defaced, a U.S. judge ruled Thursday.

The order, signed by Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court for Southern New York, allows Baidu to proceed with a lawsuit it filed against Register.com in January. Baidu's suit accuses Register.com of breach of contract, gross negligence, and recklessness related to a January 11 hack attack that left Baidu disabled for several hours. Visitors to … Read more

Sex.com seeking a new hookup

Anyone interested in Sex.com will find an eager seller for the right price.

The domain name, considered to be the Internet's most valuable, is now on the market, domain broker Sedo announced Thursday. Sedo is peddling the hot domain name on behalf of its client and current owner, Escom, which scooped it up in 2006 for an estimated $14 million. Along with the domain name, two related trademark registrations are also included.

Escom CEO Del Anthony said he chose to sell the domain through Sedo because of its experience brokering high-value domain names and its global network of … Read more

Google me

Links from Monday's episode of Loaded:

Samsung launches a new line of Galaxy-S phonesObama is set to sign a memorandum to put an additional 500 megahertz of spectrum up for auction for commercial use in the next 10 yearsAmazon releases Kindle for iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone with the ability to play embedded audio and videoFacebook is blocking Twitter's application but we don't know whyICANN tentatively approves the .xxx top-level domain for pornographyKevin Rose speculates about a new social network from Google called Google Me

ICANN OKs .xxx domain name for porn sites

Porn sites may soon be able to tag themselves with a .xxx address now that ICANN has given the new domain name its initial OK.

After denying several requests over the years for a new .xxx top-level domain, ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) finally relented Friday by giving the new domain its conditional approval.

ICM Registry, which would manage and sell the new domain name to porn sites, has waged a long struggle to get .xxx accepted by ICANN as a top-level domain, only to get a thumb's down at each turn. ICM's Chairman … Read more

Get a free .com domain name registration

You know me: I like free. Domain registrations aren't exactly pricey (many places will set you up for under $10), but when I can get one for nothing, well, I'll take it.

If you're looking to carve out your own personal corner of the Web, start a new business, set up an e-mail address for life, that kind of thing, 1&1 Internet is offering a free one-year .com domain registration.

Yep, free. This is good for new domains only, not renewals, and it's limited to one per customer. After the first year, you'll … Read more