Researchers at Foundation for Research and Technology in Heraklion, Greece - a hotbed of Facebook research - have created a small Facebook application that causes a DDOS on a certain website. The application masquerades as a “picture of the day” app and shows an image from National Geographic. When someone clicks on it, however, it makes a request to a victim’s website, pulling down about 248 gigabytes of fake data a day and essentially shutting down the server.

Joost, battling for relevance in the online tv world against Hulu and others, will soon no longer require users to download separate desktop software to access the service (its existing software is based on Xul). Instead users will be able to access Joost via a small browser plugin that will continue to use Joost’s P2P technology to distribute video among users quickly.

The service launched to considerable fanfare but has fallen off the radar as of late as the company has been plagued by a shortage of content and, well, users. And as the inertia of the online video business moves away from desktop clients and to the Web, it seems Joost has finally seen the writing on the wall and will launch an online video service of its own.

As a concept, Veritocracy is actually quite simple. At its heart, Veritocracy pulls together some of the better qualities of Techmeme — targeted stories and related posts to an original story — and Digg. Once you get to the front page, you’re immediately presented with a nice layout of highly-targeted stories on topics ranging from politics and technology to business and entertainment.

The site collects what it deems to be the best perspectives on various subjects from around the Web, groups them together, and lets its users decide which is best through the use of a voting system. As a user votes on different stories, Veritocracy becomes more personalized to that specific user’s interests. And as long as that engine works well, Veritocracy claims publishers will be able to find the ideal target audience and readers will find stories that fit their interests.”The ultimate objective,” says CEO Lee Hoffman, “is to create a truly meritocratic content distribution system where each article a writer publishes finds its way to the individual readers that will actually want to see it.”

Before that can happen, Veritocracy has a long way to go. Right now, the site is in private beta and is slowly working its way towards a wider release later this year. If you want to check out Veritocracy for yourself, Veritocracy sent us 500 invites for TechCrunch readers. To redeem your invite, type “techcrunchlove” into the invite box, sign up, and start using it.

NetSuite, a company that touts itself as a provider of solutions that can help companies run almost every aspect of their business, announced Friday that it will be the first business application provider to provide native support for Google Chrome.

According to the company, Chrome’s browser is an ideal candidate for NetSuite products. Because the browser is optimized for Web 2.0, the company’s AJAX-powered features in its products should work much better on Chrome than any other browser. NetSuite was quick to point out, though, that its products can still be used on Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.

Now that convention season is over and the candidates have about eight weeks before they find out who will lead the United States for the next four years, it’s time we compare each candidate’s attention online as we head into the final stretch.

According to Google Trends data, Republican candidate John McCain is quickly gaining ground on Barack Obama and witnessed a spike in searches the day he announced Sarah Palin as his running mate. However, Obama witnessed an even greater spike at the same time, perhaps due to his convention speech the night before and some comparative searches pertaining to Palin.

Wonder where Hurricane Ike will hit or when Tropical Storm Hanna will pass? Hurricane season has lots of people glued to the Weather Channel to catch the latest updates on developing storms. But why wait for the weatherman to tell you what is going on when you can check for yourself online? One of the best places to do that is Stormpulse. (Google Earth is another one). Stormpulse shows active hurricanes and tropical storms in the Atlantic. And the graphics are better than TV because you can play around with them.

You’d think that with the FCC conducting so many wireless spectrum auctions, that all that spectrum sold off for billions of dollars would be all used up. The sad truth is that many companies who win spectrum at auction end up sitting on it. All of this “fallow” spectrum is a big problem. A Florida startup called Spectrum Bridge today launched a marketplace to address this problem.

Companies that own spectrum can use Spectrum Bridge to find buyers and sellers for portions of spectrum they own that they don’t need. The marketplace has $250 million worth of spectrum listed, which is not that much considering that companies spent $19 billion on the last official FCC auction. But at least it is a start. The secondary market for spectrum is grossly inefficient today, mostly consisting of side deals between telecom companies.

Although buying products from your desktop at home has become just as customary as buying products at the store, few have found reason to buy products on their cell phones. In an attempt to buck that trend and make it easier for consumers to buy products from their cell phone, Billing Revolution announced today that it will offer a ’single-click’ billing and payment service that will streamline mobile purchases.

Once consumers are ready to buy something from the Web from a vendor that employs Billing Revolution’s service for payment, they are taken to Billing Revolution’s purchase page where they input credit card information from their phone. Once complete, Billing Revolution automatically sends an SMS receipt to their phone, which contains a link. After clicking that link, authentication is complete and with all future purchases, consumers will need only to click ‘buy’ for a transaction to be completed.

Can it get any worse for the newspaper industry? The steep decline in print advertising just keeps getting steeper and, for the first time, even online ad sales have gone down. Total print ads in the U.S. were down 16 percent in the second quarter to $8.8 billion. That makes nine consecutive quarters in which “print revenues have declined at an almost continuously accelerating rate,” notes Alan Mutter at Reflections of a Newsosaur. He put together the chart at left, which starkly illustrates the newspaper industry’s death dive.

The newspaper industry took in $1.7 billion less in print ads during the second quarter than the year before For the first half of the year, the industry is down $3.1 billion. At this rate, there won’t be an industry left by the end of next year. Of course, revenues have to stabilize at a lower level before that happens. Don’t they? Rght now, we’re at 1995 revenue levels.

So the tech and geek crowd is a little underwhelmed by the new $300 million Microsoft advertising campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld that kicked off tonight. It’s mostly content free, with just one mention of Microsoft near the end. It’s a far cry from the brilliant Microsoft v. mac ads that Apple has run over the years.

So what’s the deal? In an email we’ve obtained from Microsoft SVP Bill Veghte to all employees, he talks about the goals of the campaign. The overall goal is to inspire consumers and “tell the story of how Windows enables a billion people around the globe to do more with their lives today.” This first phase, he says, “is designed to engage consumers and spark a new conversation about Windows – a conversation that will evolve as the campaign progresses, but will always be marked by humor and humanity.”

The ads are just an icebreaker, he ads, to reintroduce Microsoft to consumers. Later this month they’ll do a deeper dive, which I assume means talking about features.

One thing’s for sure - the ads have sparked conversation. Full text of email is below:

Dropbox is one of those infuriating startups that just won’t show us much of what they’re up to beyond the basic user experience (see video). We first saw them at Y Combinator demo day in August 2007, and talked to them again in March when they went into private beta.

It looks like Sequoia was on them fast though. Last September, we’ve learned, the company raised a small $1.2 million round of financing from the fund, making it Sequoia’s second known investment in a YCombinator company (the other is Loopt).

Expect more news on Dropbox in the next week or two.

Wixi, the social filesharing network that debuted at TechCrunch40, has finally been released to the public. The site offers a media-centric virtual desktop that allows users to play their media files from any computer that supports Flash, and also serves as a service for file sharing between friends. Any users that sign up by October 1 will get unlimited storage for life, while members joining after that date will need to pay $5 a month for the privilege (though they will still be able to get a free account with a 3GB limit).

TechTicker’s Sarah Lacy interviewed Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington about the upcoming TechCrunch50 conference. The first two segments are up. In the first segment, Lacy talks to the two about the origins of the conference and why they are so determined to end payola in tech events:

“The conference is back on Sept. 8 and now dubbed TechCrunch50 for the 52 companies debuting at it. (Don’t ask.) It’s being held the same day as Demo this year and tech folks are choosing sides carefully. For a two-year-old conference, TechCrunch certainly has some big-name loyalists. Among its panel of experts are Marissa Mayer of Google, Marc Andreessen of Netscape, Opsware and Ning fame, Mark Cuban, Chad Hurley of YouTube, and some of the Valley’s most powerful investors. Not bad.

Center stage are the startups. Both Calacanis and Arrington are known for rubbing some people the wrong way, but even critics admit these are two guys obsessed with helping fledgling entrepreneurs. They don’t charge companies to present and spend hours with each one, helping founders hone their pitches.”

Those Jerry Seinfeld Microsoft advertisements started today. CrunchGear’s Doug Aamoth recorded the first ad during the Giants/Redskins game and put it up on the site. This is reportedly a $300 million ad spend. Seinfeld gets $10 million.

It’s a cute and cuddly situation comedy about shoes. Has a couple of moments. No mention of Microsoft or Windows other than “are they ever going to come out with something that will make our computers moist and chewy like cake so we can just eat them while working?” A butt wiggle by Gates followed. Overall, I give this a 0/10.

These ads can’t be all tech or they’ll lose the audience. But I can’t imagine this will sell software, either.

There are few things more hilariously hopeless than watching someone play a modern video game for the first time: their targeting cursors wobble aimlessly across the screen, unleashing a stream of bullets that manage to hit everything but their target. And amid their cries of frustration and accusations of cheating, they seem to inevitably come to one conclusion: “this game sucks”.

Unfortunately, this phenomenon is bad for the industry, as a bad experience can turn off a fledgling gamer from gaming entirely. And while developers do everything they can to make their games as accessible as possible to novices (or newbies, as they’re often called), nothing can make up for the years of experience many of today’s gamers have under their belts. At least, until now.

Meet GamerTrainer, a new startup that offers in-game tutoring sessions online across a variety of today’s most popular games. For $30 an hour (or less if purchased in bulk), you can have a private lesson with one of the site’s official GamerTrainers, all of whom have years of experience in the games they’re teaching.

Pushing beyond its mobile Skype service, iSkoot has purchased social.im, and instant messaging client that let’s you IM all of your Facebook friends. iSkoot already has a partnership with Skype to bring the VoIP service to mobile phones, including Skype-branded mobile phones in other countries. With social.im, it will add a Web-based IM service that taps into your social network.

The TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco next Monday through Wednesday is now oversold. We had originally anticipated as many as 1,500 attendees (50% more than last year), but we blew through that number earlier this week and are now at around 1,650 attendees. The venue actually holds this many people without any problems, but we have to order more infrastructure stuff to accommodate everyone.

Since Amazon released its video on demand service earlier today, I’ve pored over each and every section of the site to determine if it has what it takes to supplant Hulu as the best online video service providing professional network content. And after doing just that, I’ve quickly realized that it doesn’t.

Amazon has done all it can to solidify its stance in the online video market. First, it launched its Unbox service to compete with film streaming and now it has tried to compete in on-demand streaming of TV shows and movies. And by making TV shows and movies available online to be streamed directly to your computer, it’s quickly becoming apparent that Amazon is not necessarily focusing all its attention on iTunes, but on what it perceives to be the next frontier in video: online streaming.

Yahoo’s already crushed stock price has fallen further today - its down 8.36% since this morning, bringing it to a nearly five year low of $17.75. Yahoo has been as high as $34 in the last year (thanks to that Microsoft takeover bid), which means nearly $23 billion has been taken out of shareholder pockets in that period.

How long can Jerry weather this storm?