Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
6.04.2017
5.05.2013
Buying on the Internet .... A tax cheat?
Shopping on the Internet without paying sales taxes makes you a tax cheat in almost all states
Excerpt:
Buy anything on the Internet lately without paying sales tax? In all but a few states, you’re probably a tax cheat.
That’s right, even if Internet retailers don’t collect sales tax at the time of the purchase, you’re required by law to pay it in 45 states and the District of Columbia.
Here’s the problem for states: hardly anyone pays the tax, and there’s not much states can do about it. Unpaid sales taxes are usually referred to as “use taxes” on state income tax returns.
.... Use taxes apply to purchases made over Internet, from catalogs, television and radio ads and purchases made directly from out-of-state companies. State officials, however, complain that few people pay these taxes, Olsten said.Comment: I wouldn't even know how to file "use taxes" for Minnesota.
2.11.2013
11.11.2012
Uber Internet Anonymity
How to disappear from the Internet forever
Excerpt:
Sick of horribly embarrassing things showing up when potential employers Google your name? Tired of everyone knowing you live in a garden level dungeon apartment? Perhaps you just don't like the fact the Internet makes you easy to find. Thankfully, it's not that hard to delete yourself entirely. Here's how to do it.Comment: It doesn't look that easy! Meanwhile try the Fake Name Generator (screen shot above)
9.25.2012
Iran hacks Bank sites?
Websites at Wells Fargo Latest Hit by Attack
Excerpt:
Cyberattackers disrupted websites operated by Wells Fargo WFC & Co. Tuesday, continuing a string of attacks that started last week at J.P. Morgan Chase JPM & Co. and Bank of America Corp. BAC ... Sitedown.com received 330 complaints about the Bank of America outage and nearly 1,000 complaints about J.P. Morgan's problems over the past week. Jeff Herdell, who runs sitedown.com, said the Wells Fargo complaints were significant because the company rarely experiences problems with its websites. A Wells Fargo spokeswoman confirmed that some customers were having problems logging in on Tuesday but said the San Francisco-based company was working to resolve the issue. She added that the outage was a systems problem and that no customer-account information was compromised. The scope of the disruption has raised eyebrows. "The amount of bandwidth that is flooding the websites is very large, much larger than in other attacks, and in a sense unprecedented," said Dmitri Alperovitch, chief executive of CrowdStrike, a private security firm investigating the attacks.
Lieberman: Blame Iran for Cyber Attacks on Bank of America, Chase
Excerpt:
Iran likely orchestrated the cyber attacks that impacted the websites of Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase last week in retaliation for U.S. economic sanctions on the country, Sen. Joe Lieberman told C-SPAN. The comments from Lieberman, who is chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, stand in contrast with online claims from a group that claimed responsibility for the attacks and cited anger over a recent YouTube video mocking Islam. “I don’t believe these were just hackers,” Lieberman said on Friday evening while appearing on C-SPAN. “I believe this was done by Iran and the Qods force, which has its own developing cyber attack capacity. And I believe it was in response to the increasingly strong economic sanctions that the United States and our European allies have put on Iranian financial institutions.” According to Reuters, the hacking of websites and networks at BofA began in late 2011 and escalated this year.
Comment: screen shot from: sitedown.co
7.28.2011
Speaking of Gmail (and YouTube)
New Google Project Goes for the Jugular
Excerpt:
Gmail continues to trail Hotmail and Yahoo Mail in user number -- at 190 million users to Hotmail's 360 million and Yahoo's 270 million.
Comment: www.emailintervention.com
Top 10 most-visited Internet sites
The List:
Comment: Of these: I used to use both Yahoo mail and Hotmail. Supplanted by Gmail and a jrpeet.com branded Gmail. My homepage is IGoogle. I use finance.yahoo.com to track investments. I probably visit youtube daily but not directly ... something sent to me generally
2.07.2011
Why I support an internet kill switch for the United States
Why I support an internet kill switch for the United States
Comment: U.S. civil rights bodies call for rejection of Internet "kill switch". Commerce would screech to a halt! Our freedoms would be abridged!
2.05.2011
1994: 'What Is the Internet?'
NBC Fires Employee for Posting 'What Is the Internet' Clip
Excerpt:
An NBC worker who posted old footage from the "Today" show of the hosts wondering, "What is the Internet anyway?" has been fired, the network confirmed, saying the person had a history of distributing material without permission.
The footage, in which Katie Couric, Bryant Gumbel and Elizabeth Vargas try to figure out the Internet and e-mail addresses, made the rounds via said Internet last week, posted and re-posted to Facebook pages and sent via e-mail.
Filmed in 1994, the clip features Gumbel demanding, with a befuddled expression: "What is the Internet anyway?" and Couric stumbling to define it as: "that massive computer network, the one that's becoming really big now."
Comment: I was using the Internet back then but it was in it's infancy. I had a Prodigy account. As I recollect we had a 9600 baud modem. Click article link for video.
1.29.2011
How Egypt Killed the Internet
How Egypt Killed the Internet
Excerpt:
In the case of Egypt, it was probably done with a few phone calls, says Jim Cowie, the co-founder and chief technology officer of Renesys Corp., a company that analyzes how the Internet is performing around the world.
Egypt severed mobile and Web communications late Thursday, the Journal reported.
Mr. Cowie said in an interview with Digits that he isn’t privy to how Egypt actually shut down the Web but outlined a scenario based on his “knowledge of how the Internet is structured.”
“People have talked about a ‘kill switch’” that would link to every router and be able to shut each one off from a central location, “but that is not realistic,” he said. “What is most likely is that somebody in the government gives a phone call to a small number of people and says, ‘Turn it off.’ And then one engineer at each service provider logs into the equipment and changes the configuration of how traffic should flow.”
Comment: Interesting chart associated with the article (Wall Street Journal)
4.04.2010
Can Minnesotans escape the "Amazon tax"?
The Sales Tax That Comes Back to Bite
Excerpt:
Time was when it was easy for citizens to avoid paying sales taxes on some purchases made online or out of state. Ebay and Craigslist wouldn't be as fun otherwise.
But skirting the law is getting more difficult. Now 24 states, plus D.C., are pricking shoppers' consciences with a special line on the tax return that requests a payment for sales taxes on any goods bought out of state, including those from online retailers—up from 20 states in 2008. Other states collect the tax in a variety of ways, some with special forms that taxpayers are supposed to fill out voluntarily. If, like many, you don't fess up, you may get a bill (see map).
States are trying to recoup some of the $20 billion or so they lose each year to online-sales-tax evasion. The gap exists for a quirky reason: States with sales taxes always have a "use tax" on items residents buy from out-of-state vendors. But a 1992 Supreme Court decision affirmed that out-of-state vendors don't have to collect the tax. It's up to taxpayers to track what they owe. Most don't.
"These rules are poorly understood and they make a lot of people mad," says Jim Eads, head of the Federation of Tax Administrators, a group of state tax officials. He points out that New Mexico even has a law on its books prohibiting enforcement of its use tax.
This year Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia and D.C. added a line to their 2009 returns asking residents to pay use taxes, according to CCH. Many states warn against leaving the line blank and include a table of "suggested" contributions by income level. In New York, this works out to $78 for a return showing $200,000 of adjusted gross income. Items costing more than $1,000 are supposed to be handled separately.
Such piecemeal efforts will not be necessary if Congress passes a bill many states are pushing for: the Streamlined Sales Tax. States would harmonize their rules (but not necessarily their rates) and then collect tax on outbound sales and send it to the inbound state. So far 23 states have signed on, although holdouts include big ones like California and New York. Lawmakers seemed poised to pass the measure last year before they became preoccupied with health care, but the bill could return.
Minnesota Seeks "Amazon Tax"
Excerpt:
Minnesota has become the latest state to consider taxing consumers on internet sales by proposing the so-called "Amazon Tax." House Bill 401/Senate Bill 282 would require retailers with no physical presence in the state to collect sales tax on digital products purchased by Minnesotans and remit it back to the state.
Current federal law bars states from forcing businesses to collect sales tax unless they have a physical nexus in the state. Following New York's lead, the legislation would circumvent the intent of the lawby presuming that a company has a physical nexus if business is solicited through a third-party advertiser that is based in Minnesota.
Comment: Internet Tax Freedom Act. The Streamlined Sales and Use Tax
9.10.2009
Pigeon-Net
Pigeon beats Internet firm in data transfer race
Excerpt:
A South African company on Wednesday proved it was faster to transmit data by carrier pigeon than to send it using the country's leading internet service provider.
Local news agency SAPA reported the 11-month-old pigeon, Winston, took one hour and eight minutes to fly the 50 miles from Unlimited IT's offices near Pietermaritzburg to the coastal city of Durban with a data card strapped to its leg.
Including downloading, the transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds — the time it took for only four percent of the data to be transferred using a line provided by Telkom.
SAPA said Unlimited IT performed the stunt after becoming frustrated with slow internet transmission times.
The company has 11 call centers around the country and regularly sends data to its other branches.
Comment: I'm thankful for Comcast!
6.26.2009
Jackson death ripples through the Internet
Jackson dies, almost takes Internet with him
Excerpt:
How many people does it take to break the Internet? On June 25, we found out it's just one -- if that one is Michael Jackson.
The biggest showbiz story of the year saw the troubled star take a good slice of the Internet with him, as the ripples caused by the news of his death swept around the globe.
"Between approximately 2:40 p.m. PDT and 3:15 p.m. PDT today, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson," a Google spokesman told CNET, which also reported that Google News users complained that the service was inaccessible for a time. At its peak, Google Trends rated the Jackson story as "volcanic."
As sites fell, users raced to other sites: TechCrunch reported that TMZ, which broke the story, had several outages; users then switched to Perez Hilton's blog, which also struggled to deal with the requests it received.
CNN reported a fivefold rise in traffic and visitors in just over an hour, receiving 20 million page views in the hour the story broke.
Twitter crashed as users saw multiple "fail whales" -- the illustrations the site uses as error messages -- user FoieGrasie posting, "Irony: The protesters in Iran using twitter as com are unable to get online because of all the posts of 'Michael Jackson RIP.' Well done." The site's status blog said that Twitter had had to temporarily disable its search results, saved searches and trend topics.
Wikipedia saw a flurry of activity, with close to 500 edits made to Jackson's entry in less than 24 hours. CNET reported that by 3:15pm PDT, Wikipedia seemed to be "temporarily overloaded."
Comment: Al Gore invented it and Michael Jackson broke it!
2.13.2009
2.05.2009
Can Facebook turn traffic into profits?
Facebook turns five
Excerpt:
One challenge Facebook is yet to overcome is how to make money.
US software giant Microsoft bought a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook in 2007 for 240 million dollars, valuing the social network on paper at 15 billion dollars.
But Facebook, unlike other Web giants such as Amazon, eBay, Google and Yahoo!, is yet to prove how it is going to translate traffic into cash.
"There's no significant visible source of revenue other than investors," said Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group.
"There's a lot of potential there but they're still kind of living in this dotcom mindset where a business plan doesn't make a difference," he said. "And as we saw with the dotcoms, that has a very unfortunate end to it."
"Google was able to figure out fairly quickly how to monetize what they were doing and they became a giant and that's the potential for Facebook but they've got to cross that chasm," Enderle said.
Going public with an IPO, or initial public offering, would not appear to be an option for Facebook right now.
"Doing a public offering when you have no revenue? Good luck with that -- particularly in this market," said Enderle.
Advertising could be a money-spinner but "the ad model doesn't seem like it works all that well for Facebook -- though it could," said Enderle. "You know an awful lot about people, and so you would think they could do targeted ads."
Comment: I think it is a really cool service. I didn't even know that they weren't making money. Wonder if Facebook will be around 5 years from now?
1.17.2009
EU to Microsoft: Separate Browser from OS
Microsoft Ordered to Delete Browser
Excerpt:
The European Union said Friday that Microsoft’s practice of selling the Internet Explorer browser together with its Windows operating system violated the union’s antitrust rules.
It ordered the software giant to untie the browser from its operating system in the 27-nation union, enabling makers of rival browsers to compete fairly.
“Microsoft’s tying of Internet Explorer to the Windows operating system harms competition between Web browsers, undermines product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice,” the E.U. said in a statement.
Comment: Makes SENSE! The browser is an application, not an essential OS component.
1.11.2009
Brazilians shouldn't boil tea!
Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.
...
A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines - about 2% of global CO2 emissions. “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power.
...
Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, has calculated that maintaining a character (known as an avatar) in the Second Life virtual reality game, requires 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. That is almost as much used by the average Brazilian.
Comment: Useless factoid?
12.16.2008
The end of "the daily"
Detroit papers drop home delivery to 3 days a week
Excerpt:
Fighting to stay in business, Detroit's two daily newspapers will radically change their relationship with readers by slashing home delivery to three days a week, printing small editions on other days and encouraging people to get information online.
Comment: Believe it or not, when I was a kid in Cincinnati, we received 2 papers a day. The Cincinnati Enquirer in the morning and the Cincinnati Post in the afternoon.
In college, I worked Saturday nights at the Enquirer loading papers onto trucks. I think it was from 6:00 p.m. until 2:30 a.m.
We also had thrice weekly milk delivery. How times have changed!
12.11.2008
Bit.ly
Bit.ly
Comment: Another URL shortening service. Like Tinyurl.com but looks like you can create an account and save shortened URLs.
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