Advertising remains the primary means of support for online news outlets, and there's a long uphill battle facing anyone trying to forge new business models, at least according to a report produced by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The extensive report on the State of the Media examines numerous aspects of the media world, but emphasizes that, when it comes to online news, getting people to pay for content they otherwise value is "like trying to force butterflies back into their cocoons."

First things first: Pew notes that last year, online advertising saw its first decline since 2002. Numbers from eMarketer said that revenues fell by a total of $1 billion between 2008 and 2009. Still, a full 81 percent of Internet surfers say they're cool with online ads if it means the content remains free, although "much of that is because they find them easy to ignore."

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Its spores ride the wind, wiping out wheat crops and breaching science's best defenses. Inside the race to stop the Ug99 fungus.

Google has been cranking out new versions of Android operating system faster than handset makers can keep up with. As a result, the latest Android phones to hit the stores carry an older version of the OS, which means consumers often have no access to new apps or features.

A Massachusetts computer company buys the first domain name, and gets the .com ball rolling.

The iPad may not be out for several weeks, but there are still some excellent choices if you're looking for a tablet-like device for reading e-books. We compare 10 recent e-readers and tablets.

Autopia selects 10 car designs that have stood the test of time.

If dipping into your life savings to develop that great idea or project isn't an option (as in, you don't have savings), the crowdsourced fundraising service called Kickstarter just might be your only financial hope.

Scalr on schedule

Scalr - the open source admin console for Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and its Eucalyptus doppelganger - has added a cron job task manager to its arsenal, giving you more freedom to write and schedule scripts on sky-high virtual servers.…

Offloading malware protection to the cloud

A number of humorous yet undocumented features are hiding beneath the surface of some of the most popular open source software applications. Although easter eggs are generally easy to spot when you can look at an application's source code, there are a few that aren't widely known.

Google's Goats

Unbeknownst to most users, Google's Chrome Web browser is powered by a distributed array of goats. In order to prevent the creatures from clogging the tubes, Google uses teleportation to moves them between endpoints on the network. A hidden feature in Chrome's task manager allows users to see the total number of goats that are actively being teleported for each running browser tab. In Chrome's task manager, right-click the task table—check the "Goats Teleported" item in the context menu.

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Winners are all over the map at South by Southwest's 13th annual awards ceremony honoring the internet's best and brightest. Thank god for host Doug Benson's satirical jabs at the contenders.

Two Digg employees have built "Wheretheladies.at," a relatively simple map mashup that tries to figure out which South by Southwest venues are populated by the most females.

Earlier this week, we noted that the major parties in the European Parliament had all agreed on a resolution trashing the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and the secret process that has been hashing it out. That resolution has passed Parliament by a huge margin—633 yes votes, 13 no votes, and 16 abstentions.

The Greens/EFA coalition praised the vote. Greens MEP Carl Schlyter of Sweden said that "ACTA risks becoming known as the Absence of Commission Transparency Agreement... The EU cannot continue to negotiate on ACTA if the people are not allowed to take part in the process. It is also a totally absurd and unacceptable situation if MEPs, behind closed doors, have to ask the Commission about the content of the agreements we are supposed to vote on."

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Let's get one thing out of the way first: True Crime looks good. The game was demoed for me in a private suite, played live, and talked up by the developer. Mixing the best parts of Stranglehold and Grand Theft Auto IV, it was a game where we walked in with low expectations and walked out very excited about the story of an undercover cop in the wilds of Hong Kong.

Now, let's talk about the way games are marketed at events like GDC. Activision paid for an area in the W Hotel to look like a shady club from the game and decked it out with seedy characters. Two stripper poles were set up in the room, and beautiful women used them to demonstrate how long they could hold their own body weight upside down. Camera phones were out, free drinks were enjoyed by all, and camera crews worked the room fervently. This is video games.

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Canonical kingdom spans 10 million machines

When you have Mark Shuttleworth as your backer, as commercial Linux distributor Canonical does, it is a bit like having money in the bank when the bank also believes fervently in your cause. It is a rare combination, and one that has allowed the Ubuntu project to reach out from its Linux desktop beginnings into commercial servers - and with the latest releases, cloudy infrastructure - without having the profit pressure that most startups have to deal with as they try to grow.…

The power of collaboration within unified communications

'The internet' is in the running for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Modesty does not prevent us from reporting that the internet's candidacy was championed by the Wired for advancing 'dialogue, debate and consensus.'

At some unspecified point in the future

Google is now "99.9 per cent" certain it will shut down its Chinese search engine, according to a report citing "a person familiar with the company's thinking."…

Case Study: WhatsUp keeps Legoland turnstyles ringing

A new type of wire service acts as a middleman between freelancers and big media companies, with the aim of firing up free speech in the Middle East and other regions.

The social network's annual developer get-together as part of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival focused on how it can bring its Facebook Connect technology to gamers on disparate platforms.

Well, that's one way to get a balanced diet: We all know that carnivorous plants have evolved in regions where the soil isn't very nutrient-rich, and they use their prey to supplement what they don't get via roots. Apparently, however, there are alternatives to eating the victim. I'll let the authors of a recent paper explain matters: "Three Bornean pitcher plant species... produce modified pitchers that 'capture' tree shrew faeces for nutritional benefit. Tree shrews (Tupaia montana) feed on exudates produced by glands on the inner surfaces of the pitcher lids and defecate into the pitchers." Apparently, it's possible to identify feces-eaters based on the distinct morphology of their pitchers.

Reindeer got no rhythm: Circadian rhythm, that is. In the Arctic, light doesn't provide cues regarding daily activities; rather, it indicates seasonal changes. So it's no surprise that reindeer have somehow managed to unplug their biological clock, both at the cellular and whole-body level.

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Hugo Chavez says "the Internet cannot be something open where anything is said and done" and demands crackdown on a critical news site.