Lifehacker
Computers make us more productive. Yeah, right. Lifehacker recommends the downloads, web sites and shortcuts that actually save time. Don’t live to geek; geek to live.
TutorialTomb.com Forums
An excellent source for photoshop tutorials.
Google Moon - Lunar Landing Sites
In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969, google added some NASA imagery to the Google Maps interface to help you pay your own visit to our celestial neighbor. Zoom all the way in 
Vonage - The Broadband Phone Company
Vonage - The Broadband Phone Company
The best thing since Wheaties. Well almost…
Bliggle.com
Finally an alternative to paypal, epassporte, and other instant payment services.
If you take payments online, or need a merchant account check bliggle out.
A good article about online payments.
Protect yourself: The safest ways to pay online
It’s important to be vigilant against fraud online. Here’s how to make your shopping safe and secure.
I recommend bliggle.com as an alternative to paypal ccbill ibill ect.
If that jingle you hear is the sound of online cash registers happily ringing in sales, the jangle in the background may be the sound of consumers being defrauded out of millions of dollars. The FTC’s Consumer Sentinel received more than 100,000 Internet-related complaints totaling just over $122 million for all of 2002; the National Consumer’s League’s Internet Fraud Watch received complaints totaling almost $15 million in 2002, up from $6 million in 2001.
The vast majority of the complaints are from people who use auctions. Next come general product complaints, like when a purchased item never arrives or fails to live up to its billing.
But if you’re worried about online shopping fraud, there are a number of payment tools you can employ now to keep the scammers away. That’s because how you pay for your purchases has big implications for whether you’ll get your money back if you run into problems.
False assumptions
Unfortunately, many people would be hard-pressed to name those safer ways to pay. A 2001 National Consumer’s League poll found that 59% of respondents (mistakenly) believed checks and money orders were safer than credit cards. And 55% believed, again incorrectly, that they had three business days to cancel online purchases under the federal law. (What you don’t know definitely hurts.)
The same poll showed that consumers’ biggest fear about shopping online was the possibility of having their credit-card numbers stolen. In truth, credit cards are by far the safest way to pay online, according to the NCL. That’s because your liability is limited to $50 under the Fair Credit Billing Act.
Even better, many credit-card companies have $0 liability policies. This means you won’t be held accountable for any fraudulent purchases. (Though you’ll want to read the fine print. MasterCard’s zero liability policy is good only for U.S.-issued cards. Plus, you can’t have disputed more than one purchase in the last 12 months, and your account must be in good standing.)
This doesn’t mean you can refuse on Monday to pay for something you bought Friday because you decided you really didn’t like it. But it does mean you should dispute purchases that were either made without your consent or where the goods don’t match the descriptions. You’ll need to check with your credit-card company for the specific formal steps to dispute a purchase, but many will require a written complaint that includes the transaction number and date, amount, the merchant name and reason for the dispute.
This isn’t to say credit cards are failsafe, of course. Credit-card companies lose about $1 billion a year to credit-card fraud, while merchants lose about $10 billion annually, according to CardWeb, a credit-card information site. But better their loss than yours.
Credit cards with special powers
Perishable credit cards go one better than standard credit cards by assigning a specific credit-card number to each online purchase or to each online merchant for a specific time period — sometimes a few months, sometimes a few weeks. American Express was the first to widely start using this technology in the fall of 2000, but other companies including MBNA and Discover have followed suit.
To use MBNA’s Shop Safe program, you’ll actually download software that you’ll use to generate a new account and dollar amount for each purchase (or you can set the dollar amounts and time limits according to your needs if you don’t want to do this before every purchase). American Express’ Private Payments program also allows you to create temporary account numbers for each purchase. But the Amex Blue Card has the added smartcard technology that allows you to “lock” access to Private Payments on your PC.
This, however, requires a smartcard reader, which you can usually purchase from your smartcard issuer or at your local electronics store. American Express offers three different readers that vary in price from $0 to $60, depending on your computer’s setup.
The Verified by Visa program, launched in December 2001, doesn’t generate new credit-card numbers for every purchase. Instead, it requires card users to enter a password. Merchants also benefit from the service: they aren’t held responsible for fraudulent purchases when the password is authenticated.
Third-party payment services
Now that eBay is a verb as well as a way of life for many shopping enthusiasts, payment services such as paypal (acquired by eBay) are a great resource. (After all, auctions are still the No. 1 source of online fraud complaints, according to the NCL.) Services like paypal allow you to fund an online account and make payments from that account without exposing your real credit card or bank account information.
By using the service, you can send money to anyone with an e-mail account, making them useful for more than auction sites. Purchases made with these payment services have differing fraud protections. To dispute a purchase made with paypal, you must file a complaint within 30 days of the fraud. This doesn’t prevent you from filing a complaint with the credit card you used to fund your paypal account. But your card’s fraud policies may not cover third-party payment services. That’s because some credit companies view the initial funding of your account as the purchase you made on your credit card, and thus, the only one their liability policies will apply to. This could mean that if paypal can’t get your money back for you, you could be out of luck. (Visa, for one, says it will honor its normal dispute policies on purchases made with third-party services.)
Another drawback: Not every merchant accepts all of them. Some merchants may accept only a proprietary version of these services, as Amazon.com does. Amazon accepts Amazon Payments but not paypal or other third-party services.
Digital wallets such as MSN Wallet and Gator eWallet are geared toward convenience — they store multiple account numbers and passwords and populate fields automatically on Web sites when you check out. But they have added security features including encryption of your account data. These payment methods are also not yet accepted everywhere. Merchants must sign up to offer the service.
!The debit card security deficit
Many people view debit cards as superior to credit cards, giving themselves a satisfied pat on the back for not racking up huge monthly bills. But when it comes to fraud, debit cards can be a poor cousin to credit cards. That’s because your liability limit under federal law increases the longer you wait to report any unauthorized activity. If you report it within two days, your liability is capped at $50. Wait longer than two days, though, and it skyrockets to $500. And if you don’t report the unauthorized debit transaction within 60 days, you could be liable for the full amount — even if it exceeds $500, says the Federal Trade Commission.
Some credit-card companies are changing their policies so that they treat credit and debit card fraud the same; Visa and MasterCard are two, CardWeb says. The law, however, is definitely on credit’s side. Even if you succeed in getting your money back after disputing a debit purchase, you’re still likely out the full amount of the purchase until that refund comes through, which can feel far more inconvenient when it’s your checking account taking the hit instead of your credit limit.
While debit cards are not as safe as credit cards, they’re still better than using cash or money orders. Cash and money orders are among the worst ways to pay since you have little to no recourse for getting your money back.
Great British Ghoul-o-Rama
A site Kelly the lobster found… Pretty funny stuff.
