Web's crop of dating sites is ripe for the pickin'

You only need to type the word "dating" in any online search engine to discover that high-tech matchmaking has become a big-time e-business-1,166 pages worth of related Web sites on Yahoo alone.

When the concept of pre-Internet "computer dating" first cropped up in the `70s, the idea of putting the mysteriously complicated mechanics of love in the hands of artificial intelligence seemed both spooky and questionable. But now it's clear many singles are willing to give it a try.

"The closer (we got) to Valentine's Day, the more profiles (we had) posted and the more members we get joining," says Karen Smith, the marketing manager for Ebony.com, a Dallas-based "online African-American singles community." At just barely a year old, Ebony.com already has about 1,400 members, 9,400 posted profiles, one marriage to its credit and another in the works, Smith says.

Like most dating sites, there are free services provided, which allow you to post a profile and photo. But to receive e-mail and communicate with potential mates, you'll have to subscribe, and that adds up to about $17-$20 a month or around $100 a year for discounted annual subscriptions.

Sites range from large national organizations such as Americansingles.com, Match.com or Date.com-the latter boasting more than 1 million users worldwide-to regionalized city and community sites such as TexasMatch.com, which caters exclusively to the Lone Star dating scene. All of the major sites break down their membership by geographic area.

Signing up involves giving some basic personal information that allows members to seek out potential partners based on a variety of criteria.

Gender, sexual orientation, location and age are the big parameters, of course, but you can narrow down the field by hair and eye color, body type, height and weight, ethnicity, religion, occupation, education level, income, smoking and drinking habits and previous marital status. Some sites even go into greater detail about bedroom preferences.

But most sites are quick to point out that they aren't designed entirely for romantic purposes.

"It's a chance to go on at 2 a.m. and just chat with someone," Smith says. "Before, people who frequented these sites were viewed as being desperate. But we're so busy these days, and this is just a different way for busy professionals to find someone.

"We've moved from the club to online singles," Smith says, and then adds with a laugh, "And online, you can also get rid of someone a lot easier."

Workers walk from Mary Esther to jobs here

Lodging is so hard to find in Destin that some summer workers with jobs there are willing to room in Mary Esther and walk to work, Destin librarian Cindy Oberlin says.

"About five or six came in Thursday or Friday to register and get their library cards," Oberlin said. "They'd walked here from Mary Esther in the heat. We gave them bus schedules."

As the summer tourist season has grown over the years, and more and more businesses have opened in Destin, the summer labor market has become excruciatingly tight. A growing number of businesses rely on Eastern Europe as a source of teen and twentysomething summer workers.

One company, Eurohouse Holding Corp., started feeding that market in 2002 by bringing more than 20 workers to Destin in 2002, and the number rose to more than 300 two years later.

Destin Library's Internet computers have become the connection between visiting workers and their families and friends back home. Oberlin said the walkers from Mary Esther, which is about 10 miles west of Destin, told her they wanted to use the library in Destin, rather than in Mary Esther, because it's closer to their job.

Oberlin said the students usually start showing up at the beginning of May, but this year, they didn't arrive until June. A more worrisome change from past years, she said, is that many of them apparently have nowhere to live and sometimes not even a firm job.

"A lot of them are showing up that don't have a place to stay, and they're asking us for information," Oberlin said. "It's very disturbing they don't have any knowledge of any place to stay. I don't know that they're coming with definite places to work."

It's not the first time foreign students have run into problems. In 2004, 11 Polish and Ukrainian summer workers wound up with nowhere to live until landowner Tom Curry gave them permission to pitch tents in the back yard of a home he owned on the Destin's west side. The city decided that didn't meet city codes, but City Manager Greg Kisela found them rent-free housing at Jay Villa Cottages in the harbor area.

Hi-tech giant in free speech dispute

Intel, the US microchip manufacturer, is to fight a legal battle in California that will decide whether large corporations have the right to suppress free speech on their own internal computer systems.

In an appeals case pending before the California Supreme Court, the corporation, valued at $135 billion (Pounds 88 billion), is pitted against Ken Hamidi, a former employee.

Because of the many high-tech companies in California, particularly in Silicon Valley, the state's cyber-law rulings tend to be used as precedent not only elsewhere in the United States but also overseas.

The legal battle began when Mr Hamidi, 55, who was fired by Intel after a protracted dispute over workers' compensation, sent six batches of e-mails to thousands of the company's employees. The e-mails were highly critical of Intel.

Intel accused Mr Hamidi of trespassing on its internet computer system. The company obtained a court order banning Mr Hamidi from sending any further bulk e-mails to its 80,000 employees.

Intel's lawyers said that if free speech did not allow Mr Hamidi to walk into Intel's lobby and talk to employees, then it did not allow him to do the same using the company's internal e-mail system.

Intel's court order is now being appealed, with the case attracting national attention. Big business has lined up behind Intel to provide support while US civil libertarians, who accuse the firm of trying to avoid the First Amendment, have sided with Mr Hamidi, who initially represented himself. The ACLU union, plus 41 law professors and other civil libertarian and activist groups, have offered to help Mr Hamidi.

He is now represented free of charge by William McSwain, who wrote a law review article on the case while he was a student at Harvard Law School.

He said that his client was trying to put across a message that was in the public interest. He argues that the movement of electronic files cannot be regarded as trespassing.

With effort, Mac OS upgrade solves old problems

The release of a new version of the Apple Macintosh operating system evokes mixed feelings in a veteran Mac user.

A new OS will always be better in some way than what it replaces. In the case of OS X 10.4, also known as "Tiger," it's a lot better. But a new operating system -- and there have been four of them in the new century so far -- also brings a certain amount of cost and effort in its wake.

You wonder if your 5-year-old computer, or even your 3-year-old, will be able to handle everything the new operating system has to offer.

I've used Macs almost since the beginning. My first was a Mac 512k-e in 1986. The number stood for 512 kilobytes of memory, or less than one floppy disk. I used it until the early 1990s, when I upgraded to the Mac Performa series and OS 7.5.3. That became my first Internet computer in 1995.

In 1999, I bought a lime green G3 iMac running OS 8.6, and in 2002 a G3 iBook running OS X 10.1.

All four still work fine, although the oldest two are in retirement. I've gradually upgraded the RAM and hard drives of the iMac and iBook as new versions of the Mac operating system were released by Apple.

I might have stayed with OS X 10.2, also known as "Jaguar," with which we were perfectly happy. But alas, I needed OS X 10.3, known as "Panther," to run the newest version of Apple's wonderful iPhoto photo-editing software.

Panther was a roaring disappointment. Performance slowed to a crawl on both Macs. Apple's Mail program and Safari browser took forever to load. Even saving a bookmark took forever. My daughters' older computer games based on OS-9 no longer worked.

If I hadn't discovered that the free Thunderbird e-mail client worked fine on 10.3, I might have dumped it and shifted back to 10.2.

So when OS X 10.4 came along in May, my first thought was that I would do no more operating system upgrades on my two computers and would have to wait until I got a new computer before I could enjoy the many touted new features of Tiger. On its Web site, Apple said any Mac with a G3 chip could run Tiger, so long as it had a Firewire port and at least 256 megabytes of RAM.

I changed my mind. Amazon.com was offering a substantial discount off the $129 retail price of 10.4, so that's where I made the purchase. I knew going in that a DVD-ROM drive is required to install Tiger, unless I wanted to send in a coupon plus $9.95 after the box arrived for a CD version.

My older iMac had a DVD drive, but the laptop didn't. I have an external DVD burner for the laptop, and I bet, correctly as it turned out, that I could boot the disk off it. Installation on the laptop was a breeze. It picked up all my settings, including for my Airport wireless base station.

Miracle of miracles, all the performance problems of 10.3 disappeared in 10.4. Mail worked fine; so did Safari. My Samsung laser printer still worked, even though Samsung had no 10.4 driver for that model.

I turned with enthusiasm to my older iMac and ran head-on into problems.

Every time I got about a third of the way into the installation, it crashed. I was running the minimum recommended 256 megs of RAM, so I upgraded to 640 megs. Still wouldn't load.

Andrew Justice of JustMacs on the West Shore told me my last option was the nuclear option: wiping out the hard drive and installing "clean."

I shuddered. That meant hours of work, first to back up the contents of the hard drive onto an external drive and then to reinstall it. All the settings for e-mail and other things would need to be entered manually. But I had no choice.

Fortunately, it worked. Once again, the performance problems of 10.3 disappeared in 10.4. After some tweaking, the Epson C-62 printer I use with the iMac worked fine. I was one happy Mac guy.

Chris Bourdon, senior product manager for Mac OS X at Apple, believes my problems with 10.3 were caused by issues specific to my computers. He says Apple always strives for performance improvements in new versions of OS X but did nothing specific to make 10.4 work better on older G3 Macs.

"With the G3s, there's not a lot of hardware you can use to accelerate performance," he said.

Bourdon said G3 Mac users who are still running OS-9 can upgrade directly to 10.4, so long as they have sufficient RAM and a Firewire connection. He told me I can put OS-9 back into my computer simply by reinstalling it from an OS-9 install disk. It won't affect 10.4, he said.

I tried that with an OS-9 disk, but got a message that the disk was "read only" and couldn't be used for an install. Hopefully, this too shall pass.

Next week, I'll tell you more about the features of Tiger, which are spectacular.

Mistake in Pakistan detours YouTube users

Most of the world's Internet users lost access to YouTube for several hours Sunday after an attempt by Pakistan's government to block access domestically affected other countries.

The outage highlighted yet another of the Internet's vulnerabilities, coming less than a month after broken fibre-optic cables in the Mediterranean took Egypt off line and caused communications problems from the Middle East to India.

An Internet expert said Sunday's problems arose when a Pakistani telecommunications company accidentally identified itself to Internet computers as the world's fastest route to YouTube.

But instead of serving up videos of skateboarding dogs, it sent the traffic into oblivion.

Last Friday, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority ordered 70 Internet service providers to block access to YouTube.com, because of anti-Islamic movies on the video-sharing site, which is owned by Google Inc.

The block was intended to cover only Pakistan, but extended to about two-thirds of the global Internet population, starting at 1: 47 p.m. EST Sunday, according to Renesys Corp., a U.S. firm that keeps track of the pathways of the Internet for telecommunications companies and other clients.

The greatest effect was in Asia, where the outage lasted for up to two hours, Renesys said.

YouTube confirmed the outage yesterday, saying it was caused by a network in Pakistan.

"We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again," YouTube said in an email.

Misrouting occurs every year or so among the world's Internet carriers, usually as a result of typos or other errors, according to Todd Underwood, vice-president and general manager of Internet community services at Renesys.

"To be honest, there's not a single thing preventing this from happening to E-Trade, or Bank of America, or the FBI, or the White House, or the Clinton campaign," Underwood said.

"I think it's a useful moment for people to decide just how important it is that we fix problems like this."

Techie pleads guilty to hijacking computers

In the first case of its kind, a 20-year-old California man pleaded guilty Monday to hijacking hundreds of thousands of computers and selling access to others to spread spam and launch Web attacks.

Jeanson James Ancheta of Downey, Calif., admitted to felony charges for breaking into military computers and for selling access to groups of hijacked PCs called bot nets.

Security experts say bot nets have increased dramatically in the past two years, partly driven by a wave of relatively unsophisticated "bot herders" like Ancheta, who tap into tools and instructions widely available on the Internet.

Computer-security giant Symantec says it has been tracking communications between more than 10,000 hijacked PCs per day in the first six months of 2005 -- double what it saw in December 2004. McAfee, another security firm, detected 32,000 distinct bot networks last year, triple that in 2004.

Those numbers probably understate the actual level of activity, since bots "conceal their controller," says Fred Felman, analyst at tech security firm Tenebril. Security experts say elite bot herders go to great lengths to stay hidden, and sometimes raid each others' networks.

"The market has gotten so crowded they're actually fighting for real estate on these compromised PCs," says Charles Renert, security research director for security-software supplier Determina.

Ancheta's activities over 14 months dating back to June 2004 were rudimentary, security experts say. He modified a widely available hijacking program, called rxbot, to usurp control of as many as 700,000 PCs. He earned about $60,000 using bot nets to distribute adware -- advertisements that direct computer users to porn, gambling or other websites, Assistant U.S. Attorney James Aquilina said in a phone interview.

He also earned profits selling bot nets to others to spread spam and launch Web attacks, Aquilina said. Ancheta typically sold access to up to 10,000 machines at a time.

Bot herders sometimes flood commercial websites with bogus requests, shutting down the site. To end the attack and re-open for business, the website owner must pay a fee.

Ancheta forfeited $58,000 he had in cash and a 1993 BMW; he must also pay $19,000 in restitution to the federal government. He could also serve jail time. Sentencing is scheduled for May 1.

"This (hacking) community thinks it's immune to prosecution, but this case sends a message they are not," says Aquilina.

Some stuff and deadly virus

A new computer virus spread over the Internet yesterday in an apparent attempt to destroy one of its predecessors.

The Netsky.b virus e-mails itself to addresses stored on an infected computer. It also copies itself to folders that appear to be shared with other computers.

Infected e-mail has a file attached that contains the computer code necessary for self-propagation.

"As it replicates itself, the infected machine will become extremely slow because all the bandwidth is being utilized to spread the virus," said Jag Sebbag, general manager of anti-virus software company McAfee Security in Canada.

Netsky.b is a difficult virus to spot because the contents of the e-mail and the name of the attached file can vary wildly. Sometimes the file name for the attachment ends simply with the extension .zip.

Sometimes it has a double extension, such as .rtf.pif.

Once a computer has been infected, the virus tries to deactivate two versions of the Mydoom virus that hit the Internet late last month.

Anti-virus experts have speculated Mydoom was created by supporters of the Linux operating system because it attacked Web sites maintained by Microsoft Corp., a Linux competitor, and the SCO Group. The latter company is involved in an intellectual-property dispute over certain aspects of Linux software.

Sebbag said it's possible someone who supports Microsoft or SCO may have written Netsky.b in retaliation for Mydoom.

McAfee rates the virus as a medium risk threat, largely because of the speed at which it is spreading.

"The infection rate is not what it was with the Mydoom or Sobig virus, where they were spreading at incredible speeds," Sebbag said. "But that may pick up."