Internet

The Christmas season is a time when Roman Catholics flood their churches in droves to honor the birth of Christ. A far afterthought in all the praise and worship is the higher-than-usual volume of money the church incurs at this time. Sadly, some ... "seasonal churchgoers" do not give the church a second thought until the Easter season approaches. Others must work all season and are unable to attend mass on Saturdays and Sundays with some form of regularity. Whatever the circumstance, church donations constantly suffer during non-holiday periods. But not any more. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese ... (view more)

Online retailers in Britain could be missing out on more than $5 billion worth of business because customers are concerned about security. The report's authors found that one in five people questioned do not shop online because they believe rogue ... web traders will not deliver goods, or are trying to commit fraud. The survey was carried out by GetSafeOnline.org, a site funded by the British government, Microsoft, eBay and the HSBC bank. GetSafeOnline.org's managing director Tony Neate said, "Being aware of the warning signs, and taking a few simple precautions, is all that's needed to shop with ... (view more)

As much as 95% of all email is spam, according to new research. Barracuda Networks, an email and web security firm, analysed more than a billion emails sent to its customers this year. They found between 90-95% was spam, compared with 85-90% last ... year. They also carried out a survey of their customers, which include major firms IBM, Coca Cola, and Harvard University. They found that 57% considered spam the worst form of unsolicited advertising, more than junk mail and telemarketing put together. Though they found that most people receive five or fewer spam emails each day, an unfortunate 13% ... (view more)

The Ask.Com search engine now offers users the ability to search without any records being collected. Anyone using the site can, with just two clicks, make sure details such as their IP address (which identifies the particular computer they are ... using) and the phrase they are searching for are not stored by the site. (Source: irconnect.com ) The service is titled AskEraser. Some critics have noted that the name is slightly misleading; rather than erasing data, it simply makes sure the information is never written in the first place. It only applies to future searches and it isn't possible to ... (view more)

America OnLine (AOL) has launched a new version of its software, designed to work more efficiently with Windows. In the past, AOL users have generally had to access all of their Internet services (such as web browsing, email and instant messaging) ... through a single screen (or 'window'), an approach dubbed 'walled garden' by some commentators. AOL's tactic kept everything together in one place, but some users found it wasn't possible to use tabbed browsing. That's where you can quickly switch from one screen to another by pressing the ALT + TAB keys or simply clicking with the mouse. The ... (view more)

Less than a month after Facebook announced its Beacon advertising program, the social-networking company has made a serious retreat from its initial plans. In a statement on Facebook's blog last Wednesday CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a public apology ... for the way Beacon was introduced. "We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it," Zuckerberg said. Beacon was Facebook's most recent attempt at finding a way to monetize the increasingly popular web site. The initial launch was announced on November 6, with 44 high-profile companies signed on for the kick-off. Beacon began as ... (view more)

You can make the case that bullying never really ends. You just move from elementary to high school and onto that job where a boss demands this of you while blaming you for that. Bitter as that outlook may be, not even technology seems to be ... stopping bullies from carrying out their abusive behavior. In a recent report, Reuters took a close look at technology, a sphere it deems to be the new frontier in bullying. According to U.S. researchers, nasty tykes are now leaving angry text messages, hateful emails, and conducting cyber gossip about all of their peers. What's the big deal? Most of us ... (view more)

Adobe announced last Thursday that it was partnering with Yahoo! to bring ads to PDF (Portable Document Format). Through an opt-in service, publishers of PDF files can now have relevant text ads appear alongside their instruction manuals, stock ... reports, and press releases. After registering online with Adobe, businesses upload their documents for keyword analysis which matches advertisements with the file. "By partnering with Yahoo! on this innovative advertising service we are creating opportunities for publishers to build new businesses around unique content that previously was just given ... (view more)

Talk about 'An Inconvenient Spoof'; the website for Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth has been breached by hackers. The blog page of climatecrisis.net has been altered to include links to more than eighty pages, each named after a ... different product from an online pharmacy. The products include Viagra, Vicadin and Prozac. (Source: theregister.co.uk ) The links only appear in the page's source code (which tells the computer what to display). They aren't ordinarily visible on-screen to site visitors, so it seems likely the hackers are not intending to lure people directly to their site ... (view more)

The New Jersey Assembly has taken another step closer to passing a law to govern Internet dating. The Internet Dating Safety Act has passed its committee stage (where proposed laws are debated in detail) and will now go to the full assembly for a ... final vote. The law would affect all dating sites with customers in New Jersey. The key requirement of the bill is for sites to inform customers whether or not they run background checks, and whether or not people who fail such checks are still allowed to sign up. This information would appear on every email sent to or from a customer in the state on ... (view more)