http://www.theinternetpatrol.com Internet Safety, Windows Updates, Internet News, and More Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:45:20 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Thousands of AuthorizeNet customers have started their long 4th of July weekend learning that Authorize.net has gone down - and gone down hard - due to a fire at one of their main data centers in Seattle, Washington. Authorize.net is one of the largest providers of merchant services on ... http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/data-center-fire-sends-authorize-down/ It seems like only yesterday we were reporting that, due to California's legislature (among others) being poised to pass a tax on affiliate programs (which some were also calling an "advertising tax") such as those run by Amazon and Overstock, these and other companies were resorting to dumping the affiliates ... http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/california-governor-schwarzenegger-vetoes-california-affiliate-program-tax-overstock-reinstates-california-affiliates-back/ Well, look what the spam cat just dragged in - address book importing spam from Bebo. Why is it that these various social networking and other sites seem to simply consider the incidental spam attendant to address book importing (if they think about it at all) to be the cost of ... http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/bebo-spam/ This is just about the coolest thing that we've seen in a long time! This device consists of two bluetooth handsets, which you connect to your cell phone - just as you would any other bluetooth device - and you instantly have extension handsets for your cell phone! ... http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/cell-phone-extension-phones-wirelessly-connect-blue-tooth-extension-handsets-to-your-cell-phone/ With ever more states either passing or contemplating passing an Internet affiliate program sales tax, the two edges of that particular sword are being felt from coast-to-coast, as affiliates are being slashed from the lucrative affiliate programs of some of the largest Internet companies. At the beginning of this year, a ... http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/affiliates-getting-dumped-from-coast-to-coast-as-states-contemplate-internet-sales-tax-laws/ The news of Michael Jackson's cardiac arrest, and subsequent death, caused such a tsunami of searches on Google that the search giant's system believed that it was under attack, and triggered Google's attack defense mode, including requiring searchers to solve a CAPTCHA. Searchers searching for information on Michael Jackson ... http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/sheer-volume-of-michael-jackson-searches-doses-google/ If you are used to getting payments sent to your Paypal account, you may have noticed in the past couple of weeks that you are suddenly being charged a fee even for Paypal-to-Paypal payments! In other words, where it used to be free to send and receive payments between ... http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/paypal-sneaks-in-new-fees-for-paypal-to-paypal-transactions/ Millions of Paypal users around the world found Paypal down, and were told that it was a Paypal internal server error, and to contact webmaster@paypal.com. "Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, ... http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/massive-paypal-outage-hits-users-around-the-world/ As Paypal went down yet again - and this time in what appears to have been an outage lasting several hours and affecting people on several continents - people are looking for Paypal alternatives. But are there Paypal alternatives? The answer is a resounding yes - there are ... http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/3-easy-alternatives-to-paypal/ In an interesting move that may or may not be tied to the economic times, Paypal has introduced a new service in which it exhorts you to proposition people and offer to pay them to do stuff. Or, as they say in one of their online ads, "Get stuff ... http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/paypal-introduces-proposition-and-pay-people-to-do-stuff-service/