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Reuters - The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved a plan to give the U.S. economy a $146 billion election-year boost through tax rebates and other measures to stave off a possible recession by boosting business and consumer spending.

In a candid discussion of his classified ads site and its business model, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark said Tuesday he has considered open-sourcing some Craiglist technology, frowns upon banner ads, and believes the site's impact on newspaper ad sales is exaggerated.

Speaking at the WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, Calif., on Tuesday morning, Newmark detailed how the site began as a simple events list in 1995 and evolved into a real company in 1999. Now, the site has grown to one that experienced 9 billion hits per month prior to the recent holiday season. Craigslist is run on Suse Linux, Apache, and MySQL, Newmark said.

Pondering Craigslist's open source plans, Newmark said the company has considered open-sourcing some of its caching technology but said staffing issues have prevented this from happening; the company has 25 employees.

Asked the benefit of such a contribution, Newmark cited benevolence. "I don't know [the specific benefits], but it feels in the right neighborly spirit," he said.

Craigslist, he said, has been successful because it has built a culture of trust working with people. The company makes money by charging for job postings in 11 cities and for apartment listings in one city. But the company has declined to do banner ads, said Newmark. He added he already makes enough money.

"Banner ads are often kind of dumb, and they slow the site down. I'm not interested," he said.

Newmark recognized that the site has affected newspaper classified advertising, but he stressed that the impact has been greatly exaggerated. "I figure the biggest problems newspapers have these days have to do with fact-checking," said Newmark.

Craigslist is growing, he said. "We are helping out lots of people, probably in the tens of millions. We need to be prepared for that growth," Newmark said. The company must improve its software and get new servers, he said.

Newmark's own role has evolved from being the founder writing code to doing customer service, he said. "I haven't written code since the end of 1999. It makes me sad," said Newmark.

Also at the conference, Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia.com, which is community site supporting development of wikis, cited the company's open source search efforts with its Wikia Search project. The project currently is in an alpha stage of development.

New York's attorney general and state legislative leaders presented a bill on Tuesday aimed at protecting people from sexual predators on the Internet, and Facebook, MySpace, and Yahoo backed the effort.

In a press conference, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno, and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver announced legislation they called "groundbreaking" in its proposed restrictions and controls of sexual offenders' online activities.

"Today I believe we're proposing the most comprehensive, smartest, toughest law in the nation to keep people safe online, especially minors," Cuomo said.

The Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act (e-STOP) responds to the widely documented use that sexual offenders make of the Internet, in particular social-networking sites, to stalk and victimize people, particularly minors.

Specifically, e-STOP would require convicted sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses, instant message screen names, and any other online identifiers with the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services. That data would then be made available to social-networking companies and other online services so that they can then block access to sexual offenders and remove them from their sites.

The bill also calls for allowing sentencing courts and the state's Parole Board to restrict the online activities of sex offenders who used the Internet to commit their crimes, victimized a minor, or are considered highly likely to repeat their offenses. In particular, the bill would ban many sex offenders from using social-networking sites.

There are more than 627,000 registered sex offenders in the United States, about 25,000 of whom are in New York, according to Cuomo's office.

State attorneys general have been very vocal about their concerns over online safety, in particular of minors who are preyed upon by sexual offenders on social-networking sites, which are widely used by teens.

The attorneys general have often criticized Facebook, MySpace, and other sites for, in their view, not doing enough to protect minors, but the two sides have recently seemed to get on better terms and have rolled out several joint security initiatives, partnerships, and agreements.

The e-STOP bill is needed to help social-networking companies keep their sites safer and will complement these companies' in-house security efforts, Cuomo said.

MySpace chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam agreed and said laws need to keep up with the times and technology. "We hope [e-STOP] becomes a model for other states to follow," Nigam said.

"As Facebook and other Internet companies do our best to exclude [from our sites] those who would do our users harm, we need help from the government," said Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer.

Ideally, legislation such as e-STOP would get enacted widely at state and federal levels, Cuomo said.

Reuters - The man at the center of a trading scandal at Societe Generale said that his activities could not have gone undetected by the French bank.