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You may have never heard of Brandon Campeaux, but more than 265,000 folks have "circled" the photographer on Google+. As of this morning, Campeaux packed his virtual bags and left Google+ claiming that the company has done nothing about death threats leveled against him on Google+.

According to Campeaux's last post, "I received 4 separate death threats through Google+. That brings the total for the month of December way over 10. I've reported each account & flagged the individual death threats. Google responded by doing nothing. Not one account suspension."

Security researchers from various companies have uncovered the latest cyber weapon, nicknamed Sykipot. It appears to try to grab documents from high level executives within a variety of target organizations, of which the vast majority have been defense related agencies working on unmanned combat drones. The origins of the attacks appear to be with a long-standing well-funded Chinese group that has been operating for several years.

Today, Yahoo posted on their developer network blog an announcement of a new content analysis API. Its aim is to rank content by overall relevance, point to particular Wikipedia pages and annotate the results with extensive meta-data. The service is available as a Yahoo Query Language (YQL) table and more information can be found here. You can try out a sample query request and see the XML code that is returned in response, as well as documentation for the particular fields that are part of the interface.

In what may be the first lawsuit of its kind, the owners of the site TheLiberalOC.com won a judgment against another blogger who cybersquatted their domain and then posted a series of links to offensive porn sites. The site is owned by two liberal bloggers in Orange County, California (not exactly known for the dominance of that particular political persuasion): Dan Chmielewski, a PR executive and Chris Prevatt, the publisher of Thinking Liberally Media. Last week a federal judge ruled in their favor in a lawsuit charging Art Pedroza and the Orange Juice Blog with cybersquatting, trademark and copyright infringement. It is a well-won victory for all of us.

Today Zoho announced a makeover for its venerable (my, how time flies) CRM SaaS service, including new features and a new UI. The company also stated that its software is used by 5.5 million users and has 25,000 CRM customers. The features are all available immediately and the existing pricing remains the same.

Earlier today, my colleague John Paul Titlow posted a piece on comedian Louis CK's DIY efforts to shoot and publish a performance video online. You can also draw some parallels with those enterprise folks who are building their own apps. Now comes this study done for Intuit that is worth taking a look at.

This is a message that can't possibly be repeated often enough: Good content trumps SEO. Don't believe me? Fair enough, but how about the head of Google's webspam team? In a short video today on Google's Webmaster Central Channel, Cutts answers a question about SEO practices and whether "poor" sites with bad SEO are penalized by Google.

There is already a well-functioning administrative body for handling intellectual property disputes between U.S.-based companies and parties in foreign countries. It's the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC), and if you've followed the many disputes brought by Apple against mobile phone makers, by mobile phone makers against Apple, and among IP portfolio holders such as Qualcomm and Broadcom, no doubt you've heard of USITC.

So why didn't Congress consider the Commission as a solution for the burning problem of resolving piracy matters with unknown parties outside U.S. borders? That's a question being asked, and possibly even answered, by an alternative bill introduced last week to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP bills in the House and Senate, respectively. This morning, a cavalcade of leading tech companies known to oppose SOPA already have signed on as supporters of the USITC-based alternative.

Facebook is announcing a new execution engine for PHP in order to try to boost performance. Facebook introduced HipHop for PHP nearly two years ago. Today the company announced a new tool in the HipHop toolbox, which it claims is 60% faster, with a 90% reduction in memory cost.

Facebook engineer Jason Evans writes that the company put together a team last year to replace the HipHop interpreter (HPHPi). Today they're taking the lid off of the new HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) which will replace HPHPi and eventually be used in production.

The U.S. International Trade Commission would be the court of first instance for disputes brought by parties claiming that a Web site hosted offshore is trafficking in its intellectual property, in a draft of a bi-partisan bill released today by Sen. Ron Wyden (D - Ore.) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R - Calif.). The Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade bill (whose acronym is somehow "OPEN") is being offered as an alternative to the PROTECT-IP anti-piracy legislation which passed the Senate Judiciary Committee last May, but which has yet to come to a vote of the full Senate. The bill's House counterpart, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), is currently being debated by representatives.

USITC is already the principal court for resolving intellectual property disputes between American and foreign companies, so certainly no one yet can fault the bill lack of precedent.