A new instant messaging worm that masquerades as Apple Computer's iTunes application and drops adware on infected Windows PCs has been found.

When billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban wanted to get instant feedback on his new movie about Enron, he found even the best search engines were not giving him immediate results. Cuban will soon relaunch his IceRocket search engine as BlogScour. Similar to Technorati or PubSub, Cuban's BlogScour will search for the latest postings across the so-called blogosphere and return a list of results.

In the latest effort to capitalize on consumers' desire to be part of the on-screen action, ESPN and MasterCard plan a fall campaign that encourages TV viewers to vie for the title of "ultimate sports fan." The marketing program will ask sports fanatics to submit videos or digital photographs and stories of their own sports shenanigans to be displayed on the Web, where consumers can vote for their favorite. The online display in September and October will be done in the bracketed style used to track tournament college basketball teams.

Billionaire Barry Diller won approval from shareholders at two companies to spin off IAC/InterActive Corp's Expedia travel unit and acquire Web search service Ask Jeeves Inc.

Microsoft and Google are officially at war over who'll grab control of the Internet in China. Google fired the first volley yesterday by poaching the brainy head of Microsoft's lab in China - Kai-Fu Lee - to build the search engine's new beachhead in China.

Companies would do wisely to use first-party instead of third-party cookies, according to findings from Coremetrics research. The company revealed findings from its LIVEmark Index, a service that provides benchmark performance tracking for over 110 online retail brands. It found anonymous traffic accounts for 13.8 percent of traffic on retail Web sites using third-party cookies. Retail sites that have adapted first-party cookies fare much better, with an average 0.6 percent anonymous traffic rate.

Does Congress need to lay down new laws after last month's landmark Supreme Court decision on file swapping? Depends on whom you ask. A spectrum of outlooks came from lawyers who squared off at a panel discussion hosted Tuesday by the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee.

Yahoo Inc.'s efforts to boost its media and entertainment offering face snags as several media group heads are leaving or choosing not to move to new Los Angeles-area offices, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. on Tuesday said it would buy $25 million of stock in WorldSpace Inc., which provides satellite radio services in Asia, Europe and Africa, extending the largest U.S. service's international presence.

Traversing the minefields of change always is tricky business. But shifting disciplines is a whole other thing. It's the difference between catering to the masses and to the individual, advertising a product and actually selling it, randomly browsing rather than searching for specifics and delivering what you think consumers want versus what they know they want. Those kinds of paradigm shifts are rattling all aspects of the media and entertainment industries in ways that the advent of color TV, Imax, transistor radios and videocassette recorders never did. That's because new digital mainstream technology is designed by computer and electronics companies …