The industry is definitely making big changes to self regulate around social gaming offer scams (complete background here, with updates). Zynga, the largest social gaming company and the worst offender when it comes to scams, said yesterday that they will take steps to remove scams from games. They were quickly followed by RockYou.

Today MySpace is making a big move itself. They are instituting a “zero tolerance for app scams” policy, says CEO Owen Van Natta, and are amending their apps developer terms of use to further restrict the types of offers than can be presented to users.

The existing terms of use already prohibit many types of scams and require clear and accurate descriptions of offers. But as we’ve shown in previous posts, sometimes a clear and accurate description hidden at the bottom of a page in 8 point type isn’t all that useful.

Many of us spend hours a day on our browsers surfing the web both at home and from the office, but we don’t really do much with our web history, which could really serve as a goldmine of information. Nebul.us, a startup launching today in private beta, is looking to tap into this data, leveraging it to offer a cloud-based web history, a productivity tool for monitoring how you’re spending your time online, and a social link sharing service. The site is now in private beta, and 500 TechCrunch readers will be able to gain access by using the invite code ‘techcrunch’.

Here’s how it works: after installing a browser plugin (the service currently has support for Firefox with IE, Chrome, and Safari on the way), your browser will start monitoring your browsing history and uploading it to the service. Everything is intitally locked down in a private mode — meaning nobody else can see it — unless you visit the site and explicitly decide to share it with your friends.

When the iPhone OS 3.1 update rolled through town, it brought with it a handful of new features – but it also killed off one, not-so-official feature: unauthorized data tethering on AT&T.

Early this morning, the endlessly ingenious iPhone hacking community released Blacksn0w, a carrier unlock for the iPhone 3G and 3GS. Even if you have no need to plug in a different SIM card than what was originally intended, however, Blacksn0w still has its perks. Namely, it brings the aforementioned unauthorized data tethering right on back.

We’ve just walked through the process, and it went off without a hitch. If you’re interested in doing the same but don’t want to do it alone, we’ve thrown together a handy step-by-step guide, just for you.

Last month, Twitter noted that it was seeking volunteers to help translate its service into other languages. Today, the first of those is ready to go, as Twitter has formally unveiled support for the Spanish language.

The Twitter Blog has a post about it right now, but co-founder Biz Stone has cheekily written it entirely in Spanish. We’ll go ahead and translate it for you:

An update to our post in late October about OneRiot and Yahoo partnering to build real time search results into Yahoo: OneRiot CEO Kimbal Musk now confirms the relationship. The new search engine will go live tomorrow.

In the email, Musk says that OneRiot results will appear in the main Yahoo search results page for certain queries:

Today, we are pleased to confirm that OneRiot is working with Yahoo to deliver realtime search results to Yahoo users. We have been working with Yahoo for 18 months, initially as the launch partner for the Y!BOSS platform and now as the provider of realtime search results. Yahoo joins a list of 70+ partners who utilize the OneRiot realtime search API (others include Microsoft and Reed Elsevier). During an initial test phase, OneRiot results will appear on the main Yahoo Search Results Pages (SRPs) for certain queries, complementing Yahoo’s usual results. OneRiot has a robust realtime index of the web and orders search results via PulseRank, the company’s proprietary ranking algorithm which reflects the current social buzz around any piece of web content.

More than 1/3 of all Internet users worldwide visit MSN every month. 400 million people. That’s way more than AOL’s 80 million, and not ridiculously out of reach of Yahoo’s nearly 600 million. But still, it’s the most popular Internet portal that no one actually ever goes to. Starting tonight though that’s going to change. Or at least, MSN is changing. We’ll have to wait and see how usage numbers are affected if at all.

The most notable change is a new logo and lots less blue (a screen shot of the old MSN is below for posterity). Everything is sleeker and easier to read. Not as many links. More video (hot HD stuff using Silverlight). Lots and lots of Bing bling and Live.com services.

And of course, there’s Facebook. And Twitter.

Log right in on the bottom right of MSN. Half of their monthly visitors are already Facebook users, says Microsoft. And 15% use Twitter. So having the ability to read and create Facebook and Twitter messages right from the portal page is a good idea. For users with Silverlight, more advanced apps will be available.

Microsoft will roll out the new version over time. But if you want in right now, and just absolutely positively can’t wait in line, you can see it immediately by going to http://preview.msn.com.

Yesterday, Intuit closed on its previously announced $170 million acquisition of personal budgeting site Mint, making Mint founder and CEO Aaron Patzer the new vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Personal Finance Group. He is now in charge of not only Mint.com, but also all of Quicken’s online and desktop products. What will his first order of business be? I spoke to him today to find out.

“Over the next 6 to 9 months,” he says, “we will end-of-life Quicken Online and their customer’s data will be migrated over to Mint.” Just a few months ago, the Quicken Online team was questioning Mint’s success. Now, Patzer is their new boss.

It’s not so much revenge as it is a smart business move. Intuit doesn’t need two different online financial planning sites for consumers, and it bought Mint because it couldn’t beat it. Combining the two is the obvious move. (Both help consumers keep track of their money and spending by monitoring their bank accounts, brokerage accounts, credit cards, and other financial accounts).

Real time search and discovery engine Topsy is releasing a bunch of new products and tools this afternoon.

Topsy is all about the power of the ReTweet on Twitter. When the service first launched publicly in May we noted that ReTweets are the new currency of the web. And it isn’t just the number of retweets that matters (which is subject to large scale spamming efforts). It’s the authority of the people doing the retweeting, too.

One way Topsy is distinguishing itself from competitors like OneRiot and TweetMeme is by holding on to data forever. Most real time search engines are focused on right now, which is exactly what people want. But they dump data periodically, and anyone looking for older stuff won’t be able to find it. Here’s a sample search for “skype andreessen” on OneRiot (4 resutls), TweetMeme (0 results) and Topsy (37 pages of results, which can be sorted and filtered by time). So when you want to look up old Tweets around a link, Topsy has the data that no one else is currently showing.

I just got my hands on the the Twitter Peek aka the Tweek and I’m trying to figure out who, specifically, this is for. First, consider this my review: this device is not very good if you’re a Twitter “power user” like myself or anyone else with maybe 100+ followers and a few hundred folks you follow. To be clear, this isn’t quite Peek’s fault as they’re clearly not interested in pleasing folks like you and me. They’re looking for folks from a different aviary, presumably new Twitter users who haven’t quite gotten hooked but are interested in the service enough to stick with it and have $199 burning a hole in their pockets absolutely right now and don’t really follow very many people. If you know any of those people, please send them to Amazon to pick this up.

For the rest of us, this thing is pretty rough. I follow 2104 people and so this thing was buzzing and Tweeting all afternoon until I finally turned it off. Weird batches of tweets would come in, all from one person, for example, or weird messages like “Oh Hey, you’re Tweeting so much! We’re going to try to catch up” or something to that effect. It’s also really slow. You have to click twice to read a Tweet – once to bring up the menu and once to read the Tweet – and scrolling is really bad. And it makes a buzzing and a tweeting noise when tweets come in – which is all the time. And it’s $99 with 6 months free or $199 for life. And it only does Twitter. No email. No texting. I’m really selling this thing, aren’t I?

When Loopt launched in 2006 it was ahead of a curve that is just starting to be recognized: Location. Now, with services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, and even Twitter fueling the location-based services frenzy, Loopt realized that it needed to shift its strategy a bit. Enter Pulse, a new feature launching today.

Previously, Loopt was more of a passive service — you started it up on some device and it kept track of where you were. Other users could see where you were if they opened the app too, but generally it wasn’t about pinging your friends to let them know where you are and what you were doing. But Pulse makes Loopt much more of an active service. It recommends hot places, hot events, and lets you know what your friends are up to.

[Sweden] The Swedish government is following in the footsteps of the Finns (well almost), as their IT-ministry is now promising that 90 percent of all Swedish homes will have access to a 100 mbit/s broadband connection before 2020.

According to Swedish IT-minister Åsa Torstensson it isn’t possible to function in the information society of today without a fast internet connection. You hear that? This is the information society, people!

Infectious, a startup that makes high quality decals and skins that let you customize the look of your iPhone, car, laptop, skateboards, and more, is launching a new feature today: one off prints of your own custom designs. Starting today users will be able to use an integrated Flex app to upload their own images, which they can then have printed out on high quality adhesive stickers (or decks, in the case of skateboards).

We’ve been watching Infectious for a while — back in May 2008 the site launched large, vinyl decorative stickers for your car, and they released decorative iPhone covers just in time for last year’s holiday season.

Whenever you hear about bugs and exploits being discovered in the iPhone’s browser, Safari, it’s usually the doings of some masterful meddler who devoted hours to unearthing any flaws they could find — not some user casually tapping around the application. Apple’s pretty good at keeping things locked down, and the iPhone’s got enough users that most of the nasty user-facing bugs have been flushed out. Well, except for this new one.

It’s not an incredibly common bug, and it doesn’t seem likely that it would hit most users – but for the iPhone users this newly discovered bug does affect, it could mean huge operator fees.

We’re at PayPal’s much-hyped PayPal Innovate X 2009, the payments company’s first dedicated developer conference. PayPal, which reported strong earnings recently, is hoping to engage developers in producing applications on top of PayPal’s newly released API. eBay’s CEO John Donahoe said this morning that PayPal is set to be bigger than eBay in the near future, forecasting the payment company’s continued growth and dominance in the space. We reported on parts of the open platform here and here. PayPal is already testing the platform with startups Payvment, FundRazr, Lottay and TwitPay. PayPal is officially opening up its PayPal X platform to developers and will be presenting a roadmap for its view of the future of payments.

Here’s a comprehensive list of the Adaptive Payments APIs that PayPal is releasing today. Adaptive Payments are the first suite of APIs that are part of PayPal X’s open platform. Here’s a comprehensive list of the Adaptive Payments APIs that PayPal is releasing today. I’ve also embedded the full list of APIs that will eventually be available on PayPal X below.

NBC is gearing up for the 2010 Winter Olympics with some changes to its mainstay site, NBCOlympics.com, scheduled to go live tomorrow. (See screenshots below). Once again, just as it did with the 2008 Summer Olympics, NBC will be using a video player based on Microsoft Silverlight technology to offer full HD videos. Except this time, the video player will have DVR-like functionality, with the ability to rewind the video, highlight clips and save them.

The video player will also incorporate Facebook Connect, to allow people to chat with their friends as they are watching the events. NBC expects the addition of Facebook chat to make the videos a more social and engaging experience, and also hopes viewing times will subsequently increase.

Gameloft, one of the world’s largest mobile gaming development houses, has just released their numbers for the third quarter of 2009.

In the first three quarters of 2009, Gameloft has already slung $132.3 million in mobile applications. This is up roughly 18% percent from the same time period last year, during which they brought in roughly $112.2 million.

Today is the first day of PayPal’s much-hyped PayPal Innovate X 2009, the payments company’s first dedicated developer conference. PayPal, which reported strong earnings recently, is hoping to engage developers in producing applications on top of PayPal’s newly released API. We reported on parts of the open platform here and here. PayPal is already testing the platform with startups Payvment, FundRazr, Lottay and TwitPay. PayPal is officially opening up its PayPal X platform to developers and also unveiling additional APIs at the conference and will be presenting a roadmap for its view of the future of payments.

Taking the stage this morning for the keynote address is PayPal’s senior director of PayPal’s developer network, Naveed Anwar. He says that PayPal X, the new platform, is officially open. PayPal moves over $2200 dollars per second. John Donahoe, eBay’s CEO, takes the stage next. He says that this is an important marking point in the company’s history. The bottom line message is that working together with developers to unleash the next wave of payments technology. Donahoe admits that eBay was not know as the a bed of innovation but saw the opportunity in PayPal. Marc Andreessen has been a huge part of technology playing a growing role at eBay, says Donahoe. PayPal was given an unlimited budget to hire talent and develop key innovations.

Collaboration on editing documents and spreadsheets is becoming a key feature in productivity suites with the emergence of Google Docs, Zoho, Etherpad and others. Even Microsoft is adding collaboration features to Excel in its new version of Office. While Microsoft is adding this limited functionality to its new version of office, DocVerse offers a plug-in for Word, PowerPoint and Excel that lets you collaborate with other users when editing a document.

Once downloaded, the DocVerse plug-in will appear on the right-hand sidebar of any Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel file. You can invite other users to collaborate with you, and once all partied have downloaded the plug-in, you can share documents with each other. Whether users are working on a document online or offline, DocVerse will track, manages and sync all changes to merge them into one updated version of the document. You can communicate with other users via an IM feature within the plug-in as well.

Two years ago, a bunch of labels affiliated to music giant EMI Group sued both MP3tunes and its infamous founder Michael Robertson – former founder and CEO of MP3.com and currently running VoIP startup Gizmo5 – over alleged copyright infringement. A year ago, a judge did the sensible thing and tossed out the part of the case that could personally bankrupt the man.

Fast forward to about two weeks ago, when a new ruling gave EMI again a way to go after Robertson’s personal assets in court.

Lawsuits can be the source of all sorts of surprising and off the wall stories and this one, filed by a Google Atlanta-based former data center employee takes the cake. In the lawsuit, which was filed on Oct. 29 in a federal court in Atlanta, the former employee, James Bara, alleges both sexual and religious discrimination from his superior.

While it doesn’t sound juicy, the stories that Bara tells are. Bara was initially a contractor for Google’s Atlanta office, working as an assistant in the Data Center. After six months, he was hired by Google as a full-time employee. According to the complaint, all was rosy for the next two years until a female transgender employee joined the group Bara worked for. Bara’s boss, a woman named Pam Sohn, allegedly made inappropriate comments about this woman, and ridiculed her sexual preference.