Raipur is joining the list of Asian regions looking to crack down on porn surfers. Chhattisgarh police launched the crackdown when several cybercafes were raided, a week after six teenagers in Bhilai were detained for watching Internet porn at a cybercafe. None were detained in Raipur, but city leader Ashok Juneja said, "Around 80 major cyber cafes are overcrowded from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., mainly with teenagers interested in Adult sites. We hope to keep them away from the cafes."
EBay wants to keep away from Microsoft's Passport, backing away from the user authentication system as Microsoft continues scaling it back. After buying Passport when it bought Firefly Network, Microsoft had an advantage with Passport guiding users to Microsoft-owned sites, but few companies deployed it and privacy advocates fumed at the technology. Job hunting giant Monster.com dropped Passport during the fall, and eBay plans to drop it in late January.
Most of us dream of a white Christmas, but e-tailers were dreaming of a black Christmas – and got one. Online holiday season sales jumped 24 percent from 2003, to $8.8 billion, according to VeriSign, which said it measured the total e-sales volume between Thanksgiving and two days past Christmas. "We have seen clear changes in consumer behavior such as accelerated weekday shopping activity, more confidence in buying digital goods from e-commerce sites, an increase in gift-certificate purchases as well as the direct impact of shipping lead times on sales," said VeriSign vice president of payment services Trevor Healy.
The British Broadcasting Corp. is dreaming about – and working on – a grid computing project aimed at saying goodbye to an aging content distribution network and hello to an Internet protocol network, for raising network resilience and bandwidth for streaming media feeds good for transferring over 200GB of data per hour. Known as Gridcast, the project emanates from the 9/11 atrocities, which also took down a BBC bureau in the former World Trade Center. Gridcast is planned for distribution between London, Glasgow, Belfast, and Cardiff.
Now, as the man never even thought about saying, except maybe when he was bombed out of his trees, let's dunk for headlines:
>>Mustard and sauerkraut, please – Said a deputy Nassau County (Long Island) police inspector: "We've never seen hot dogs mixed with prostitution before." Said the New York Daily News: That was before the gendarmes came upon a pair of Baldwin hot dog vending ladies who offered their own kind of hot sauce on the side…
>>Come on, baby, do the locomotion! – Bad enough: A couple busted on the Shoshloza Meyl's Trans Karoo train in South Africa for doing the (ahem) locomotion (ho ho ho) in front of other passengers. Worse, says iAfrica.com: She's 31 and he's 17.
>>Big busted – We won't exactly say "easy come, easy go," but former Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith has gone from bazoom to bust, courtesy of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld a probate ruling that her late husband's son should be his sole heir. Thus spake the Associated Press.
>>Will she always have Paris? – We presume Paris Hilton will try not to have a malfunction over this one, but Janet Jackson's Super Bowl exposure beat the infamous Hilton sex video as the number one search of 2004, according to search engine Lycos.
On which note, Heads & Tales and your extinguished author would like to wish you a happy, prosperous, and fulfilling New Year.
