Web Sites

Have you been bitten by a vicious dog? Been the victim of a surgical mishap? A sexual assault on a cruise ship? There's a lawyer waiting for your call. Boca Raton, Fla.-based firm WhoCanISue.com has scores of billboards and bus-shelter signs dominating the local landscape. The service matches website visitors with lawyers. Choose your complaint from a drop-down menu -- nursing home abuse, for example -- and then a sub-category, such as bedsores, dehydration or falls and fractures.

Almost as soon as Guang-Yu Xu was laid off from his engineering post at a Silicon Valley Internet company last month, he visited LinkedIn.com and updated his job status from "current" to "past." Through their interconnected contacts, he soon heard from headhunter Robert Greene, one of more than 530,000 recruiters trolling the professional networking site for job candidates. Within a few weeks, Xu had three offers. He started at Mint.com, a personal finance website, two weeks ago.

The Los Angeles Police Department's online crime map intended for public use has failed to include nearly 40% of serious crimes reported in the city, a Times analysis has found. The omissions, which date back at least six months, include thousands of crimes known to LAPD officials and are included in their official crime statistics. Among the 19,000 incidents between Jan. 1 and June 13 that do not appear at lapdcrimemaps.

I like Yelp. The review site can be a nifty way to check out a restaurant before risking a meal. But is Yelp also a shakedown racket for merchants? Some restaurant owners say the San Francisco company is unusually aggressive in trying to get businesses to pay hundreds of dollars in monthly "sponsorship" fees to improve their ranking in search results and to move their most positive review to the top of the page.

Since emerging from the primordial ooze, parents have wrung their evolving appendages over ways to shield their offspring from hungry predators, lurking maniacs and strangers from without.

The cyber attack that brought down Twitter for several hours Thursday was aimed at a single blogger in the country of Georgia, according to Facebook, which was also targeted in the attack. Cyxymu, as the blogger is known online, uses his blog and accounts on several social media networks to lash out against Russia, which has waged battles with Georgia over disputed territory. "Yesterday's attack appears to be directed at an individual who has a presence on a number of sites," Facebook said in a statement.

Despite a broad and persistent cyber attack whose targets included the White House, the New York Stock Exchange and the Washington Post, government websites were operating normally on Wednesday, officials said. The attack began July 4 and caused little damage, but it touched off a debate among experts over whether it represented a mild nuisance or the opening salvo of a potential electronic war.

Jack has risen, hallelujah. After being hit by a bus in a Super Bowl TV/Web commercial Feb. 1, Jack -- the grand-tete CEO-mascot of Jack in the Box -- emerged from his coma March 4, newly inspired. At Jack's direction, the San Diego-based restaurant chain will undertake a brand makeover this spring, including a new logo (Duffy & Partners, Minneapolis), redesigned store environments and a new corporate website that launched Monday. Jack, I feel obliged to point out, is a fictional character.

The nervous woman in a gray suit clicked on a photo lineup on an overhead screen labeled "Jihadi Martyrs." It flashed to mug shots of men with names like Abu Issa, an Al Qaeda recruiter, and Abu Jabber, a trainer. A man in one photograph was pointing a machine gun. "They are all me," said the blond mother from Montana, speaking before an audience of computer experts, law enforcement agents and investigators at the first International Conference on Cyber Security, held last week in New York.

They're bigger, they're bolder, and soon they'll be covering up large swaths of some of your favorite Web pages. The Online Publishers Assn. on Tuesday released several new in-your-face advertising formats designed to be both more obtrusive and interactive.