You know what I can’t stand? When I click on a link on a website – to go to another page – and it ends up being a PDF download instead. Now, I have nothing against PDF downloads, but I do have something against finding myself downloading and opening PDF files without warning. C’mon people, put a “download PDF file” or “read PDF file” link there, or at least a warning that says “clicking this link will download a pdf file.” (In case you are wondering “What is a PDF file?” or “What does PDF stand for?”, ‘PDF’ stands for “Portable Document Format”, and it is a format that was developed by the Adobe corporation.)

In addition to the breed of filth known as “typo squatters” (people who register domains which are common misspellings of popular domains, and then put ads on them), and “drop squatters” (people who grab established domains the moment that the domain’s registration lapses (i.e. is “dropped”) – and set up shop on the domain – again, nothing but ads – to take advantage of the traffic that comes to the domain), we want to bring to your attention a particularly slimy breed that we call the “Doppelganger Squatter”.

The decision in the lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Impulse Media Group was handed down this week, and for many it was a shocker. There were many claims of spam from Impulse Media Group’s affiliates, and so many thought that the lawsuit was a slamdunk. It wasn’t.

According to a tip received by the Internet Patrol, the resident evil behind the throngs of social networking and other sites that are tricking people into logging into their AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail accounts, and scraping their address book, has a name, and that name is Sigma Visual Technologies. Sigma Visual Technologies provides software that allows sites to get their users to import and email all of their contacts in their address books. Put another way, it lets these sites scrape and spam your contacts. In your name!

As any Sidekick owner – be it Sidekick I, Sidekick II, or Sk3 – can tell you, if your Sidekick (also known as the Danger Hiptop) has been exposed to water it will preclude any chance of your getting your Sidekick repaired or replaced under warranty. But how do they know? Here, we show you pictures of the tricky traps that are hidden on your Sidekick let Tmobile know whether your Sidekick has been exposed to water.

The Pure Digital PSV-352 60 Minute and Pure Digital PSV-351 30-min Point & Shoot Camcorder are really catching on. But the software, while simple to use, is crippled, and worse, it emails your videos through Grouper.com, where Grouper grabs not only your video, but harvests the email addresses and creates an account for you, all without letting you know at the time!

MySpace, which recently capitulated to legal demands and has started openly identifying and maintaining a database of sex offenders who have created profiles on the MySpace site, has accidentally branded an innocent woman, Jessica Davis, as a sex offender.

I read an article this week about “virtual rape”. Yes, really. That would be virtual sexual assault on your virtual online character or persona. This is all coming out now because, I kid you not, someone from Second Life reported a virtual rape to the police in Brussels. And they are investigating it. Oh for pete’s sake, give me a break! How tenous a grasp on reality do these people have? And how the heck can there be “forced online sexual activity”? Isn’t that nearly an oxymoron?

Filehound is software that allows law enforcement officials to quickly scan a hard drive and determine the true nature of the contents of an image file that has been renamed to appear to be something else.