DUOWAN

Stop cribbing about traffic! Control it!

Drop dead gorgeous and dangerous!

Two law firms have filed a class-action lawsuit against local search provider Yelp for allegedly extorting Cats & Dogs Animal Hospital, based in Long Beach, Calif., in order to take down a negative review.

Beck & Lee Business Trial Lawyers in Miami and The Weston Firm in
San Diego filed the suit, according to a Web site that the two firms created.

Both firms painted Yelp as a Web site that preyed on small businesses to increase its sales commissions.

From the suit:

Last year I wrote about my Windows 7 install experience. I actually did an upgrade from Windows Vista 32-bit to Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, so it was a bit more complicated than anticipated. What I didn’t mention then is that I also tried to video-tape my experience. Before I had a chance to do anything with the video, the holidays intervened, then vacation, then CES 2010, then the iPad–you get the idea. I finally finished it a few weeks ago. A masterpiece, it’s not. Even so, it gives those considering a Windows 7 upgrade a good idea of what they’re in for.

Windows registry is a massive repository of settings that control almost everything in hardware, software, and networking. It can be very difficult to navigate around the Windows registry.

This is where Registry Workshop comes in very handy. It offers powerful, flexible, and safe registry editing, with all the features that Windows’s own Regedit.exe should have but doesn’t. Software analyst Edward Mendelson loved it so much that he gave it the very rare score of 5 out of 5. Find out why in our full review at PCMag.com.

If you’re looking for a way to keep an eye on your kid’s online activity, PCMag’s security analyst Neil Rubenking recently reviewed two stellar parental-control products you might want to consider.

Safe Eyes 6.0 focuses more on what the family likes to do online than on how to control what they do. Calling itself a “family Internet manager,” Safe Eyes 6.0’s new simplified interface reports what Web sites, videos, IMs, and so one your family is viewing. It installs on up to three Macs or PC, and provides content blocking, though it’s not particularly strong.

Net Nanny remains PCMag’s Editors’ Choice for traditional parental control with Net Nanny 6.5. It does everything you’d expect and goes beyond the competition in real-time per-page content analysis and resistance to attack by budding hackers. For a full list of all parental control products reviewed on PCMag.com visit our Parental Control & Monitoring Product Guide.

If you’re a fan of Seesmic Desktop or Seesmic for Blackberry or Android, you’ll be pleased to find out that there’s also a Seesmic Web client that doesn’t require you to download Adobe AIR like the desktop app does.

Seesmic Web is no slouch feature-wise either: It has all the tools and options that the downloadable version has, and is laid out the same way, complete with a scrolling view and multiple columns that you can configure to show your Twitter stream, your mentions, your direct messages, your lists, and even trending topics and searches. 

This is not a trick. The video for the1987 hit single, “Never Gonna Give You Up,” which led to a deluge of amused–and then quickly annoyed–Web surfers and single handedly made people care about singer Rick Astley again, has been pulled from YouTube over apparent copyright concerns.

In its run as the epicenter of the “rick-rolling” phenomenon, the video managed to rack up 30 million views. The page for the video still exists, but clicking on it will bring up the text “This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.”

Oh, well. We knew we’d have to give it up, sooner or later. Someone get Billy Ocean on the phone.

I wrote about a sleazy Facebook move yesterday, and I got some positive response. So, what the heck. Let me tell you how it’s ticked me off today. Actually, I’ll let Matthew Haddad tell you. It’s about a Facebook app called Super Status: “It sucks and spams my friends.”

I’ll have to take Matthew’s word on that.That’s his comment on the app’s Facebook fan page. I found Matthew only after I started sniffing at Super Status, because I was spammed!

Facebook plainly tells you on the Super Status fan page that “This application was not developed by Facebook.” Developed, no. Enabled? Well, that’s another story.

My brush with Super Status began with a Facebook notification. A friend, Mary Ellen, commented on my status… or so it said. 

More on this after the jump.

[Images were added to clarify; they were left out initially due to editor's error!]

Twitter and Yahoo have reached a deal to include Tweets in Yahoo search results and throughout various Yahoo properties, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced Tuesday.

“Similar to the partnerships we have made with other large Internet companies, Yahoo will receive what has been dubbed ‘Firehose’ - a full feed of public tweets sent to Twitter and our partners every second of every day from all around the world,” Stone wrote in a blog post.

Google and Microsoft announced in October 2009 that they would start including Tweets in search results for Google Search and Bing.

Under the deal with Yahoo, users will have access to Tweets via Yahoo Search, as well as their own Twitter feed via the Yahoo homepage and Yahoo Mail, Sports, News, Entertainment, and Finance. Users will also be able to share Yahoo activity - comments on articles, ratings, buzzes on Yahoo Buzz - on Twitter, and Yahoo will be able to build Twitter clients into their products.