Photobucket is an important site on the Internet that hardly anybody understands. Unpretentiously, it has built an essential service that didn’t need to shout out for attention, the way MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, or other related sites have. Yet it’s built an audience of 38 million members, a figure now growing more than 80,000 per day. That’s up from just 50,000 members at the end of 2003.

Photobucket is where your photos live. Its name is well chosen. The whole point is to allow you to show those photos anywhere else that you want to on the Internet. Photobucket is built on linking. You put your photo or video there, and link it to whatever other site you want - be it your MySpace page or your personal blog. A large number of links go into Facebook, Xanga, Friendster, LiveJournal, Blogger, and other such sites.

The flexibility Photobucket gives users to shift their links to other sites does enable them to flee MySpace, something many teenagers have recently been doing as they migrated to Facebook, where security and control provisions are greater. The real risk to Photobucket would be if the next hot social network were able to become popular while prohibiting linking from the outset. But given how users have learned to behave, that might be difficult to achieve.

Photobucket is happily learning to monetise its 17 million unique visitors per month, as counted by ComScore. That’s slightly more than Facebook and half as many as YouTube. Interestingly it’s more than double the 7 million at Flickr, the that site many people believe is the largest photo-sharing site. Photobucket pushes over 2.5 billion images out onto the Net each day, and its visitors come to manage that photo and video stream. So far, 80 percent of revenue is from ads.

Intel had a rough 2006, giving up market share to rival Advanced Micro Devices, but the chipmaker is expected to regain market share this year. Intel in 2006 saw its worldwide revenue decline 12 percent, losing share to AMD for most of the year in the server and consumer markets, Gartner said. Also affecting Intel’s revenues was an across-the-board price war with AMD that hurt the larger chipmaker the most.

Late in the year, however, Intel started to recover from its missteps following the release of its Core 2 Duo for desktops and notebooks, and its Xeon 5100 series for servers, the research firm said. In addition, Intel in November released quad-core chips for workstations and servers, a product line AMD won’t have until the middle of this year.

Intel will run four manufacturing plants this year, and AMD is bringing a second online, as well as outsourcing additional manufacturing to Chartered Semiconductors. With a slowing economy expected, it’s unlikely there will be enough servers, desktops and notebooks made to use up the supply.

Worldwide revenue for the semiconductor market in general rose 10.2 percent last year to $262.7 billion from $238.3 billion in 2005. Slowing growth rates in traditional markets, such as PC processors, were offset by strong demand for dynamic RAM (DRAM) memory chips, and processors used in wireless communications.

The top five vendors last year in descending order were Intel, Samsung Electronics, Texas Instruments and Infineon Technologies, which tied for third; Toshiba, and STMicroelectronics, Gartner report informs. AMD was 14th in the overall ranking.

Brazil’s government said it will provide free Internet access to native Indian tribes in the Amazon in an effort to help protect the world’s biggest rain forest.

The environment and communications ministers signed an agreement with the Forest People’s Network to provide an Internet signal by satellite to 150 communities, including many reachable only by riverboat, allowing them to report illegal logging and ranching, request help and coordinate efforts to preserve the forest. The ministry said that the city and state governments must first install tele-centres with computers in selected areas, including indigenous lands. The federal government then will provide the satellite connection.

The areas in 13 states, including the Pantanal wetlands and the poor northeast, were chosen by the Environment Ministry, the National Indian Foundation, or Funai, and the government environmental protection agency Ibama, the ministry said.

Few tele-centres will be built deep in the forest and this will allow Indians easy access to public officials so that they can alert them of illegal miners, loggers and ranchers.

FBI investigators have visited Second Life’s Internet casinos at the invitation of the virtual world’s creator Linden Lab, but the US government has not decided on the legality of virtual gambling.

Second Life is a popular online virtual world with millions of registered users and its own economy and currency, known as the Linden dollar, which can be exchanged for US dollars. The company was seeking guidance on virtual gaming activity in Second Life but had not yet received clear rules from US authorities.

Hundreds of casinos offering poker, slot machines and blackjack can easily be found in Second Life. While it is difficult to estimate the total size of the gambling economy in Second Life, the three largest poker casinos are earning profits of a modest $1,500 each per month, according to casino owners and people familiar with the industry.

The surge in Second Life gambling coincides with a crackdown in the real world by the US government, which has arrested executives from offshore gambling Web sites.

A Cisco Systems router, flying in low Earth Orbit onboard the UK-DMC satellite built by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL), was successfully configured by NASA Glenn Research Center to use IPsec and IPv6 technologies in space.

The UK-DMC satellite is a member of the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC), used for observing the Earth for major disasters and commercial land monitoring. The five DMC satellites in orbit rely on standard IP networking to send mission-critical imagery to ground stations and to interact with terrestrial networks. The DMC effectively extends the Internet to orbit, and its farsighted adoption of IP has made it possible to take the backbone of the Internet even further into space. Internet technologies new to the space environment, such as IPv6 and IPsec, can be tested using the Cisco 3251 Mobile Access Router provided by Cisco Systems as an experimental payload on the UK-DMC satellite.

NASA Glenn was able to reach across the Internet to the UK-DMC satellite from Cleveland, Ohio via SSTL's Guildford, England, Mission Control Centre, using mobile routing. The 3251 router in orbit was configured and tested during a twelve-minute period while the UK-DMC satellite passed over the ground station. The Cisco Systems router and firewall used in SSTL's Mission Control Network were given simple software upgrades to add IPv6 capabilities to allow this end-to-end IPv6 testing to take place.

Widely popular Web sites using so-called Web 2.0 technology should take heed of a new attack aimed directly at them. Security researchers at Fortify Software, a security company, have reported a new wave of Internet attacks targeting Web 2.0 sites and the Ajax applications that have helped make them so dynamic. Coined JavaScript Hacking, attackers go after vulnerabilities in major Ajax toolkits, allowing them to pretend to be victimised users and gain access to sensitive information.

While the vulnerability is widespread, the attacks aren’t yet, Chess said. But he’s sure that they are taking place and he’s also sure the problem will escalate.

Applications built using Ajax, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, produce richer and more dynamic Web sites, like Google Maps, MySpace, Gmail, and the Netflix site. The sites do a lot of work behind the scenes so they are less about users filling out one form after another, and more about the application automatically giving the user the information that he needs. The problem is that Web 2.0 sites are vulnerable in a way that Web 1.0 sites aren’t.

JavaScript isn’t at fault, said Chess. It’s the way the browsers handle it, and nearly all of the Ajax toolkits are vulnerable, according to a report from Fortify.