Black Friday is nearly upon us. Does it matter?

You can't deny that the day after Thanksgiving has lost something of its luster over the past decade. It's not always the highest-volume sales day of the year any longer. (Check out this PDF from the International Council of Shopping Centers if you don't believe me.)

You may have already known that. But are you aware of an even greater change in what's taking place in the retail world this year?

Retailers are competing even more fiercely online for your business, which means the official "deal season" is being extended to even earlier in the year. Many online sellers now don't even sweat the whole "Friday" concept of "Black Friday."

For instance, Dell's already pushing Black Friday deals, well in advance of the actual date. Some of its marked-down offerings include a Dell SE178WFP Monitor, a Dell V305 All-In-One Printer, a Western Digital 1 TB My Book Home External Hard Drive and a Sharp 42-inch LC42SB45U 1080p LCD HDTV. Other PC and electronics e-tailers are doing the same: Here's MicroCenter's deals.

Kmart is likewise carrying a slew of holiday sales -- including products with "Black Friday Prices" -- on its home page. USB storage figures prominently here.

Everyone's getting into the action. Costco's deals (going with the generic "Holiday Savings" theme on these) offer some big savings on GPS units and flat-panel displays.

A local favorite here in Manhattan, J&R Electronics, is also starting early with its Black Friday deals on DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. Here's your chance to get a legal copy of 1992's "Sneakers" for $3.99.

A major Web host accused of serving up spam and controlling botnets has been largely yanked from the Internet.

What's unique about this story is that a mainstream media outlet had a hand in bringing it down.

While digging into McColo, the Web host in question, Brian Krebs at The Washington Post's Security Fix blog prompted two of the company's ISPs to cut them off.

In his blog, Krebs writes:

The badness attributed to McColo was not limited to spam. It included child pornography sites; sites that accepted payment for spam and child porn; rogue anti-virus Web sites; and a huge malicious software operation that apparently stole banking and credit card data from more than a half million people worldwide.

The company was also the subject of a report issued today by security researchers HostExploit. Following a two-year study, the report confirmed many of Krebs' charges, including that McColo supported pharmaceutical and other kinds of spam, served as command centers for botnets, hosted illegal content and served malware and infected sites.

According to Krebs, McColo's servers "help manage the distribution of the majority of the world's junk e-mail."

Even if that's the case, the net effect of severing the major connections used by HostExploit -- which still maintains a few tenuous links to the Net through other ISPs, HostExploit noted -- may be hard to see.

Krebs' claim hinges on findings like that by HostExploit, Kaspersky Labs and others, who have accused McColo of not just malfeasance, but of playing a major part in the world's spam epidemic. In its report, HostExploit's analysts wrote that "it is clear that McColo has a key role in managing [the] world's major botnets, and malware warehousing, which has been estimated as partially controlling 50 - 75 percent of the world's spam."

As a result, McColo's alleged bad behavior represents only a portion of a portion of the causes of spam. And with the actual perpetrators -- the parties responsible for controlling the botnet command servers that McColo hosted -- still at large, and their botnets still intact (if uncoordinated at present,) it's unclear how great an impact the news might have in even the short term.

The Web host's site, McColo.com, was down as of press time. E-mails to the address listed in McColo's WHOIS database entry were not returned.

Let the other chumps watch all night. I'm calling the race now. The victor? CNN.

Yep, CNN wins the election coverage race. How come? They have holograms. Holograms!

Have a look:

Okay, she's not really a hologram. Or is she? I have very little information on this technology at the moment. And yes, it seems very cheesy, what with the "beaming in" animation -- and Wolf's seemingly transparent attempts to avoid looking like he's looking at a monitor.

Or is ol' Wolf somehow actually seeing the "hologram" in front of him? It's all very mysterious. Mysterious, cheesy and wonderful.

UPDATE: More info on the setup here from USAToday.com.