As many are now aware, a woman who was kidnapped as a child 18 years ago was found alive at the home of her captor, Phillip Craig Garrido, in Antioch, California this week; this morning it was confirmed that she is Jaycee Lee Dugard who, at the age of 11, was kidnapped back in 1991. Philip Garrido, who had kept Jaycee Dugard, and the two children whom he fathered with her, captive in his back yard all this time, (and who also used the alias Phillip Craig Knight) kept a blog. And oh what a blog it is. Oh, and his email address? GodsDesire@rocketmail.com (And also phillipcknight@yahoo.com.)

Amanda Bonnen – the woman formerly known as @abonnen on Twitter – was apparently unhappy with the mold growing in the apartment which she rented from property management company Horizon Group Management LLC. Earlier this year she said as much on Twitter, tweeting a Tweet (a Twitter message) in which she said “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay.”
Whether or not Horizon thinks that a moldy apartment is ok, they clearly think that talking about their moldy apartments isn’t – this week Horizon slapped Amanda Bonnen with a lawsuit in which they ask for $50,000 in damages for that single Tweet.

Power buyers on eBay have long known – or at least suspected – that some eBay sellers create fake accounts, with the shill accounts doing “shill bidding”, that is bidding up the price on their own items, artifically inflating the bidding price so that the winning bid (never their own, of course) earns them more money. But now eBay has been forced to admit that shill bidding, by unscrupulous eBay sellers, does indeed occur.

Stupid users are the worst problem on the Internet, according to this survey of more than 600 Internet users.

The Internet can be used for all kind of great things, and certainly one of those great things has been the development of the microlending sites – where users contribute a small amount of funds, and then the microlending site extends a small business loan (typically up to a few hundred dollars) to individuals to allow the recipient to get on their feet by starting or furthering a small business. However, one site is funding cock fighting, which is not only a horrible blood sport, but is illegal here in the United States. Perhaps more astonishingly, the CEO of the site, Kiva.org, is justifying the practice!

Here’s something that we just learned the hard way – from direct personal experience. If you file a dispute with Paypal – and then escalate it to a claim, as Paypal encourages you to do – there is only one situation in which Paypal won’t then immediately dismiss your claim, making it a win for a non-compliant, non-responsive, or just plain sleazy seller.

Spamza.com is a website that recently went live, where you can enter someone’s – anyone’s – email address, and they will start getting instantly spammed by dozens of newsletters for which they did not sign up. If you’ve had a sudden increase in spam or suddenly found yourself signed up for a lot of mailing lists and newsletters that you didn’t request, Spamza may be why. You see, the Spamza site runs a script that takes their email address and then Spamza signs them up for those newsletters, without their permission.

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.)

Shocking news came to us this week, with the results of a Samsung Mobile survey showing that more than 6 out of 10 people asked for a preference stated that they’d text in their vote for the Presidential election this fall if the option were available to them.

If you’ve ever gotten an email from someone offering to pay you to put a link on your site – or even if you’ve just ever stumbled across a link from one site to another that is completely out of context – you’ve probably stumbled across one of the newer grey areas on the Internet: paying someone who couldn’t care less about the quality of the content of your website to go find and spam other websites who won’t care about the quality of the content of your website and convince them to link to your site.

Now, we all know the importance of feedback. Giving feedback is what allows businesses to even better serve their customers. And we’re all familiar with feedback forms on all sorts of sites, the quintessential example being the feedback form for eBay feedback. There are all types of feedback – positive feedback, negative feedback, and even constructive feedback which may be neither. But demanded feedback? Giving and receiving feedback should be a voluntary act. Demanding that I leave feedback for a transaction with you may lead to destructive feedback, or maybe I should learn how to give scholarly constructive feedback that feels positive when it isn’t! I mean, why provide feedback at all if it’s going to be so strained? Why do you feel entitled to – indeed – how dare you demand feedback from me? [And check out how eBay is forcing sellers to leave buyers only positive eBay feedback – no more eBay negative feedback for buyers with the new eBay seller feedback rule!]

Following complaints about police officer safety based on concerns that the policeman (policeperson?) rating site ratemycop.com (that’s Rate-My-Cop .com, get it?) posed a danger to law enforcement personnel because it outed the full roster, including names and badge numbers, of police officers at nearly 500 police departments around the country (to the tune of some 140,000 police officers), RateMyCop’s host – GoDaddy – unceremoniously and without warning pulled the plug on the site. So who is in the wrong here? To quote that famous Buffalo Springfield song, we say nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.

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!

It’s like all those foreign movies with bad translations that you like to laugh at, only this time it’s real – journalists in Israel used the Babelfish free online translator to translate an email request to the Dutch foreign ministry – and in the process insulted a Dutch dignitary’s mother and created an international incident. Who in their right mind would let Babelfish translate a message – let alone send a Babelfish translation – to members of a foreign government whom they wished to interview??

Self-professed pedophile Jack McClellan ran his Seattle Tacoma Everett Girl Love website at stegl.org openly and, by all accounts from legal authorities, legally. You see, Jack McClellan has no criminal record, and as best as anyone can tell (and of course he claims) McClellan has never actually molested or illegally touched a minor. He just loves them. But his website – which we recreate here – was knocked offline by an outraged public.