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Leading internet portal Yahoo has landed exclusive rights from the Federation Internationale de Football Association to produce and market the web site of the World Cup, FIFAWorldCup.com. The portal will also become one of FIFA’s 15 worldwide partners, meaning that it will produce, host, market and sell sponsorships for FIFAWorldCup.com. Under the terms of the deal, Yahoo will handle the web site for the 2002 World Cup in Korea and Japan and the 2006 World Cup in Germany. The arrangement gives Yahoo a pair of on-field advertisements in every one of the 20 arenas in which the 64 World Cup games will be played. Given soccer’s global popularity, the web site stands to draw more traffic than did the web site of the Super Bowl, according to Yahoo. For example, the official World Cup 1998 site drew 1.1 billion page views during the course of the tournament. The site will be available in six languages and will feature e-commerce, news and message boards. Yahoo and FIFA did not disclose the terms of the deal.
The new Ocean's 11: Rat Pack hackers
In yet another indication that virtual reality is no safer than reality, hackers have been robbing online casinos with greater frequency. Worse still, they often come back after taking a bundle and blackmail the casino into paying them not to attack again. Just last week, CryptoLogic of Canada had its gaming servers broken into by hackers who calibrated the software so that losing was impossible. The company lost $1.9 million in false wins from 140 gamblers in just a few hours. In other cases hackers have sent a crude-but-effective denial-of-service barrage, which immobilizes the victim site with a flood of information requests. That can destroy a site right before a major sporting event, robbing it of millions of wagers. Hackers sometimes set up fake gambling sites that mine the credit cards of unsuspecting players. Online casinos are a prime target for hackers, partly because they often operate in lightly-regulated areas like the Caribbean.
Heavy traffic drives through auto sites
The web sites of the major automakers are getting jammed with traffic, and American car manufacturers are on top. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, Ford’s web site drew 1.4 million unique visitors for the month of July, laps ahead of Chevrolet.com, which had 905,000 unique visitors. No. 5 was another General Motors site, GMbuyerpower.com, which attracted 734,000 unique visitors. Japanese automakers took spots No. 3 and 4. Toyota.com received 809,000 unique visitors, and Honda attracted 782,000. According to Nielsen//NetRatings analysts, automakers’ web sites are gaining traffic because consumers increasingly are turning to the internet to research different models and makes as they consider buying a new car. Nielsen/NetRatings examines the actions of internet users by gathering data from 62,000 home users and 8,000 at-work users in the U.S., plus 155,000 international users.
Wine.com’s remains are up for auction
One million bottles of wine on the wall: The leftover inventory of defunct online vintner Wine.com is going up for grabs on Sept. 15 and 16 in an online auction touted as the “World’s Largest Wine Auction.” Leading auction site eBay is running the wine sale on its live auction site, along with two other internet auction sites, icollector.com and AuctioNet. More than a million bottles of wine, ranging from table wine to champagne to rare, pricey vintages, are available. The inventory, valued at $10 million, is housed in an airplane hangar in California’s wine country and is divided up into lots ranging from a few bottles to enough to stock a retail store. Wine accessories are also being auctioned off. Onetime rival eVineyard acquired Wine.com in April.
Mystery chess champ may be Fischer
Reclusive chess prodigy Bobby Fischer may have resurfaced on the internet. Nigel Short, a chess champion in the UK, says he believes that he battled an anonymous Fischer in a set of online games. The matches were set up through a middleman on the Internet Chess Club site, and Short’s challenger insisted on anonymity. Based on Short’s resounding loss, and on his phantom opponent’s American spellings and idioms, Short concluded that his adversary was Fischer. He wrote the London Daily Telegraph about his theory, calling Fischer the “Loch Ness monster of chess.” Rumors are circulating that long-missing Fischer has taken to playing online, incognito. In a 1972 Cold War face-off, Fischer beat Russian chess master Boris Spassky, after which Fischer went into hiding. He reappeared 20 years later to best Spassky again in a match in Yugoslavia. Fischer returned to hiding after the rematch, in part because the U.S. government reprimanded him for violating sanctions against Yugoslavia.
September 11, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
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