Logo designer David Airey took a monthlong trip to India starting in late November. About three weeks in, hackers took over his Web domain, davidairey.com. How'd it happen? Airey blames a Gmail security flaw he read about. Something to do with going to a malicious website that inserts forwarding filters into a user's Gmail settings. Totally messed up his life, he says, not to mention his rank in Google search results. Google says it's fixed this particular flaw, but here's how to make sure you haven't been affected.

So, I updated my Macs to the new Leopard operating system, then synced my calendars with Apple's .Mac online service. You can see the results. Fake Steve Jobs has actually acknowledged there are bugs, which makes me wonder if Leopard hasn't Time Machined me into some alternate universe. iCal is cool — my stupid Vista PC can only find one of my brother's birthdays next week. Piece of junk. My new calendar makes total sense to anyone with a basic grasp of string theory.

Facebook's new ads come in two forms. Social Ads are based on your profile. Beacon ads come from other sites when your friends do something there. Enterprising JavaScript nerds have already reverse-engineered a way to keep them out of your face.

Are you a fan of Valleywag? I am. (Do sign up. It feels a bit lonely by myself.) After Facebook launched its new ad offerings, I had three thoughts:

(1) Well, this means more spam!
(2) Scoble's going to be all over this.
(3) How do I get in on the action?

Facebook doesn't provide a do-it-yourself guide to the new offering, but it turns out anyone can sign up, easily. Valleywag now has a page on Facebook. After the jump, step-by-step instructions on how to get your own.

Remember WhatsOpen.com, the stealth search startup that piqued Google cofounder Sergey Brin's interest last month? Brin was so intrigued he told the founders to keep the company hush-hush. Now, however, a source has leaked screenshots of WhatsOpen's secret project. The company has a Web application which shows users nearby stores and their operating hours — "what's open." Click to viewBut I'm told by a source that WhatsOpen has also written the first wireless app for Google's new Android operating system. (You may know Android better as the software behind the still-mythical Googlephone.) Demo screenshots after the jump.

Got 30 seconds? Read my summaries of the early reviews of Apple's new operating system in Thursday's papers. Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg, New York Times reviewer David Pogue, and USA Today's Ed Baig agree: Time Machine backups, yay. See-through menus, boo.

Oh god, Evite. It starts with an email about a party with no information about that party, and then it gets worse. But in many cases there's no reason you have to use the most popular site. Here's what to use instead of Evite, YouTube, Blogger, Twitter, Digg, and MapQuest.

Want to get Apple's new operating system, Mac OS X Leopard, for a mere $40? CrunchGear, the gadget blog owned by TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, has a simple strategy: Lie about being a student. Given what CrunchGear pays its writers, it's doubtless the only way they can afford to get a copy.

Gmail is increasing storage allocations for Google Apps accounts and speeding up the storage increases for standard Gmail accounts. I'm excited to get more space — I'm currently taking up 52 percent of my 2.7 gigabytes — but why now? With competitors offering free unlimited storage, Google is falling behind in webmail features. In August it started offering paid upgrades to Gmail. But why pay for space if you can get unlimited from Yahoo, gratis? Our guess is that the pay-to-play storage service has fallen flat, now that customers are used to getting the world for free. And that speaks to another problem for Google: Why did it want to charge in the first place? Some people whisper that Gmail may not be generating as much advertising revenue as people hoped.

For the Web's overcurious types, Twitter keeps giving and giving. Sure, Facebook and LiveJournal give professional stalkers a window into their prey's mind and soul, but Twitter is a far more valuable tool — you receive constant updates on their whereabouts and moods without the long-winded diatribes and tedious application invites. Now Twitter is rolling out a handy tracking service that will help you procure new victims. Now you can simply call up your trusty mobile sidekick, anonymously text, say, "TRACK Arrington", and every little mention of the man will be Twittered your way. If one of your target's pals — perhaps JasonCalacanis? — has a particularly juicy tidbit, send a "WHOIS" Twitter, and you can start stalking his friends, too. With the username and identity in hand, you can easily "follow" him on Twitter, or "coincidentally" appear in the same cafe, and pitch the man on your startup with a healthy plying of coffee and pastries. (Photo by Wanda Gould)

Bay Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, is cutting small checks to startups developing apps on Facebook's F8 platform, VentureBeat reports. Sure, Bay is opportunistically trying to ride on top of the frenzy for apps written specifically for Facebook's user base of 29 million. But Bay's initiative, called AppFactory, is small potatoes compared to what we think Facebook backer Jim Breyer, managing partner at venture capital firm Accel Partners, might be up to.

Del.icio.us, the social-bookmarking website people use to track, categorize, and share their favorite webpages, is testing a new version. But did its engineers really mean to give the whole Web a glimpse of the redesigned site by snapping photos of the usability lab? It's hard to make out details of Del.icio.us 2.0, but we know this much: As insiders have been hinting for a while, the pink highlights showing a bookmark's popularity are gone. (Photo by nzdave)

NICK DOUGLAS — "If you've sent me an email (and you aren't my wife, partner, or colleague), you might want to send it again." So says Fred Wilson, venture capitalist, declaring e-mail bankruptcy today on his blog. He's not the first high-profile person to take this measure. Here are three other notables who've given up on their e-mail (the most famous of whom reportedly white-lied) and three who found a better way.

NICK DOUGLAS — You were qualified, they could afford you, and they needed you. So why didn't they hire you? They didn't want to tell you, but your boss-to-be rejected you because of the best kegger of your senior year. She saw the photo with the sorority girl with — is that a tattoo or a third nipple? — straddling you as you spray Heineken all over her. A new study summarized by CNET says that one in five employers look up job candidates online. In your industry, you'd best bet everyone at the company is not only googling you, but digging up your MySpace and your blog as well. That doesn't mean you have to stop having fun; it just means you have to take the following steps to keep what's none of their business out of their business.

Craigslist's New York real estate listings are a particularly hideous wasteland. A new $10 fee for listings by brokers hasn't cut all the crap yet by any means, and wading through the illiterate broker misery is beyond dispiriting. But we can help! For some reason, Craigslist doesn't publicize that not only can you search for things, you can search against them.

One of prettiest useless things seen I've seen in awhile: the Twingly screensaver, via Biz Stone. Pulls in blog RSS feeds from all over the world, showing them accumulate in pillars on an elegantly rotating 3D globe. Post titles scroll by; click on any title to display the post and have the globe flip to the blog's physical location. And of course you can zoom and rotate around the blog-globe like the crazy spaceman you are. Minutes of fun.

Once you write enough blog posts, and read far too many blog posts, you acquire an instinctive sense for the principle ingredients of an audience-pleasing offering. However, rather than itemize those ingredients, it's far easier to discuss this magical formula in terms of the instinctive emotional responses you hope to conjure in readers. The broadest of those responses are indignation, titillation, stimulation, and affirmation. Hitting any of the buttons is good. Ideally, you pack as many of those responses as possible into your content, even (and sometimes especially) if they're contradictory. Hitting the sweet spot in the center of all four virtually guarantees bloggy nirvana. In honor of indefatigable Silicon Valley guru Tony Robbins, after the jump, you may explore these four spheres and their subspecies by way of a soothingly hued Venn diagram.

PAUL BOUTIN — Wall Street Journal uber-reviewer Walt Mossberg replied at length to Valleywag's email inquiry yesterday, in which I asked why he mentions Apple's Mac OS X so many times in his review of Microsoft Windows Vista. He obviously thinks the Mac still whups Vista, yet doesn't tell his loyal readers to consider a Mac instead of the pricey new PC most will need to buy to run Vista's best features. Are they holding a gun to his head there, or what? The Sage of Potomac replied instantly, but his email got stuck in the tubes for most of a day. Walt's full response after the jump.See also: David Pogue calls Vista "a truck"

PAUL BOUTIN — Vista or OS X? The star reviewers at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both point out Microsoft's new operating system (a) requires a new, beefed-up PC to use its best features, and (b) seems like an inferior copy of Apple's Mac OS X. David Pogue and Walt Mossberg are both known Mac fans. Each spends a good chunk of his review praising OS X over Vista. It leaves a reader wondering: Should I buy a Vista PC or get one of those Macs, and why didn't they tell me which? Are Pogue and Mossberg appeasing Mac fanboys without actually advocating Apple? Were they ordered not to blurt out VISTA SUCKS GET A MAC? After the jump, Pogue takes the bait.

When you make words for a living, you will inevitably find yourself drawn into certain ruts of repetition. That's why you'll see the same tired clich