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Phishing, the highly illegal scam of tricking people into revealing their logins and passwords by creating fake emails, Twitter messages, and/or websites, does not actually make phishers a lot of money. A new paper (PDF) by Cormac Herley and Dinei Florencio from Microsoft Research argues that the basic laws of economics still apply to phishing. As phishing becomes easier, and as 'phishing kits' are being sold for less than $100, the actual income for each individual phisher has to come down. Phishing has become a "low-skill, low-reward business."

Our favorite URL shortening service, Bit.ly, has just released a Firefox plug-in that you'll probably want to add to your browser. It lets users hover over shortened URLs from a wide variety of services, including TinyURL, and see the resulting full URL - as well as how many people have clicked through the shortcut.

Along with Bit.ly's semantic analysis of destination pages, the data unearthed by this new plug-in holds a lot of promise. The plug-in also does some handy tricks on Twitter. It's not perfect yet, but it holds a lot of promise.

Opera plans to unveil a new version of its SDK today that will allow Opera's partners to create a more uniform browsing experience across multiple devices and platforms. The new version of the Opera Devices SDK now gives developers access to Opera Link, the company's bookmark synchronization service. Once device manufacturers start integrating this, users will be able to easily access their Opera bookmarks from their mobile phone, desktop, or Wii.

Searching by terms is great. But some things are just easier to find when you can actually look at them - especially if you tend to be more visually oriented. Book dust jackets, album covers, and product packaging, for example, tend to register with some people far more easily than names. And, then of course, there's video. When you're looking for a video, you're likely looking for that video. So, wouldn't it be great if you could quickly scan thumbnails to find that YouTube video you were seeking? Now, you can with Wibe7.tv.

Commenting on blogs is - by and large - broken. Designed with the hope of proffering interaction among bloggers and readers, commenting has generally devolved into a series of one-off responses with little actual conversation. Why? It's not designed to facilitate conversations. That's why you see any number of people - Intense Debate and Disqus, most notably - working to provide technology that enhances the conversational dynamic. Now, a new open source project from Jim Jeffers promises to enhance commenting in a way that is both natural and conversational. Meet Encouraged Commentary.

In what appears to us to be a new addition to many Google search results pages, queries about birth dates, family connections and other information are now being responded to with explicitly semantic structured information. Who is Bill Clinton's wife? What's the capital city of Oregon? What is Britney Spears' mother's name? The answers to these and other factual questions are now displayed above natural search results in Google and the information is structured in the traditional subject-predicate-object format, or "triples," of semantic web parlance.

A new report from Forrester presents a cost analysis of cloud-based email systems in enterprises, such as Google Apps or Yahoo!'s Zimbra. In the report, Forrester argues that cloud-based email services are cheaper than running email on-premise for all companies with less than 15,000 employees. What's more, Google Apps is significantly cheaper than both on-premise solutions and other cloud-based email services - even for very large enterprises. This could spell trouble for Microsoft, as we explain below.

While today's Apple Keynote was slightly underwhelming, a lot of other companies have made up for this by releasing their own products during MacWorld. One of the more exciting applications that launched today was WebEx's new native iPhone application (iTunes link). Thanks to this, you can now join meetings hosted on Cisco's popular WebEx service directly from your iPhone.

At the Macworld 2009 keynote today, Apple announced that by the end of this quarter, all 10 million songs available on iTunes will be DRM free [Digital Rights Management]. As of today, 8 million songs will be DRM free, with the other 2 million done by end of Q1 09. This is long overdue, especially considering that Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to the music industry in February 2007 asking them to abolish DRM. Since that time, many of Apple's key competitors have gone DRM free or have significantly loosened the restrictions - Amazon in September 07, Rhapsody in June 08, Yahoo Music in July 08, and Walmart in October 08, to mention just some. So it's great to see the market leader in online music, Apple, actively killing off DRM too.

The economy is depressing but there's no shortage of cool new individual hires in tech to report already this year. Mozilla, Dell, AOL Sports and some of our favorite startups have picked up new engineers and executives this week. The biggest tech job news of the New Year, though, may be that Lifehacker's long time editor Gina Trapani announced yesterday that she's leaving her position.

Check out some of the young year's first highlights in tech hiring as reported by our site Jobwire below. Jobwire is sponsored by VisualCV, which is a service for job seekers. Jobwire reports on 10 to 15 completed new hires in tech and new media every weekday.