>> Yahoo starts to roll out its new home page. Your gadgets may be poisoning other countries. And your love of Brad Pitt may get you into trouble with malware. It's Thursday, September 18, I'm Natali Del Conte and it's time to get Loaded.
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>> You may notice Yahoo looks a bit different today. That's because the company is starting to roll out its new and improved home page. The new Yahoo will have a tabbed column that users can use to link to their favorite sites, which is sort of like a bookmark that isn't stored locally. The site is also heavily focused on customization and use of all your Yahoo properties straight from the home page, such as mail, calendars, weather, news and more. Yahoo.com is still the most heavily traffic site on the web, but the company has been accused of being stale and behind the times in the last few years, so this is their solution to that. This is a small step forward, but yahoo also recently opened up its platform for third party developers, so it will be more interesting to see how the site evolves based on that. For now, only one percent of its users will see the new home page in the U.K., France, India and the U.S. Google launched Street View for mobile on Wednesday. This is the photographic image maps that the company launched last year. If you go to Google.com/gmm from your mobile phone, you can download the new mapping program and it will give you the option of viewing your maps in regular graphic form or you could Street View you'll get your maps in photographic form. Mobile Maps also has new walking directions, which is great for a city like New York. It also allows you to find your views of businesses within the maps in the same way you can find them in the browser version. The new version doesn't work with the iPhone yet, but I suspect an iPhone version will get its own updates soon enough. Some interesting news about Brad Pitt. If you've been known to search for the actor online, there's a one in five chance that you may be targeted with malware. McAfee says Brad Pitt now sits at the top of the list of fake celebrity sites that hosts malware. Other celebs on the list include Beyonce, Mariah Carey and George Clooney. The spread of malware using this method is one of the most common ways to infect the PC. It's also one of the easiest demographics to target people with the weakness for pop culture and celebrity gossip. The infected links are mainly tied to screen savers, wall papers, ringtones and pictures. So if must search for Brad Pitt's screen savers try to only download from secure sources or you could just try to curve your celebrity obsession. You know who you are. We stopped at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday. It was largely an enterprise technology conference, so a lot of back-end stuff with servers and softwares as a service, but we were able to see some consumer stuff. Of note, we got a demo of the new Internet Explorer 8, that's in Beta still. Take a look.
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>> For the first 2000 keyboard gives you one of a highest level of security available. It has 128-bit encryption between the receiver and the keyboard, no delays or no drop-outs and has up to 3 years battery life.
>> What we really looked at IE was the design, the browser, the way people browse today. I'm getting suggestions that I -- getting directly from that search provider. We've made the open search box and experience like other New York weather and I start to mouse down my example and you see another button pop-up, that's the website's icon. So as I go and browse someplace else and I click on here, I now get a quick snap shot into that weather no matter where I am.
>> And Powerset has built technology that really brings search the next step. So imagine that you wanna do a search for, say Henry VIII, which you can actually get, you know, for example information about when he was born, when he died and so on, but also the interesting thing is that you might have meant Henry VIII, the historical character, or you might have meant the play.
>> So the Car is really just to get people in to the booth, but it's a full-size F-1 simulator. I saw that you did drive it, you had a pretty good time.
>> In addition to the Formula 1 car here in the booth, Lenovo is launching six new flat screen monitors. This is the ThinkVision. It's 24-inch and it also comes in 22-inch again this is the ThinkVision line.
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>> Web 2.0 Expo runs through Friday. You can find more information at web2expo.com. The Boy Genius report is reporting that Verizon could soon be offering contract-free plans. This is just a rumor, but if it's true, customers could sign up for a service without a contract as long as they're willing to pay the full price for their phones or else use the phone they've already got. This could go into effect as early as September 21. I wonder how many of my viewers still have a landline phone at phone. I don't. According to Nielsen that puts me in the 17.1 percent of Americans who don't have landline phones. The study finds that more and more households are ditching the landline because times are tough and that's an extra $480 on average per year for something that most people don't even really need. What's interesting though is that wireless-only users spent 45% more time on their phone, but only pay 10% more for their service than they would with a landline. Also interesting is the fact that 10% of households with a landline try to give up the landline and went right back right to it. I wonder why especially now that emergency services on cell phones is just as good as it is for the landlines. If you were in that 10%, tell me why you did this, loaded@cnet.com. A new report from the Government Accountability Office indicates that our electronics are not being recycled the way we intend them to be. The GAO says that the environmental protection agency does not enforce laws against toxic waste from used electronics. What tends to happen to these products is that they are shipped overseas to poorer countries where they're dismantled and opened in dangerous conditions. This exposes workers there to the chemicals inside, so even if our gadgets aren't going into our own landfill, it is still is a concern when they are being shipped abroad to unsafe disassembly. The government wants the EPC to crack down on this and in fact we all should. The EPA is going to investigate reports such as the one out of Hong Kong that the Chinese government had to reject over 26 containers of illegally exported materials. If you wanna get involved, you can write to the EPA and follow their investigations. You can start at epa.gov. As expected we got plenty of e-mail from you all about whether or not the airline should fire wall their Wi-Fi network to prevent porno on planes. Here's a random sampling. Muhammad [presumed spelling] says, "I honestly think that its premature, and not really necessary. I think surfing the Internet for porno is not something that one would do in a very public place like an airplane. I mean look at all other Wi-Fi hotspots and coffee shops, and airports. I myself have never seen anyone watching porno through them." Muhammad is from Cairo though and that's less accepted in Muslim countries. Here in New York, my producer Wilson said he regularly sees people watching porno on the subway. Americans just must be brazen like that. Alex [presumed spelling] is a staunch proponent of our right to watch porno on the plane. He writes, "People have their right to watch what the heck they want on their laptop if they have their headphones on and they don't bother anyone. And if you Natali are looking in other people's laptop screens and not in yours that means you are breaching other people's privacy and is your fault." Wow! I do try to mind my own business. By the way, are you one of the people my producer sees on the subway? Jeremy [presumed spelling] writes in, "I think that watching porn on the plane is ridiculous. But I also would be leery of what would be the next thing to be blocked. Maybe any page that has an ad for another airline? Besides, with how good you look some people might consider Loaded porn." I sure hope not, but thank you. And finally, Robert [presumed spelling] says, "If this content is not filtered then I would have to take it upon myself to educate the person sitting next to Natali watching porn. That would simply lead to a confrontation on the plane, which would lead to a bad situation as well." Oh, he's defending my honor. We have some valiant viewers here on Loaded. Those are all your headlines for today, but before we go I wanna wish a happy birthday to Matt Stevens [presumed spelling], happy birthday Matt. That wraps up your week of getting Loaded, but if you've missed any episodes this week, be sure to catch up at loaded.cnettv.com. Thank you for watching. I'm Natali Del Conte with CNET TV and you've just been Loaded.
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