Michael J. Ross writes "Every Internet user's impressions of a Web site is greatly affected by how quickly that site's pages are presented to the user, relative to their expectations — regardless of whether they have a broadband or narrowband connection. Web developers often assume that most page-loading performance problems originate on the back-end, and thus the developers have little control over performance on the front-end, i.e., directly in the visitor's browser. But Steve Souders, head of site performance at Yahoo, argues otherwise in his book, High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Frontend Engineers." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.

Clant writes "Google has been accused of benefiting from certain piracy websites because of the Adsense program, according to reports. Several major media companies have called on Google to properly screen their AdSense partners and stop supporting sites that are benefiting from piracy. 'Legal filings show that Google worked with EasyDownloadCenter.com and TheDownloadPlace.com from 2003 to 2005, generating more than $1.1 million in revenue for the sites through the AdSense program. Google reportedly noticed the amount of traffic and advertising served by the two websites and assigned them an account representative to help optimize their efforts.'"

Via GamePolitics, which has commentary of its own on the situation, a report on the Destructoid site pointing out a new, harsher penalty for GameStop employees that sell M-Rated games to minors. To be blunt: they're fired. Not only that but their managers are fired too, for failing to keep an eye on them. This new policy was set down last week in a conference call, which also warned that 'secret shopper' sub-17-year-olds would be trying to keep game store employees on their toes. The article quotes statistics from the ESRB saying that the M-rated policy has, in the past, only been enforced 65% of the time. I would imagine this will work to fix that.