A wide-ranging look at Internet use among Americans has found that the gap between men and women is narrowing, but that the genders are very different in how they use the technology. The study, from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, reports that the percentage of women using the Internet still lags slightly behind that of men. Most notable in the survey was not the breadth of usage, but the differences in how men and women approach the Internet. Men are slightly more "intense" users, the study found, and log on more often, spend more time online, and are more likely to be broadband users. They tend to value the Internet for the freedom it gives them to try new technologies or get information. By contrast, women appreciate more fully how the Internet allows them to communicate with others, and use email more frequently.

Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small town in England, has earned a million dollars in four months on the Internet. All he sells are pixels, the tiny dots on the screen that appear when you call up his home page. A 10-by-10 dot square, roughly the size of a letter of type, costs $100. Tew’s home page now looks like an online Times Square, festooned with a multi-colored confetti of ads.

Days after the revelation of a flaw in Windows’ handling of WMF graphics files, dozens of exploits are being spread from thousands of adware sites. But good protection is available. At the same time, further testing confirms that a workaround issued by third parties and endorsed by Microsoft is effective in most regards, and in the most important circumstances, but not in all. Also, the workaround has side effects that could prove troublesome.

Rates Technology, which holds patents for the process by which most Internet phone calls are made, confirmed on Friday that it is suing Google over its Web-based phone calling system. New York-based RTI said it estimated that damages from the lawsuit could reach $5 billion, assuming the litigation process takes four years as the market for Internet-based phone services booms. RTI holds two patents in the telecommunications field and generally takes a one-time fee of up to $5 million to cover companies who provide the services or the equipment to support them. It filed the suit against Google in October.

A Trojan horse program is churning out bogus Google ads promoting products Google eschews–gambling, cheap Viagra, girlie photos and adult dating. The ads, being targeted at small publishers, are identical to Google AdSense ads except that referral graphic buttons are being converted to text, apparently due to a bug in the Trojan, according to the publisher who reportedly discovered the Trojan.

Happy New Year from all of us at ZATZ!

The world’s biggest chipmaker said on Thursday it will scrap its 37-year-old logo and well-known tagline as part of a major rebranding that will emphasize its shift away from its core PC business and into consumer products. The original Intel logo featuring a lowered "e" will be replaced with one showing an oval swirl surrounding the company’s name. The phrase "Leap ahead" will supplant "Intel Inside," which launched the Silicon Valley giant into public awareness in the 1990’s and helped it build the world’s No. 5 brand , worth an estimated $36 billion.

The White House and National Security Agency have been caught tracking visitors to their Web sites in ways that may violate official US guidelines. The organizations have been using different techniques to spot return visitors and monitor what they are looking at. Although widely used on commercial Web sites, US federal guidelines prohibit official use of such tools.

A businessman has won what is believed to be the first victory of its kind by claiming damages from a company which sent him email spam. Nigel Roberts, who lives in Alderney in the Channel Islands, took action against Media Logistics UK over junk emails in his personal account. Under new European laws, companies can be sued for sending unwanted emails. The Stirlingshire-based firm has agreed to pay

Sony BMG has struck a deal with the plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit over copy-restriction software it used in music CDs, according to a settlement document filed at a New York court. The record label has agreed to compensate buyers of CDs that contained the XCP and MediaMax DRM programs and to provide software utilities to allow consumers to uninstall both types of software from their computer.