Finally something refreshing from Yahoo. You Witness News is a new news service that uses Flickr photos and user-submitted videos to document news events. As described on the Flickr blog, “it’s a “citizen journalism” site which allows people to submit photos and video directly to the editorial desk of the biggest news site on the web.”

There aren’t too many details of how things work behind the scenes, but the crew at You Witness News will continue to work closely with established news outlets and sources while receiving submissions from users. Thumbs up Yahoo, it’s a bout time to see some refreshing and original services and no more copycats.

For the second time in less than a month, users of ZoneLabs product ZoneAlarm Pro are experiencing severe difficulties with the programs’ TrueVector Engine.

Since Friday, June 24, reports have been flooding forum boards and blogs. The majority of users are experiencing TrueVector engine crashs. The VSMON.EXE system service seems to use 100% of the CPU, and causes RAM consumption in excess of 50MB.

One way to ease the problem is to disable the Alert Advisor until a more permanent solution will come from ZoneLabs

For more information, visit the ZoneLabs Forum.

The latest excitement stems from the already high profile BitTorrent is the entry into the search space. BitTorrent will now offer search of media and other files over the web..

This is coming after the a MPAA’s press release blaming the BitTorrent protocol for the leak of Star Wars episode III.

On unrelated news, BitTorrent is moving to Silicon Valley from Washington state.

MSN spaces is officially out of beta and includes a few enhancements. Microsoft have an official press release about the it: “Global Availability of MSN Messenger and MSN Spaces Connects People Around the World”

One of the enhancements is the 50 new themes, providing users with more choices when deciding to customize their Space. I saw a many of complaints while Spaces was in beta about the available themes being ugly and the lack of inspiration in their design. A number of the new themes are quite simple yet elegant, which I’m sure, will appeal to some users. Another enhancement is the tripling of photo storage space from 10MB to 30MB. The length limit on comments was removed as well.

But Microsoft did not enhance the service for users alone, it also enhanced it for itself. Now users will find ads in places they wouldn’t have seen them before, including in their personal Spaces. This is a risky strategy since similar free services do not include such intrusive advertisement.

AOL launched a new Internet telephone service, getting into an already crowded market with various startups, cable operators and traditional phone and communication companies. The AOL Internet Phone Service includes the regular features of traditional telephony combined with services that are accessed on a PC over the Internet.

This technology, known as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has been around for many years is being touted as the next big revolution in communications but never really caught on until recent years, mainly as a result of higher distribution of broadband. Dozens of companies have entered this market in recent years, ranging from tiny startups giant traditional telecom players.

Need a ride? Get it from Google. Using its recently released Google Maps technology, developers at Google Labs are now working on Google Ride Finder – a service which allows users to locate transportation services within a given area.

Just three weeks ago I reported about CherryOS suspected of being a replica of the open source PearPC and now it seems like there is an attempt to protect the GPL in court. After trying to contact CherryOS to talk things through, there was no reply other than “speak with an Attorney”. So, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. More details here.

Amid all the raving reports about CherryOS – the new Mac OS X emulator for PC, BetaNews reports or rather brings back allegations of CherryOS being actually a stolen modified code of the PearPC open source project.

From the artice: “Its creator, Arben Kryeziu, found himself in hot water last year amid claims the software was simply stolen from the open source PearPC project. With the code now under public scrutiny, it appears that such allegations are true.”

Reports about CherryOS being a hoax surfeced as soon as the story appeared on wired back in October last year. If not a hoax, the proof for CherryOS being a rip-off seems to be all over the application. Not only that, first adapters are already reporting that it smimply doesn’t work.

Wells Fargo Bank announced that it has completed a five-year project to Web-enable its 6,200 ATMs in 23 states. The Windows-based infrastructure is designed to allow Wells Fargo to update and add services to its entire network remotely. More than 3,000 online stations were installed in nearly all of its 6,046 branch locations. The WebATM machines and online stations are part of the company’s strategy to integrate all channels — stores, phone, ATM and Internet.

Jonathan Velline, head of Wells Fargo’s ATM Banking, said the biggest challenge was the amount of internal software development needed to migrate the bank’s ATM back-end systems operating system from OS/2 to Windows. Another hurdle was tightly integrating the ATM back-end systems with other business units, such as branch and online banking.

This strange move by Wells Fargo took me by surprise. A few years back, I had the pleasure of working with some of Wells Fargo technical stuff on integrating a fairly complicated system on their back-end. I was impressed with their high availability and security requirements and demands. As it seems the seeds for this whole ATM to Windows move where planted back than. The security issues with Windows were well known even than which makes this move even stranger.

Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner Inc., in Stamford, Conn., said the move to Windows-based systems is “not great news for the security of the system. I’m sure there’s a lot of holes that will be created because of this.” – You can say that again.

SiliconValleyWatcher is reporting a scoop. Yahoo is in negotiations to buy Flickr.

Form the story, “A high level source within Yahoo told SiliconValleyWatcher that the two companies are in negotiations over the purchase price and that as of late Friday night Pacific Time, no final agreement had yet been reached.”

You can read the full story on here.