A girl in the United States who came up with the idea to set a date to “attack a teacher”, created the page on Facebook and invited her friends to it, has been arrested along with five of her friends, all girls. The Facebook page had more than 100 students accepting the invitation but it is not known yet at this point if these students will face any punishment.

Although these girls are now claiming that it was just a joke, no one can really be sure if one of those who came upon this page or invited to it and participated would take it as a joke or really act upon it for real. Who can say this isn’t the catalyst needed for yet another school shooting?

The six girls arrested are only 12 and 13 years old and it is quite disconcerting that such young girls can think of something like that. Back in my time, we were brought up to think that teaching is a noble profession and teachers should be respected, even those that fail us.

I read with interest a about a man facing felony charges for reading his wife’s email to find out if she was having an affair and if she was exposing their daughter to her physically abusive former husband.

According to news report, the wife gave him her password to her email account so that should give him authorization to read her email, right? I don’t see how this should put him into trouble with the law. If the wife didn’t want him to access her email anymore, she should change her password, even if they may continue to share a laptop.

This reminds me of the case of Daphne Iking, whose now former husband also told of reading her email and instant messages, which means that if this case happened in the United States, he too could also be facing felony charges already.

I guess in Malaysia, people just don’t see that reading someone else’s messages is wrong.

One of my blog readers wrote to me asking if I could recommend him a good webhost. He wants to set up a blog and commercial website for his “dog training” business. I told him that I am hosting with friends at the moment and because of work commitment, they are not accepting anymore new accounts. They hold REAL jobs, you see.

And, since he plans to host a commercial website, I advised him to host with a proper webhosting company. I came across this netfirms.com promotion coupon which would come in handy if he decides to host with netfirms.com.

I told him that he has to act quickly to enjoy the discounts since these promotional coupons are all limited-time offers. Why would he not want to save 33% off a business hosting plan, right?

Anyway, this reader told me that this is his first time hosting a website and it will be his first website. He said he has no idea how to go about it but I believe that once he confirms his subscription, any good web host will walk him through the technical aspects of setting up and maintaining his website.

Now, I have to help him look for a website designer.

*** This post has been sponsored.

When I read this news early this morning, my heart dropped to my stomach. You know the kind of feeling! Thousands of people have reported that their Hotmail accounts have been wiped out some time between 31st Dec 2010 to 1st Jan, 2011, and all that’s left in the email account is the “greeting” email that’s standard to new email accounts.

While Hotmail does deactivate some accounts that have no activity within a certain period of time, these users are using Hotmail as their primary email, like myself, and it is really appalling that email can get lost just like that, especially from a “trusted” major provider like Microsoft.

Over the years, I have lost two email accounts previously, when it was no longer economically viable for the providers to offer free email. I have lost a lot of email, contacts, photos and other important stuff that come through email. But I never thought that this could happen with a Microsoft property.

I remember facing some trouble logging in to Hotmail some times but to have entire content in an email account missing, accounts that have stayed active some for as long as ten years, is just too much to stomach. Imagine, there would be thousands and thousands of email which can never be recreated.

What is worse than losing email is that Microsoft has yet to issue an official statement on this and has not given any time line when this would be resolved. Also, all who are affected would like to know one thing: Is it possible to retrieve all the lost data in their Hotmail accounts?

It’s Facebook and it’s sad! LOL

While some people may claim that not everyone celebrates Christmas Day, most people in Britain do so what are they doing on Facebook on Christmas Day when they should be spending some quality time with family and friends offline?

Facebook should also release data on the peak hours that the Brits logged on to their Facebook accounts on Christmas Day. It would be really helpful to see if maybe it’s nap time or just before bedtime. But it does show that holiday or not, family or not, people still need to spend time online to catch up with each other.

Perhaps, the virtual crops needed harvesting?

I was one of those who were affected when Skype went down worldwide for a few hours yesterday. I couldn’t log in to my account, which I use on my mobile phone, and didn’t know what was wrong until I did a search online and found Skype’s acknowledgment on Twitter.

This is the second major outage that Skype has suffered from. The earlier one was in 2007. While it is not a big deal for technology to have an off-day, this time, it’s the holiday season and I believe many people were trying to take advantage of free or cheap calls that Skype offers to call home to their families in far away lands.

Skype has clarified that this outage has nothing to do with WikiLeaks supporters who have actively brought down many major websites that no longer supports the whistle-blowing website. Anyway, all is well and good again. Happy holidays!

My webhost has been writing to me, pushing me to upgrade my hosting package with them. I have been with them for more than three years now and for the past three months, have exceeded my bandwidth allocation. Back, then, I didn’t know that I got a bad deal or maybe web hosting was just so expensive. At the price I am paying, I would be getting twice of everything today but I am stuck with an older package.

My webhost says that if I were to pay double what I am paying, I would be getting a larger hosting account. However, I failed to see why I should pay so much and still get a “small account”. If I were to pay an extra $100 a year, I would be getting a limited account and that’s definitely worth considering since I run so many websites, blogs and eCommerce stores. Having an unlimited hosting account means that I could just dump everything in one account.

As you can see, I have been comparing unlimited hosting packages and a friend recommended Host Nine. I have not heard of them before but they really do have a pretty good deal going on, where one could save 15% on an unlimited package. This coupon is valid until the end of the year only.

*** This post has been sponsored.