Of course, there are rumors swirling around that Bing might be coming to your iPhone in other capacities than an official app, which, with the Apple-Google continuing to escalate, don't seem so far fetched. [Bing]

To anyone familiar with 4chan, its hard to imagine internet vigilantes residing anywhere besides the darkest corners of the web. In China, however, human-flesh search engines are a common occurrence, occupying a central role in the nation's internet culture.

The human-flesh searches are "not just a search by humans but also a search for humans"—humans that have in some way incurred the wrath of the anonymous bulletin board mob. One target, in an act of undeniable cruelty, killed a kitten on video (she was publicly shamed and forced out of her job). Another was singled out after criticizing the government's response to the Sichuan earthquakes (she was publicly shamed and forced out of her University).

This is where things get sticky. When, if ever, is it OK for the anonymous masses to dole out punishment for wrongdoing? What offense warrants this type of "public harassment, mass intimidation and populist revenge," as the article suggests it can quickly become. It's easy to see how a group could feel like they had the right to take retributive action after seeing a kitten killed on video, but it's much harder to make a case for searching out an anonymous dissident.

As the article points out, the rest of the world tends to fixate on issues of censorship when they consider China's internet culture. But reading about human-flesh search engines and their prominence, it seems like the internet activity that's not being censored is just as interesting. [New York Times Magazine]

Image credit Kai Hendry

AMOLEDOMG
You'd think that OLED-display.net would be a trustworthy source for OLED-related news, especially when their info comes from "OLED industry sources," but their claim that Apple's next iPhone will use Samsung's Super AMOLED screens isn't very convincing. We heard this business in the run up to the unveiling of the iPad, too, and there isn't really any indication that this newest report is anything other than idle speculation. It's also noteworthy—or un-noteworthy, as the case may be—that the post ends with this bit: "the CEO of Rapid Repair believes also that Apple use Samsungs SUPER AMOLED in their next generation Iphone 4G." Neither the grammar nor the sourcing of this sentence do much to help the rumor's case. [OLED-display.net]

Posterity Tweets
As you probably know by now, your Tweets don't stick around forever. Unless you're Robert Gibbs, White House Press Secretary and Twitter n00b. After some debate on the matter, governmental lawyers have decided that Gibbs' Tweets, like other forms of communication, will be recorded in adherence with the Presidential Records Act of 1978. To read Gibbs' everlasting missives, check him out at http://twitter.com/PressSec. [Binghoo!
Today Microsoft and Yahoo were cleared to go ahead with their search sharing deal, which will push Yahoo's search results into Bing's corner of the internet. They hope to complete the cross-pollination by the end of the year, though the process could spill into 2011. Not much of a surprise here—we didn't expect the Binghoos not to get clearance—so just keep in mind that your search world will be shrinking in months to come. Where's that Jeeves when you need him? [Business Insider]

Fitting Palm To A T
According to the our precocious phone-loving friend, WebOS might be making its way to T-Mobile by way of a small, Pixi-ish handset. Okay. [Boy Genius Reports]

Porn Returns To The Front Lines
Back in 2008, the U.S. military banned flash drives, memory sticks and other forms of removable media because of the Agent.btz virus that threatened to compromise their networks. Though nothing much has changed in terms of the security threat that flash drives pose, the ban has been lifted, allowing soldiers to transfer data (read: porn) more easily amongst themselves. It's sort of a bummer to read the Departa of Defense's defeatist attitude on the whole matter of cybersecurity, though. One member of the U.S. Strategic Command explained:

Simply put, DoD [Department of Defense] cannot undo 20+ years of tacitly utilizing worst IT security practices in a reasonable amount of time, especially when many of these practices are embedded in enterprise wide processes.

If that's how they really feel, I guess they might as well give the troops their removable media. And all the goodies they contain. [Wired]

This is all coming from "two people familiar with the matter," so, you know, eat a bowl of salt or whatever, but it sort of makes sense in a Machiavellian kind of way. Windows Mobile 7 notwithstanding, Apple's competition in the mobile arena isn't Microsoft, but Google, and so it's not really that outlandish, especially considering that Bing isn't necessarily a worse search engine than Google. Apple avoids throwing unnecessary support to Google (although the iPhone will still feature Google Maps, YouTube, and Gmail) while Microsoft gains a huge market for Bing. Everybody wins, except Google, who only mostly wins.

What do you guys think? If Bing was the default search engine on your phone, would you go through the necessary steps to change it to Google? I have a feeling a lot of people might just not care. [BusinessWeek]

Whenever a Google has a hiccup, even if it's not search, our tiplines are flooded. Twitter becomes an unreadable stream of complaining. The world, online, stops. Bing? Despite capturing about 10% of the search market, not so much. We got a couple pings in our tips page, and exactly zero emails. Which is odd! So let's theorize:

1. Bing users don't report outages to tech blogs, because they don't read tech blogs. They're using Bing because that's what Internet Explorer tells them to use
2. Bing users don't bother complaining; they just use Google for a half an hour. They're natural switchers anyway—they switched to Bing, right?—so it's not a big deal to shake things up for a bit. Google users, they're stubborn.
3. People don't feel so bonded with Bing, because it doesn't seem as central to their lives online as Google. Google apps—Mail, Maps Docs, Calendar, whatever—all live under the same umbrella, in the same rough interface, and under the same branding. Bing feels like its own thing to a certain extent
4. Shut up you jerk, I was utterly beside myself between the minutes of 9:24 and 10:07 PM EST last night, because of the lack of Bing.

Now you go! What will it take before Bing starts to feel, as depressingly as Google, like some kind of digital phantom limb? Will it ever?

Google claims their site automatically removed the search listing because of perceived malware threats, and had nothing to do with what People's Daily actually published. People's daily though feels as though they were the victim of an unfair attack, calling the event "malicious."

Pot. Kettle. Black. [The Register]

WolframAlpha folks are billing this as a half-priced graphic calculator, with that added benefit that it plugs into the existing WolframAlpha search engine, but again I keep coming back to the fact that I can point my browser at that web site and it costs me substantially less than $50 to do so.

Said WolframAlpha rep Josh Dilworth in an email to Gizmodo today, "How many people will buy it? We're not sure, but looking at the other apps that are $50+, we think that we're of at least comparable in utility and functionality, if not more. And, part of what the company is also doing is making a statement about the non-trivial nature of WolframAlpha's capabilities, and how much the system has matured since launch."

What better way to show maturity than peg your inaugural App Store app with one of the higher price tags in the whole system. Amiright? Commenters, help a blogger out and let me know what I'd be paying a premium for if I purchased this. [App Shopper via Scoble]

You may have heard by now that Apple no longer has claim to the name Mighty Mouse, since small-volume mouse maker Man & Machine, who had labeled its own pointer "Mighty Mouse," managed to wiggle its way through all the red tape to a successful trademark application. There's a lot of messiness involved, but the truth of the matter is a) it was dumb for Apple to borrow a name from a cartoon character in the first place, and b) the Mighty Mouse was one of Apple's worst products to date. In the end, I'm thinking there's a hint of karma in this reversal of fortune. Hopefully Apple's next mouse will be mightier in deed than in name. [Engadget]

Even though movie-poster regulars such as Owen Gleiberman and Peter Travers have labeled it "freaky and terrifying" and "a potent frightfest" respectively, studio execs seem skittish about releasing Paramount's Paranormal Activity. Instead of manning up and giving it a nationwide release, the studio has asked potential ticket buyers to declare their intentions here. I'm all for crowdsourcing experiments, but this just seems like studio cowardice at its most yeller. They call it "the first-ever major film release decided by you"—it sure won't be the last. [Movie Site]

iPhone owners love to crap all over AT&T customer service whenever they get near a JD Power & Associates survey, but apparently, for the 1.5 million who get TV programming from the T, service couldn't be sweeter. Good ole JD released the results, naming AT&T best in the west and south, Verizon tops in the east, and WOW! numero uno in the north central region. (No, World of Warcraft didn't start a cable company... or did it?) It might not startle you to learn that none of the cable and satellite carriers who actually provide TV service to the majority of the nation appear in the (positive) results. Just wait till you serve as many people with TV as you serve with cellphones, AT&T. Then let's see where you stand. [JD Power]

Danny Sullivan, king of the search engine watchers, pinned down Sergey Brin after a Google event and showed him some bad results. Like if you type "car rental," all the major agencies are there, but when you type "california car rental," many companies disappear (including my personal favorite, Hertz). He also asked why searching "search engines" brought up discussion of search engines, but "search engine" just brought up many older search sites—notably excluding Google itself. Brin said people probably don't search for Google on Google, but Sullivan disagreed. I was actually under the impression that if you go to Google and type "google," you break the internet, so in either case, I'm just glad to be enlightened. [Search Engine Land]

The next, rising generation of connected, know-it-all kids just got way more annoying. [Wolfram Alpha via Electric Pig]

Searching for desktop backgrounds is super easy in Bing—there's even a special image size category for it. You can narrow results down by color, or type (illustration or photo) too.

Consumer tools are sort of Bing's thing. Meaning? You can get the contact numbers of any company really fast, even if they've hidden them. Which they always do.

Bing's Search categories are great for quick gadget research. Bing takes a (generally decent) guess at the most important information about the device, and provides a nice little menu of subsearches in the sidebar.

That huge image in the Bing background? It changes (almost) every day, and each one has interesting, related links embedded. It'd be nice if you could turn it off, but it's sorta fun, in the same way Google's custom logos are.
You can create an RSS feed for any search. They're not as up-to-date as a Google Alert, for example, but it's a nice way to gather and sort info on an active subject.

Bing's video preview basically solves the biggest problems with video search—terrible file naming and bad thumbnails. Special bonus for international users: You can use these long-ish previews to sneak around IP filtering for sites like Hulu and NBC. Above: Conan, from London. HA.

Bing's result previews create a little summary for each result, so you don't have to click if you're just looking for basic info. Especially effective on reference material, like dictionaries or Wikipedia.

In the automatically generated top links for Gizmodo are months-old links to single posts about the second Bill Gates/Seinfeld ad and leaked box shots of the Zune 16GB and 160GB models. Really?

Google's top eight, on the other hand, make a bit more sense, with links to tag pages for the Palm Pre, Steve Jobs and Space—three currently (or recently) trending topics, among others. Bing's weird results are probably just the result of some young, dumb algorithms, but they certainly don't look great.

UPDATE: Just like that, Lifehacker's got a list of cool stuff to try with Bing. [Bing—Thanks, Jagslive, Andy Scott, and Lorenc!]

Maybe it's a little silly, but it's definitely catchy. Say it: Bing. Bing. Bing. [PC World via PocketLint]

As it's an alpha, we're not too bothered that it's run into some overload problems. Hey, at least people are using it, right? But be warned, Wolfie: A pithy error message can only charm us for so long. [via Twitter]

Its makers have never appreciated sensationalist "Google Killer!" labeling, and rightly so: Wolfram Alpha excels at interpreting huge data sets, and only at interpreting huge data sets. A revealing taste of this contrast, in practice:

SEARCH TERM: Sydney New York

WOLFRAM ALPHA: I got tables showing the distance between the two cities in miles, kilometers, meters, even nautical miles; a map of the world with the optimal flight path; and the fact that the trip spans 0.4 of the earth's circumference. I learned how long it would take to make the trip: 18.1 hours flying; 13 hours for a sound wave, 74 milliseconds for a light beam in fiber, and 53 milliseconds for a light beam traveling in a vacuum. I also got comparative populations, elevation in meters, and current local times.

GOOGLE: I got a mix of things: a form for finding flights between Sydney and New York; a Google Maps-plotted list of businesses in New York City that contain the word "Sydney"; and links to the municipal government of Sidney, a small town in upstate New York.

It's also a huge nerd:

SEARCH TERM: Aspirin Tylenol

WOLFRAM ALPHA: Alpha gave me molecular diagrams for aspirin and acetaminophen and lots of scientific information comparing their molecular weights, boiling points, vapor pressure, and so forth.

GOOGLE: Usefully (to nonchemists suffering from headaches), the top link was to a Wiki-answers page telling people whether they can take aspirin and Tylenol together. Other links gave information about toxicity, danger to kidneys, and the like.

In other words, Wolfram Alpha is like a beefed-up, research-oriented take on Google's computational extras (stock price, calculator, unit conversion), but with Aspergers.

I'm aware of the theoretical differences between the two, and I'm sure Wolfram Alpha's creators' blood would boil at the thought, but the engine's most natural home might be as a direct complement to Google, as a tab on their homepage or as a replacement for their modest current nonsearch functions. Anyway, TR has plenty more comparative search tests, and they give a pretty full picture of what you can expect when this thing finally goes public. [Technology Review]

Reports the BBC:

Marc Stephens watched the videos as a precaution when his wife Jo started to feel some discomfort.

Four hours later, his wife went into labour and started giving birth before an ambulance could arrive at their home in Redruth. "I Googled how to deliver a baby, watched a few videos and basically swotted up," Mr Stephens told the BBC.

That said, don't let Stephens fool you. He's a natural. "This is our fourth child now and while for our first I spent most of the time at my wife's head, now I'm not afraid to go down to the business end."

Truly, a heart-warming story in an age that sees despicable baby-related smartphone apps being approved for the general populace without missing a beat. [BBC News via Google Blogoscoped]

Upon reaching the Let Me Google That For You page, type in your friend's question into the search bar and click any button. The Web site will then provide you with a link to pass on to your friend, which will direct him to a page that will show your friend, step by step, exactly how to Google that specific question. The tutorial ends with an backhanded remark, "was that so hard?" before listing the question's search results. Hopefully your and the tutorial's impertinence will finally push your Google-incapable friends into braving the search engine waters on their own. [Lifehacker]