‘Zombie cookies’ may sound like a combination of dough, chocolate chips and some undead flesh but instead they are actually copies of supposedly deleted browser cookies; and today they are the focus of a major legal case in the US.

The term "zombie cookie" was coined after the issue of traditional browser cookies being undeleted by Flash was brought to light in 2009.

A legal challenge has been launched across the Atlantic against a number of websites – including Hulu, MTV, and Myspace – claiming that they were engaged in “covert surveillance” of users. The site are said to have used a Quantcast Flash application to restore deleted text files used by web browsers to store user data, or ‘cookies’ as they’re more commonly known. Continue Reading

Heading towards its 14^th year, the Webby Awards has slowly but surely become a respected ceremony, with its mandatory five-word limit on speeches often cited as the main way it stands out from similar occasions (see Al Gore’s: “Please don’t recount this vote”, as an example), and nominations for this year have just been announced.

Galifianakis gets his nomination in the catchily titled Comedy: Longform or Series category.

The long list of nominees sees good news for the New York Times, The Onion, Hulu, Foursquare, Stephen Hawking, the BBC and star of ‘The Hangover’ Zach Galifianakis. A mixed bag then. Prizes, decided by judges including Martha Stewart and David Bowie, will be handed out June 14 on the final day of Internet Week in New York.

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Microsoft has announced that its search engine, Bing, is to boast its own web-based video service, set to roll out over the next few days.

Word comes from the Bing Community blog of the upcoming launch of Bing Videos, which seems set to supplant MSN Video. If nothing else, this shows Microsoft’s ongoing dedication to Bing as a brand, with the company continuing to rebrand old services, using Bing as a kind of umbrella term for its unifying block of web-based services. Of course, the Bing blog post manages to undersell Bing Video almost out of the gate, with the service being hyped with the statement,

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News of MySpace’s impending death has been spread far and wide, but the service has been adding features left and right, with the latest announced to be a video service in cooperation with Hulu.

As well you might remember, Rupert Murdoch has been talking recently about moving a lot of News Corp’s web based operations towards a subscription-based model, saying that the free model for web just doesn’t work. This means that there are some pretty substantial questions around just how the new crossover between Hulu and MySpace video will work.

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