People looking to gain favor with potential employers have to “be aware of their identities. People do look at you,” says Kimmel, 24, a candidate for an MBA in business computer information systems at Hofstra University in Hempstead. In a nutshell, that’s the latest development in career management: managing your professional reputation, or identity, online. A key component, certainly, is avoiding or cleaning up any digital dirt remaining from one of your more impulsive moments. But increasingly, managing your online identity means being proactive: developing your own online brand, just as businesses do.

The practice of creating personal career-related Web site portfolios and blogs highlighting scholastic and work accomplishments is catching on fast as students and professionals aim to catch the attention of prospective employers — in a good way.

The online expansion of the traditional resume is taking a variety of forms, including the revamping of MySpace pages to make them more professional and the creation of short videos posted to sites like YouTube, with URL links included in an online job application.

The bikini worn by Norfolk jungle queen Myleene Klass has fetched £7,000 in a charity auction on eBay.

The cash raised by the sale of the skimpy, white two-piece will now go to help families caught up in the Farepak savings failure.

There were 105 bids during the auction and over the course of the bidding 16, 473 people logged onto the auction website to check on the bikini’s progress.

Google is offering merchants free use of its online payment service as it squares off against eBay’s market-leading PayPal.

The Internet search giant introduced Google Checkout in June, with sweeteners such as free ad credits for merchants. In November, it began offering rebates to consumers, $10 off $30 purchases. PayPal quickly matched the offer.

On Wednesday, Google ratchets up the pressure by dropping merchant fees through 2007.

“I’m thrilled,” says Lanny Morton, whose Sportscloseouts.com uses both Google Checkout and PayPal. “The online business is really competitive, and every little percentage helps.”

Merchants pay a variety of fees to use the services. PayPal charges 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction on sales up to $3,000 a month. Google’s fee is 2 percent of the sale plus 20 cents, less if the merchant is a Google advertiser.

PARENTS desperate to get a Nintendo Wii for their kids this Christmas can buy one on eBay - but it’ll cost at least THREE times as much.

Within hours of the video games console being launched in the UK more than 1,200 were on the website.

Canny traders, who pre-ordered months ago for the retail price of £179, were selling this year’s Christmas must-have for more than £500 last night. And eBay spokesman Richard Ambrose said: “We expect trading to be fast and furious in the coming weeks.

“We can expect a large volume of Wii sales as high street stocks run low and parents are under pressure try to find the must-have for under the tree.”

Although Jim Cramer loves eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) and thinks all the bad press and bad feelings are already priced into the stock, the company has had a disastrous 2006 in regards to its stock performance. The numbers don’t lie — and there are some who are picking up positions in the world’s largest online auction website for *if* the company’s fortunes turn around. Never say “when”, though — only “if.”

Hey - eBay has no debt and continues to do solid business, although there are laundry lists of things that the auction giant fails at — like customer communication, bad customer service, increasing fees and about a million other things. Still, from a purely financial standpoint, the company is in great shape. Any company with eBay’s scale that has little to no debt should be considered pretty darn decent. But, how decent?

Bob Clayton took six pages of notes because he wants to get started. Ellen Gillun and Heath Smith picked up a few tips that will enhance the work they’ve already done.

All three, and a couple dozen more, will be more savvy post office customers and eBay auctioneers thanks to the couple of hours they spent Wednesday with Dan Lesperance and Darrow Scruggs, members of the U.S. Postal Service’s Business Development Team.

At least 250 million people are registered users of the online auction site eBay, Lesperance said. And many more are about to be.

If you are an eBay user, I’m sure that fraudulent actions on the mega auction service have often crossed your mind. Hopefully in the near future that won’t be an issue thanks to a new software developed at Carnegie Mellon called NetProbe. The data mining software could detect trends in artificial feedback, and identify those users to potential buyers.

“We want to help people detect potential fraud before the fraud occurs,” said research associate Duen Horng Chau, who developed NetProbe with professor Christos Faloutsos, undergraduate student Samuel Wang and graduate student Shashank Pandit.

The first recording by The Velvet Underground has sold for $155,406 US on eBay, earning a sizeable profit for the Montreal man who bought it at a flea market for 75 cents.

Bidding reached a fever pitch when the 12-inch acetate album was put on the online auction site on Nov. 28. The first bids hit $20,000 US and climbed until the final bid — the equivalent of $179,876 Cdn — on Friday night.

The buyer is still a mystery, identified by the eBay name: “mechadaddy.”

The new owner will not be able to re-release the music, which is protected by copyright.

There’s little doubt that BitTorrent - both the protocol and the company - are quickly becoming the most important Internet event since the arrival of the World Wide Web. In many ways it already has supplanted the importance of the web, as it’s responsible for utilizing a majority of the Internet’s bandwidth and is the definitive distribution method for millions.

The road towards creating an Internet phenomenon has not been easy for file-sharing and P2P developers. In fact it has been a road filled with legal obstacles since the concept went mainstream with Napster. To date, the only successful P2P protocol seemingly capable in traversing from the legally questionable to outright legitimate is BitTorrent.

With a massive userbase and highly advanced protocol capable of transferring large files with ease, the entertainment industry has taken a much softer stance on the BitTorrent issue. Both mainstream and independent studios are gradually using the BitTorrent protocol to distribute their work and take advantage of the massive user potential.

Read more »

Web content delivery startup BitTorrent ended perhaps its best week ever with an announcement Friday that it scored $20 million in its second round of funding, which it plans to use to raise its profile as a leading brand in the content distribution market.

On Wednesday, two-year-old BitTorrent said it had signed Internet distribution deals with about eight film studios and TV networks, and was on its way to establishing itself as a service that drives other web sites that frequently move large files, à la “Intel Inside” (see BitTorrent Hooks Big Studios).

Accel Partners, which led the new round, will join Doll Capital Management, BitTorrent’s original investor, which bankrolled the company to the tune of $8.75 million more than a year ago (see BitTorrent Gets $8.75M).

“When I created BitTorrent in 2001, my mission was to solve the problem every web site has when distributing large, popular files,” BitTorrent CEO Bram Cohen said in a statement.

The latest Apple rumor has the computer maker entering the gaming console, taking on Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo.

In a note to clients published Monday, Prudential Equity Analyst Jesse Tortora said his checks show the Cupertino, California computer maker is hiring video game designers. Mr. Tortora wrote that the hires could indicate a move into either the gaming console market or that Apple could add fresh gaming capabilities to its existing line of iPod music players.

Read more »

Symantec’s integration with Veritas in the UK has run into computer problems, leaving many Symantec customers unable to renew their corporate anti-virus licenses and large numbers of computers unprotected.

An adviser working for PCWorld Business’ national licensing department told us the problem is widespread.

“It is affecting loads of our customers - from GPs right through to our government customers,” he said.

He said he understood that Symantec shut down its computer systems for a refit - part of its integration with Veritas - but that there had been no backup made. Upon rebooting, he said, more problems surfaced, as well as a backlog of orders and all the new orders that were still coming in.

One GP told El Reg: “We are a small GP practice, with 12 Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition licences. On 6th October, without prior warning, my server notified me that these licences had expired. But, no problem, as there is a 60 day grace period, and just over 1 week later I ordered 12 renewal licences from my supplier PC World Business (PCWB).

A new vulnerability has been identified in Microsoft Word. Security Analysts at MicroWorld Technologies inform that exploits for the vulnerability are out already, which can successfully thrust Trojan Downloaders into user computers.

Microsoft Corporation said they are investigating the vulnerability that exists in Microsoft Word 2000, 2002 and 2003, Word Viewer 2003, Word 2004 for Mac, and Word v. X for Mac, as well as Microsoft Works 2004, 2005, and 2006.

According to MicroWorld Experts, a specially crafted Word file carrying a Trojan Dropper named ‘MSWord.Agent’ can push Trojan downloaders into victim’s computers. The Trojans deposited this way can log on to predefined websites and bring in dangerous malwares like Backdoors and Rootkits into a victim’s computer.

“One stream of malware writers are quiet enthusiastic about exploring application software vulnerabilities as they think that’s a lot more easier and rewarding than getting into the OS level intricacies,” commented Sulabh Mahant, a Security Expert at MicroWorld Technologies. “And incidentally, that’s a fast growing tribe which is quiet apparent in the present tide of exploits targeting various vulnerabilities in a range of applications, including some of the AntiVirus products.”

Spam levels barely declined in Ireland during November as virus rates rose again, new figures from IE Internet reveal.
Less than half of all emails circulating in Ireland now constitute legitimate traffic, as the spam rate recorded last month was 55.61pc. This figure was only marginally down from October levels, which were the highest since the Dublin company began recording these statistics three years ago.

Although the US remains the highest source of unwanted junk email into the country with 26.61pc of the total, China has caught up considerably and last month just over a quarter (25.76pc) of spam originated from there. The UK is much more on the radar than before with 20.59pc whereas South Korea, a longtime mainstay of the list, did not feature in the top five senders for November.

The rate of virus infection was 11.23pc and the interesting development was the appearance of two new pieces of malware that between them accounted for more than 40pc of the total.

The first, W32/Warezov, is a worm that spreads by email posing as an operating system security update. It can beat antivirus products on the infected PC and set up a remote access facility on it so that the machine can be controlled by an unauthorised third party to launch denial of service attacks or to send spam.

Symantec Corp. today announced the availability of public beta versions of Norton Internet Security 2007 and Norton AntiVirus 2007 compatible with the upcoming Windows Vista operating system. Now, early consumer adopters of Vista can use these security tools designed to proactively protect their PCs from a vast array of online threats—including spyware, viruses, worms, hackers, phishing sites, and crimeware—while maximising security, performance, and ease-of-use.

“As we near the consumer Vista release scheduled for January 2007, we want to reassure our more than 50 million active users that our leading PC security products will be available from day one to protect their PCs from today’s evolving online threats,” said Rowan Trollope, vice president, Consumer Engineering, Symantec. “With the beta release of Vista compatible versions of Norton AntiVirus and Norton Internet Security, users of the latest Windows operating system will be able to completely secure their computers with the award-winning Norton products from Symantec.”