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If you are looking for a way to do extensive online training on online topics, then consider what Grovo.com has to offer. There are dozens of topics ranging from email etiquette to setting up Facebook ads to using Yammer, Stumble Upon, Google Analytics, Twitter and LinkedIn. While I didn't try out very many courses, it does seem well thought out. Many large Fortune 1000 companies are using the service, too. In this era where training budgets are being slashed and where keeping up with the latest online technology is difficult, this is worth a closer look.

This morning, Fraser Howard and the security researchers of Sophos Labs are reporting this discovery: The recent wave of Web site defacement attacks, including one against the outreach site for the National Cyber Security Alliance, appear to have a common source: Something is injecting malicious <IFRAME> elements into the front pages of everyday Web servers.

What makes this particular malicious injection different from thousands of others, Howard learned, is that the injected PHP code quite cleverly checks the URL and user-agent string of the requesting client, to determine whether the client is accessing the page through a search engine link, such as Google.

If you are trying to keep track of your competitors, you have a variety of tools that can make your search for business news easier. At the low end (meaning free) is Google Alerts and Google News, and you can build your own RSS feed collection and examine what comes through that pipeline. There are also paid gathering tools from Hoovers, Lexus and InsideView.com, just to name a couple of examples. GageIn is trying to enter this market with the release of its Content Platform and the integration with Salesforce and LinkedIn data repositories.

Back in the 90s, it was a good thing to have your own dot com domain. But that isn't good enough for some companies, and over the summer ICANN made it possible for you to purchase your own global top level domain (gTLD) for the mere sum of at least $185,000. Now we have dotFamilyName getting into the action and promising your own gTLD for "as little as $500,000" for your family, to provide the ultimate cachet for the ultra-wealthy. Yes, you read that right. Half a million can buy you a lot of domains that cost at best $30 a year.

Since last August's move by the U.S. Justice Dept. to block AT&T's proposed acquisition of competing wireless carrier T-Mobile from parent Deutsche Telekom (DT), there has been renewed debate in Congress and in the public discourse over the role of government in regulating the affairs of private enterprise. Last month, policy analysts -- evidently just learning to use these search engine things you read so much about -- appeared to strike a gold mine: a report from the Economic Policy Institute (PDF available here) that appeared to not only confirm but bolster AT&T's claim that the merger would lead to net jobs creation.

Usually when something is repeated enough times over the Web, it becomes the truth -- or at least gets added to Wikipedia, which for many is the same thing. But in the wake of criticism of what appeared to be the authors' jobs creation claims, the EPI responded that it never made such claims to begin with. That led the Federal Communications Commission last Thursday to begin probing how those claims were invented, by whom, and why.

Dennis M. Ritchie, co-creator of UNIX and father of the C programming language, died this past weekend after a long illness. It's no exaggeration to say that without Ritchie, modern computing would not be what it is today.

Often known as "dmr," Ritchie was born in Bronxville, NY in 1941. He studied at Harvard University, initially focusing on physics. Ritchie said that he entered computing because "my undergraduate experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be a physicist, and that computers were quite neat."

Unstructured data, for lack of a more poetic phrase, exists. In fact, there's more of it now than at any time in history - the growth rate Forrester experts cite is 80% annually, and perhaps rising. All this year, analysts have been asking whether Microsoft would come to embrace unstructured data, or what some call "NoSQL databases." But by now, it's grown so large that it's encompassing Microsoft.

So amid today's stunning news that the company plans to integrate Hadoop support in Windows Server, even insofar as to consider adopting it as a role alongside Web server (IIS) and DNS server, there's this structured database management system whose roadmap to general availability was announced this morning at the PASS Summit in Seattle.

This week LinkedIn announced they are acquiring hosted search service IndexTank, and will incorporate their technology into the overall LinkedIn search algorithms. IndexTank powers the search behind Reddit.com, Spoke and Blip.tv, among others. LinkedIn claims more than 120 million members, with half outside the US and two million company pages on its service.

It may not be an independent source of data about Windows, but Microsoft's system of telemetry for tracking the causes of system failures, is orders of magnitude more sensitive than anything else in the field. A report released by Microsoft this morning reveals that what would have been a record quiet year for Windows security was pretty much wiped out by one stupid little flaw that Microsoft can't completely patch.

What do you get when you combine gamification, social and beer? No, the answer isn't just "a really geeky party." You get Untappd a social network with the motto, drink socially. Greg Avola, one of the founders for Untappd, was one of the first speakers today at Monktoberfest. Avola shared insights into what people drink, how to motivate trying new beers and Web development for mobile.

If you're not familiar with Untappd, Avola might describe it as "the Foursquare for beer," but with one difference – there's a point to Untappd. That is, instead of just checking into a location, you're checking into a beer and sharing that information with your friends.