If you have reason to send money by Paypal to anyone in India – or if you are someone in India needing to receive money via Paypal – well, you may be out of luck, unless you can legitimately claim that the funds sent by Paypal are not for personal use, but, rather, are a business transaction for the purchase of goods. That is because Paypal has suspended all personal payments to India, and has even taken the radical step of reversing some personal Paypal payments to people in India that were already paid (leaving the hapless recipient with a negative balance), all at the demand of the Indian government, over concern that funds earmarked as ‘personal’ may actually be money being sent home by Indian citizens working overseas (known as a “remittance”).

A woman in Germany has saved the life of a man who was a complete stranger to her, using only her webcam and a telephone. According to authorities, the man, who was admiring the sunset near St. Peter-Ording off the German – Danish border, and who had wandered out onto the ice of the frozen North Sea, would surely have died had the woman not just happened to be watching the same sunset – only from 350 miles away, via webcam.

Dan Woolley, an American who was trapped and buried for nearly 3 days (65 hours, to be exact) when the hotel that he was staying at in Haiti collapsed on top of him, says that he owes his very life and limb to the emergency first aid application that he had on his iPhone, to setting his iPhone to sound an alarm every 20 minutes, and to the flash on his camera.

Wal-Mart, Gap, Nike – when you think of companies known to use labor where the work enviroment is dangerous to the workers, these are names that come to mind. But Apple? Nokia?? It’s true – the odds are good that the screen on one or more of your computers or cell phones was manufactured in a plant where workers are routinely exposed to toxic chemicals – where, in fact, workers have died due to exposure to chemicals like n-hexane. This week Chinese workers employed by Taiwanese screen manufacturer Wintek, in Wintek’s east China factory in Jiangsu province, staged a protest over, in part, their allegations that several workers have become paralyzed – and died – due to exposure to n-hexane, a toxic chemical that has been banned, but which Wintek is still using.

If you have been contacted by either of London McFee Investments or Equity Transfer Management and are wondering whether it’s too good to be true, or even a scam, well, read on. It may be that they were offering you a ‘deal’ to sell shares of stock such as General Components, or it may be that they were interested in a stock that you hold other than General Components. But in all cases, in the end, they tell you that you will need to put cash up front – usually called an “equity transfer charge” or “equity transfer fee” owing to U.S. or other stock regulations. Other players in this scam space include Asia Pacific Group and Falcon Group.

Text to donate? We’ve had a lot of questions about the messages flying around the Internet that you can text “Haiti” to 90999 and it will create a $10.00 donation to the relief efforts in Haiti following the horrible Hatian earthquake that has left hundreds of thousands dead, and many more injured and homeless. It’s important to understand that the $10.00 will be charged to your cell phone bill.

Google Maps has now mapped the Ruins of Pompeii – complete with street view! Now, without leaving your chair, you can experience (ok, nearly) what it’s like to walk around the Ruins of Pompeii!

Craig Lynch, also known as Craig Lazie Lynch (not sure why it’s “Lazie” instead of Craig Lazy Lynch) escaped from Britain’s Hollesley Bay Prison more than 3 months ago, on September 23rd. Still on the lam, he hasn’t gone underground – in fact, far from it. In fact, Craig Lazie Lynch has been driving British law enforcement mad by regularly updating his Facebook profile, taunting authorities and building a huge following of fans in the process.

Project Honey Pot has just announced over one billion served – one billion pieces of spam served to Project Honey Pot that is – and with that milestone they have released their analysis of global spam trends and patterns, and it’s very interesting.

Last Friday, if you were on eBay and quick, you could have bid on what was claimed to be blood and brain samples from none other than Il Duce – Benito Mussolini himself. The blood and brain tissue was posted for sale by an as yet undisclosed source, although Mussolini’s grandaughter, Alessandra Mussolini, has suggested that the blood and brain samples could have been lifted during the autopsy performed in 1945 on Mussolini at the Policlinico hospital in Milan.

Just this past week we told you about a vulnerability that all jailbreaked iPhones are at risk for, due to there being a default root password for SSH that most people who jailbreak their iPhones don’t (know to) change. Now, taking advantage of that same ‘default root password’ issue, countless jailbroke iPhone owners are finding Rick Astley’s mug on their iPhone, as jailbroken iPhones get “rickrolled” by the Ikee worm. (A “rickroll” (“rick roll”) is a fad that started a couple of years ago when, inexplicably, the video of Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” became the visual punchline to tricks played across the Internet, with links to supposedly topical content actually taking the user to the Astley video. To get so tricked is to get “rick rolled”.)

The High Court in the UK took the unusual step last week of allowing service of a court order on Twitter and, perhaps even more unusually, it worked! The order required that an anonymous defendant cease posing on Twitter as Donal Blaney, the blogger behind Blaney’s Blarney, and abandon the imposter account. The imposter account, using the monicker “Blaneysblarney”, looked identical to the Twitter account under which Donal Blaney actually posts, at “Donal_Blaney”.

Red Bull, the makers of Red Bull Energy Drink, are branching out – a lot. They are bringing online a line of Red Bull mobile phones – that’s right, the Red Bull cell phone. Red Bull says that the Red Bull Mobile phone service will bring you “the latest handsets, competitive tariffs and a complete package of mobile communication features. Even more, it gives unlimited access to the world of Red Bull. Welcome to our playground.”

Ever wonder why there is so much spam for Viagra? Ever wonder “Who would ever buy this stuff?” Well, while the specific details of the “who” aren’t available, there are enough of them buying it to make spamming about Viagra and other similar meds very financially rewarding.

It’s one of the newest spam tactics – spam vacation messages. Here’s how it works: spammers sign up for mailing lists, never intending to read them. Instead they put themselves on permanent vacation status, create one of those infernal “I’m on vacation” messages full of their spam message, and let the vacation program do their spamming for them. If they’re lucky, the mailing list is one where the vacation message goes back to the entire mailing list. So far we’ve seen spam vacation messages hawking mydosell.com, wholesaler-electronic.com, qigefa.com, and easevshop.com.