So hereis the article:

Just before midnight ET, Blue Security posted a notice on its home page that it was bowing out of the anti-spam business due to concerted attacks against its Web site that took millions of other sites and blogs with it. Within minutes of that online posting, bluesecurity.com went down and remains inaccessible at the time of this writing.

According to information obtained by Security Fix, the reason is that the attackers were hellbent on taking down Blue Security’s site again, but had trouble because the company had signed up with Prolexic, which specializes in protecting Web sites from “distributed denial-of-service” (DDoS) attacks.

These massive assaults harness the power of thousands of hacked PCs to swamp sites with so much bogus traffic that they can no longer accommodate legitimate visitors. Prolexic built its business catering to the sites most frequently targeted by DDoS extortion attacks — chiefly, online gambling and betting houses. But the company also serves thousands of other businesses, including banks, insurance companies and online payment processors.

For the past nine hours, however, most of Prolexic’s customers have been knocked offline by an attack that flanked its defenses. Turns out the attackers decided not to attack Prolexic, but rather UltraDNS, its main provider of domain name system (DNS) services. (DNS is what helps direct Internet traffic to its destination by translating human-readable domain names like “www.example.com” into numeric Internet addresses that are easier for computers to understand.)

So here goes an article I read here:

The system, scheduled to launch in the U.S. in the third quarter, offers enhanced ease of use, advanced testing features, geo-targeting and automated analytics, Tim Cadogan, vice president of search, said during the company’s analyst day in San Francisco on Wednesday.

“We’re exposing more data about the quality of advertisers’ listings than any other competitor,” Cadogan said. The system “shows on a five-point scale how well an ad is performing,” as well as which user queries indicate explicit or implied intent to shop, he added.

Yahoo faces stiff competition from Microsoft, which launched its new AdCenter system in the United States a few weeks ago, and Google, which has the largest share of the search ad market.

“There are areas where we needed to catch up; that is well-known,” Cadogan said.

Yahoo can leverage its registered users and broad network of services and sites–which make it the top media Web site on the Web–to improve its advertising sales, he said.

“On the Yahoo network we can find 300,000 consumers who are very likely to be buying a car within the next 30 days,” said Usama Fayyad, chief data officer at Yahoo.