The indictment alleges that Kernell gained access to Palin's Yahoo! Mail account, changed the password, took screenshots of the contents, and posted both the password and images to the Web. In a video interview (after the jump), famed former-hacker Kevin Mitnick says Kernell could face a harsh penalty.

Upon hearing the news, G4's Attack of the Show asked famed former-hacker, Kevin Mitnick, to provide some insight on what a guilty verdict might mean for Kernell:

In a campaign that has been largely waged online, this email hack and its resulting fall out remain one of the few negative uses of technology that has been reported.

In fact, we've seen any number of positive stories about the compelling uses of technology and social media during this presidential race. Those uses - from Barack Obama's use of social media to the usability of John McCain's site - are highlighted on a nightly basis in living rooms across the United States.

As election day draws near, it will be interesting to see if the campaigns continue to pursue the appropriate use of technology - and continue to eschew nefarious efforts - as part of the political machine.

Eurekster provides a service called a Swicki, a search function that lets site owners identify what other sites in their community they would like to have included in their Swicki search results. We've used Swicki here at ReadWriteWeb for some time, as have many other blogs and online communities. The company offered revenue sharing from search ads. Eurekster says that more than 100,000 sites have created Swickis and traffic to Eurekster used to be strong.

Both Eurekster and Swicki.com are down and users report to us that's been the case for the past two days. Traffic to the site has plummeted since the start of the year and key executives have departed. According to their LinkedIn profiles, VP of Engineering Blair Cassidy and VP of Product Development Tac Leung left the company in March and April respectively - but both are still listed on the company's management page. As we publish this, neither emails nor phone messages have been returned by the company. Channel Marketing Manager at Eurekster Alex Holmes sent out one Twitter message two days ago reading "temporary service outage on http://www.eurekster.com . Swickis will be back shortly."

Eurekster was founded in October of 2003 and raised more than $6 million in venture capital, most recently a $5.5 million round in March of 2007.

What Might Have Happened?

It's always interesting to ask why a startup may not have succeeded, though to be fair Eurekster could come back at a moment's notice. The company's method of determining relevance in search was always a little unclear. Google Site Search is easy to install and its results are fairly predictable. Many users wanted search results in chronological order, but that's not the first place Swicki searches took you. Finally, the Swicki usually lived in a blog sidebar. That's a hard place to build a business.

Those are our theories about why Swicki has struggled. What are yours? We hope to hear from the company soon, it's never a pretty sight to see a startup sputter out.