This may be the most useful website you ever read about on TechCrunch. New La Jolla, California startup ProQuo launches this evening to help you battle all the evil that is being perpetually perpetrated against your personal information. Get countless credit card offers, catalogs and other junk in your mailbox everyday? ProQuo intends to do what the NoCall list did for telesales calls for all that stuff, too. Which means, kill it off.

How many people visited Style.com, the online home of Vogue and W magazines, last month? Was it 421,000, or, more optimistically, 497,000? Or was the real number more than three times higher, perhaps 1.8 million? The answer — which may be any, or none, of the above — is a critical one for Condé Nast, which owns the site, and for companies like Ralph Lauren, which pay to advertise there. Condé Nast’s internal count (1.8 million) was much higher than the tally by ComScore (421,000) or Nielsen/NetRatings (497,000), whose numbers are used to help set advertising rates, and the discrepancies have created a good deal of friction.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 7 — For more than two years, a large group of engineers at Google has been working in secret on a mobile phone project. As word about their efforts has trickled out, expectations in the tech world for what has been called the Google phone, or GPhone, have risen, the way they do for Apple loyalists ahead of a speech by Steven P. Jobs.

I'm deep in a quandary. A couple of days ago, after calling Adblock Plus "the nuclear plug-in," I actually went nuclear. I downloaded the sucker and started using it. I was seduced by Noam Cohen's description of the almost Zenlike sense of peace that flowed through him when he'd outfitted Firefox with the ad-eating add-on:

It is only a matter of time until nearly all advertisements around the world are digital. Or so says David W. Kenny, the chairman and chief executive of Digitas, the advertising agency in Boston that was acquired by the Publicis Groupe for $1.3 billion

A leading online measurement service will scrap rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at the sites. The move by Nielsen/NetRatings, expected to be announced today, comes as online vid

DAVID VERKLIN is a little twitchy about how traditional TV audiences are going to react to what he calls "behavioural targeting". Online players such as Google are already using such technologies but the technique is now headed to TV land as the broadc