My friend told me that he has to switch to another web host again after getting a warning from his current web host about a violation to its terms of service. This guy runs a very popular adult website. Well, these days, only adult and gambling sites seem to continue to make money. Even though my friend’s website is “mild”, the host still wanted to shut down my friend’s website because it is not family-orientated. Anyway, it’s now taken offline until my friend could find another host. Meanwhile, his online income is affected.

Actually, running adult websites is sensitive business. Not all web hosts allow this. I know my hosts don’t and if I were to start an adult website, I definitely will have to open a separate hosting account with another web host, a host that supports adult websites.

Even though I have no plans to run an adult-orientated blog or website, just to make it clear, I did a search online to see if there are adult web hosting companies. There aren’t many but guess what? It looks like Web Hosting Choice has found the best adult web hosting company. I am actually surprised that it is so inexpensive to host an adult website since adult-orientated online business is a multi-million dollar concern!

On its blog, YouTube was proud to announce that the website now receives a billion views daily. That’s a fantastic figure for a website that was only started in 2005, but was acquired by Google, and had access to Google’s funding and advertising machinery for US$1.65 billion in 2006.

Although I also use YouTube to host my videos to share on my blogs, I haven’t taken on to YouTube as much as some of my friends. Don’t get me wrong, I do sometimes check out videos, especially music videos, on YouTube and once logged in, I would spend quite a long while there too.

But I know there are people who would make YouTube a part of their online life, like some people would do with Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. Someone I know would spend a few hours every night watching videos on YouTube, clicking on one link after another as if he was chasing television dramas. LOL

I really don’t know what he watches or what’s so nice to watch on YouTube that could grab a person’s attention for hours, but it is this attraction that keeps a person stuck to YouTube on end, multiplying this with millions of people around the world who all contribute to the billion daily views.

A couple of weeks ago, my friend, May, suffered the agony of changing ALL passwords across websites. She had to do this after discovering that her credit card information has been compromised and there were charges to the card from online purchases which she never initiated.

May is only one person in millions who are victims of cyber fraud. One thing that most of us internet users do is to use the same password for all websites that we are registered to, including email accounts, social networking accounts and worst of all, PayPal and internet banking accounts. May was sore and I didn’t dare ask her if this was what she did but she now knows that she has to use a unique password for each and every website she logs in to.

Google Blog has a post on choosing smart passwords although all the points are common sense that we already know but never take the trouble to put into practice. This post is a good reminder for us to do so. We definitely do not want to be forced to do it like May, do we?

P/S: “National” here means the United States.

Google’s latest product known as Google Wave, was rolled out to 100,000 pre-release testers last Wednesday who are responsible to turn the product inside out to look for bugs and what-not and feedback the company.

Each of these 100,000 testers are allowed to invite up to five people to try out the product, though of of them were found to be selling their invites on eBay for cash consideration instead.

Google Wave, which you can preview at http://wave.google.com/, incorporates email, instant messaging and microblogging. I have read some pretty negative comments so far but then I guess it takes time for a new product to grow on its users.

If you would like to try out Google Wave, you can bid for an invite on eBay, or you could request for an invite by placing your email address with Google. Whether you will get one before Google Wave rolls out to the masses depends on luck, I guess. In any case, a three-in-one product sounds really interesting but may be too distracting for my liking.

If you are a Xoopit user, which in my opinion is an awesome media browsing application that pulls media files and attachments from our Gmail account, then I am afraid that Yahoo! has bad news for you.

Xoopit has been acquired by Yahoo! about two months ago and now, they are going to disable Xoopit’s integration with Gmail accounts. This of course, means that someone would come up with a Gmail Lab that does something similar.

On the other hand, Yahoo! has plans for Xoopit and Yahoo! Mail users. I expect to see Xoopit in my Yahoo! Mail account soon enough but I am unsure if I will be using it.

If this affects you, do note that you have until 13th November, 2009 to download your media from Yahoo’s servers if you have deleted them from your Gmail account already.

Most people know me as a blogger but I actually also run a personal website and an eCommerce store. Although I am not a technical person, I am lucky to have friends who willingly help me, or at least point me to the right resources to use to keep my slew of blogs and websites running smoothly.

As a webmistress, my main concern is the security of my websites. This is particularly true for my eCommerce store which accepts payment from buyers by credit card. According to a report by SANS The Top Cyber Security Risks Sep 2009, 60% of hacks are targeted towards websites. According to Verizon Business Data Breach report 2008, 70% of websites are vulnerable to hack attacks. You can bet that I cannot afford any loopholes for hackers to exploit.

A few days ago, I was told of this online website security scanner called Powerfuzzer and managed to try out scanning my eCommerce Store. Scanning my domain was a simple affair. I just had to place an order, pay with it via PayPal and then sit back while Powerfuzzer does its work. If I were to write a Powerfuzzer Online – review, it would be a lengthy affair but to cut the story short, I now know where the weaknesses lie on my website and will have the opportunity to make changes to keep my website more secure before a hack attack happens.

Powerfuzzer charges US$59.99 per domain scan but it will be well worth your money, especially if you run a commercial website. Did you know that there are many websites that offer similar services at a far higher price? Don’t be surprised that some would charge you thousands for doing something similar! Powerfuzzer is able to help us keep cost low thanks to its usage of open source technologies and human touch!

received an email from the Project 10^100 Team yesterday reminding us to vote for the best idea in Project 10^100. First of all, I have to say that this email shouldn’t be a “reminder” because we were not invited to vote in the first place. And secondly, this has been a long time coming.

Did you know, the call for entries was in October last year, which means that it’s almost a YEAR since then. With only approximately 150,000 entries from around the world, one has to wonder if they really needed this long to short list our entries.

Another thing that disappoints me is that based on the items that are open to our votes, it looks like the Project 10^100 Team has grouped together multiple ideas to come up with groups of ideas.

If you ask me how they are going to select the winners or distribute the prizes based on this list of short listed ideas, I have no idea. In fact, I went and read through the short listed group of ideas and found NONE of them truly worth my vote. None of them hit the right note, if you know what I mean, and so I withheld my vote.

If you would like to cast a vote, visit this link before 8th October, 2009: http://www.project10tothe100.com/vote.html