Although looks can be deceiving from time to time, I am the quintessential geek when it comes to computer technology. I love all things about it and find it quite fascinating. That’s why this next story, reported on both Yahoo News and CNN.com, caught my (insert simultaneous gratuitous hair toss here) gorgeous, warm brown eyes today.

Apparently, there is a huge gaping security hole which allows scammers to target ordinary people when they’re typing in legitimate Web addresses. The scammers then re-direct the computer users to malicious sites and steal their information.

Yahoo News reports that if the trick is done properly, computer users are unlikely to detect whether they’ve landed at a legitimate site or an evil double maintained by someone bent on fraud. Great – more things to worry about while surfing the Net.

Now while I found this news to be quite disturbing, it wasn’t half as disturbing as discovering the photo and title of the guy who discovered this big gaping hole. For a second there, I thought I was being directed to a malicious site. Scary.

Shown on Yahoo News

The following text is taken verbatim from Yahoo News. And I quote:

“In this undated photo provided by IOActive Inc., Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration testing for Seattle-based computer security consultant IOActive Inc., is shown.”

I can only imagine how THAT topic comes up in business networking conversations.

Bob: “I’ve been the President of Mergers and Acquisitions at JoBlow Inc. for about 5 years now. But enough about me.”

“So Dan, what do YOU do?”

Dan: “Well, Bob, I’m the Director of Penetration Testing for IOActive.”

Bob: “Wow – I didn’t think they actually tested out condoms before putting them out to market. Cool job, dude.”

And in related news, Tito Ortiz is working on patching the giant gaping hole between Jenna Jameson’s legs…

Move over, Google and Yahoo, there’s a new search engine in town and it’s name is Cuil (pronounced “cool”).

As when any new geeky technology comes out (I am a self-proclaimed Queen of All Things Geeky), I just HAD to check it out. And, I don’t think it’s cool – yet.

According to an article on The Motley Fool today, Cuil claims to scour far more of the Web than Google does. It promises to sift through more than 120 billion pages to arrive at the best result. And the brains over at Cuil aren’t new to the search engine world. The creator, Anna Patterson, worked for Google before breaking off on her own with a few of Google’s former engineers. Nice to see a woman get some much-deserved brain credit for once.

So of course, I just had to test out Cuil with the first search string that popped in my geeky little brain: Christian Bale. Well, according to Cuil, he just doesn’t exist:

Hmmm. Not so impressed, Anna. Especially with the gazillion or so posts about his family ordeals this past week. I think some more programming work needs to be done here…

I also checked to see if I would get the same disappointing outcome for “The Dark Knight” and I was much much happier – there were quite a few results. I DO have to say that I like how the results pop up on Cuil vs. Google. The entries appear in a more eye-pleasing magazine format (with both photos and text) vs. a linear format (like Google) which tends to be quite boring.

So, kudos to you, Cuil, for attempting to revolutionize how the world searches for stuff on the Net. However, I think it’s just not quite finished yet so I think I’ll stick to my tried and true friend of 10 years for now. But, I can easily be swayed with a HUGE box of Norman Love chocolates though, so keep that in mind.

Have you tried Cuil.com? What do YOU think of it? Is it cool enough to take you away from Google or Yahoo?