The VMyths web site, which tracks Internet hoaxes and is a frequent critic of "computer security hysteria," is for sale on eBay. Rob Rosenberger, the site's editor and cofounder, says he has no control over the sale by cofounder Eric Robicheaud, who has set a starting price of $200,000 for the VMyths site and all its content.

VMyths maintains an archive of Internet hoaxes and urban legends, and has helped debunk rumor-driven news stories, including recent reports that the Lexus automobiles' onboard computers had been infected by computer viruses. Rosenberger is known for persistent needling of antivirus marketing practices, and worried that his favorite targets might want to shutter the site.

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Fedora, the community-driven Linux distribution started by RedHat, is the fastest growing Linux distribution in the web server survey. Based on distribution names contained in the server banner, Fedora has outpaced all its rivals over the last six months, growing fastest both in absolute numbers and in relative terms.

Distribution	Active sites Sep '04	Active sites Mar '05	6-month Growth Rate
RedHat	1630382	1610427	-1.2%
Debian	693941	791086	14.0%
Cobalt	619960	516963	-16.6%
SuSE	399031	442908	11.0%
Fedora	182421	405682	122.4%
Mandrake	62972	73459	16.7%
Gentoo	43525	63160	45.1%

RedHat's strategy of reserving the RedHat brand for its commercial offerings, while using community-driven development in Fedora to try new features, seems to be working well. RedHat seems to have the best of both worlds at the moment: market-leading status for RedHat Linux, plus the fastest growing community distribution in Fedora. While share for RedHat itself is falling, taken together with Fedora its share is around 50% and rising slightly.

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Internet marketing firm Marchex Inc. has finalized a deal to pay a whopping $164.2 million for Name Development Ltd., which displays keyword advertising across a portfolio of more than 100,000 domains. The deal, along with the recent sale of a misspelled domain name for $112,000, offers evidence that mistyped URLs and other "accidental traffic" have become big business.

The pricetag on the sale of Name Development is more than the $155 million paid by SAVVIS Communications to acquire Cable & Wireless America, and nearly as much as the $176 million Freenet paid for the hosting operations of Germany's Tect AG. SAVVIS gained about 350K hostnames in the C&W deal, while Freenet acquired 2.2 million hostnames from Tect.

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The BitTorrent hub LokiTorrent has been shut down by a lawsuit from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), with the eight-hour outage earlier today turning out to be the prelude to a closure. The site came back online briefly with BitTorrent-related content, but within hours that had been replaced by a notice from the MPAA.

"There are websites that provide legal downloads. This is not one of them," reads the new front page of lokitorrent.com. "This website has been permanently shut down by court order because it facilitates the illegal downloading of copyrighted motion pictures." An MPAA press release said LokiTorrent operator Edward Webber agreed to pay "a substantial settlement with even greater financial penalties for any further such actions," and was under court order to provide the MPAA with logs and server data.

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Google is now an ICANN-accredited registrar of domain names, providing it with yet another potential line of expansion. The fast-growing search provider is approved to sell names in seven top-level domains (TLDs) including .com, .net, .org, .biz., info, .name and .pro.

Google's registrar status, first noted by LexText, is likely to prompt speculation about its ambitions in web hosting and blogging. Google operates Blogger, the free blog hosting service with a huge user base. Cheap or free domain names could prove useful to Google in the notoriously price-sensitive blog hosting sector, where most bloggers use subdomains (i.e. myblog.bloghost.com) rather than full domain names (www.myblog.com).

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