Internet

Tipping in a recession is a dilemma. Do you stick with the 18 to 20 percent formula or retreat to 15 percent? Do you skip an appetizer, a glass of wine or a dessert to lower your dining bill and thus your tip? It's a subject that millions of diners and travelers are wrestling with. A lot of people whose income has vanished or shrunk because of layoffs, salary cuts and shrinking fixed incomes have cut back. Instead of going out to dinner every week, they settle for once a month. If they take a trip, they trade down, choosing less-expensive accommodations and restaurants.

Mark Phillips of Ednor Gardens in Baltimore sees ads everywhere for Verizon's high-speed Internet and cable service. He reads about "FiOS" in the paper. He wants to be your customer, Verizon. His family keep jamming their slower DSL line with entertainment downloads. When he streams video from Hulu.com, his daughter might not be able to do schoolwork online. He doesn't really want Comcast's broadband product. FiOS lays fiber-optic cable right to your door, which he says is faster and more secure.

TIP 19 Start trimming your phone, Internet, cable costs Telecom services offer large and relatively pain-free ways to reduce household bills. Do you really need a land line telephone? Is premium cable worth the money? (Is any cable? TV stations still broadcast for free, although you'll need to buy a new TV or digital converter.) Can you really tell the difference between cable Internet and cheaper DSL? From a simple phone bill 20 years ago, household telecommunication expenses have bloomed into multiple layers that can add up to more than $300 a month.

Inside a nondescript building, in a cubicle decorated with his kids' pictures, a Maryland State Police investigator peers at his computer screen. A Yahoo chat room is open; category: romance, Maryland. He types: "any1 into wrestling? with boys..." It's a Monday morning at 11:17, a time when most kids are in school and most adults at work. Yet, in just eight minutes he gets a lead - and that's a slow day. The number of offenders sexually exploiting children, particularly through pornography, has skyrocketed with use of the Internet, law enforcement professionals say. That has led to a more than 20-fold increase in cases investigated since the late 1980s and an even bigger jump in those prosecuted at the federal level, which ramped up efforts through the Project Safe Childhood initiative in 2006.

NEW YORK -- Battered by legal and financial troubles, Vonage Holdings Corp. has slipped from its spot as the largest provider of Internet-based phone service, overtaken by cable firm Comcast Corp. Reporting second-quarter financial results yesterday, Vonage said it had slowed financial losses by cutting marketing expenses, but that also meant fewer new subscribers. Vonage also said it had made progress with technology changes meant to sidestep a court ruling that it violated patents held by Verizon Communications Inc., of New York Vonage, based in Holmdel, N.J., gained 57,000 customers for a total of 2.45 million in the three months ending June 30. In that period, Comcast surpassed the 3 million mark by adding 671,000 subscribers for its digital phone service.

Al Gore came a long way to talk about global warming with his former congressional colleagues, but the distance was more psychic than physical. He had to cover a lot of personal ground in order to arrive in Washington last week as a certifiable celebrity and Oscar-winning star of the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. As I watched Mr. Gore testify before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, that fateful winter six years ago - when Mr. Gore had to concede the presidential race and then certify George W. Bush's election from the floor of the Senate - seemed like six decades ago. Mr. Gore's bete noire is the committee's ranking Republican, James M. Inhofe.

Wow, if you dare speak out in favor of a government program, your kitchen cabinets better not have glass fronts. Heaven forbid you cry poor but your wedding merited an announcement in The New York Times. And for God's sake, don't live on the same block as someone whose house sold for $485,000. I've often wondered when all the pent-up sanctimony that has collected in the blogosphere over the years would reach the point of explosion. Well, beware of flying shards of indignation and toxic clouds of righteousness -- the Graeme Frost hysteria may finally make the whole gasbagosphere go kablooie.

Someone in Australia browsing an Internet chat site in November spotted a disturbing image: a live video showing a man molesting a child who was sitting in his lap. The unidentified Web user quickly notified the chat site, which called the Australian Federal Police, who, using computer addresses, traced related images on the site to a man halfway around the world on Maryland's Eastern Shore. The international investigation culminated yesterday in a federal courtroom in Baltimore where Roderick Gene Parks, 42, was sentenced to 30 years in prison without possibility of parole.

NEW YORK -- An alliance of leading media and Internet companies rallied yesterday behind new guidelines intended to control the spread of copyright-protected videos on the Web. The group included Walt Disney Co., Viacom Inc., Microsoft Corp. and News Corp.'s MySpace. Notably missing was the biggest name in online video: Google's YouTube. YouTube has been at the heart of a booming trend as Internet users create and post their own videos online. Many people also record and upload copyrighted content such as TV shows and movies.

In 1996, online bookseller Amazon.com sold more copies of "Creating Killer Web Sites" than any other title. Last year, as consumers with more conventional tastes overtook their "techie" predecessors in cyber shopping, Tom Wolfe's "A Man In Full" became the favorite.Consumers who once only surfed the Web for software and hardware are shopping online for apparel from Gap Inc. and toys from FAO Schwarz, bringing Internet retailers their biggest holiday season yet -- and nudging the Internet a step closer to mainstream retailing.

Tipping in a recession is a dilemma. Do you stick with the 18 to 20 percent formula or retreat to 15 percent? Do you skip an appetizer, a glass of wine or a dessert to lower your dining bill and thus your tip? It's a subject that millions of diners and travelers are wrestling with. A lot of people whose income has vanished or shrunk because of layoffs, salary cuts and shrinking fixed incomes have cut back. Instead of going out to dinner every week, they settle for once a month. If they take a trip, they trade down, choosing less-expensive accommodations and restaurants.

OK, let's get this out there: Twitter is a funny word. So are blog, wiki and podcast. But what people are doing with these popular Internet tools is amazing. The power of "social networking," the term applied to this growing collection of sites connecting people to their friends, family and sometimes complete strangers, has perhaps been best illustrated by the aftermath of the Iranian presidential election held more than a week ago. Almost immediately after the results were announced, people took to the streets - but also to their computers and their smartphones.

AirTran Airways will become the first major airline to add high-speed Internet service to all of its planes, in a move that could pressure other airlines to speed up plans to offer the service. The Florida-based airline said Tuesday that it will offer Wi-Fi service on its 136 jets by midsummer. It's the most aggressive move to date by a large airline to allow passengers to browse the Web using their laptops, smart phones or PDAs. AirTran will charge $9.95 for flights under three hours and $12.95 for longer flights.

YouTube. MySpace. iPod. CareerBuilder. Two words fused together with a capital letter in the middle: The construction seems like it has been standard form all our lives. And yet, as Andrew Lih describes in his book that comes out today, The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia, so-called CamelCase was the way computer programmers designated topics that would be linked together on the Internet. And it became the technical underpinning for Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that launched in 2001, about the time the commercial world adopted the spelling quirk to name companies and products.

Inside a nondescript building, in a cubicle decorated with his kids' pictures, a Maryland State Police investigator peers at his computer screen. A Yahoo chat room is open; category: romance, Maryland. He types: "any1 into wrestling? with boys..." It's a Monday morning at 11:17, a time when most kids are in school and most adults at work. Yet, in just eight minutes he gets a lead - and that's a slow day. The number of offenders sexually exploiting children, particularly through pornography, has skyrocketed with use of the Internet, law enforcement professionals say. That has led to a more than 20-fold increase in cases investigated since the late 1980s and an even bigger jump in those prosecuted at the federal level, which ramped up efforts through the Project Safe Childhood initiative in 2006.

TIP 19 Start trimming your phone, Internet, cable costs Telecom services offer large and relatively pain-free ways to reduce household bills. Do you really need a land line telephone? Is premium cable worth the money? (Is any cable? TV stations still broadcast for free, although you'll need to buy a new TV or digital converter.) Can you really tell the difference between cable Internet and cheaper DSL? From a simple phone bill 20 years ago, household telecommunication expenses have bloomed into multiple layers that can add up to more than $300 a month.

Mark Phillips of Ednor Gardens in Baltimore sees ads everywhere for Verizon's high-speed Internet and cable service. He reads about "FiOS" in the paper. He wants to be your customer, Verizon. His family keep jamming their slower DSL line with entertainment downloads. When he streams video from Hulu.com, his daughter might not be able to do schoolwork online. He doesn't really want Comcast's broadband product. FiOS lays fiber-optic cable right to your door, which he says is faster and more secure.

A Baltimore federal court judge ordered six absent defendants yesterday - including one from Maryland - to shut down Internet businesses that the Federal Trade Commission claims are part of a vast $100 million "scareware" scheme that tricked more than a million people into purchasing useless security software by making them think their computers were under attack. "The evidence in this case is quite overwhelming," said U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett. He also extended a freeze on the defendants' assets and signed an order requiring them to show why they shouldn't be held in contempt of court for missing the hearing and ignoring an earlier restraining order.

In response to reader requests, we are expanding our local stock listings to include share prices of more major employers in the Baltimore area as well as adding some key interest rates. These listings will appear daily along with the performance of major stock indexes. We also publish more detailed financial data for these local stocks in Sunday's Money & Life section. As always, The Baltimore Sun provides expanded stock market and mutual fund information online at www.baltimoresun.com/business.

Pikesville's Josh Wesalo is always looking for anything that could make him a better runner. He diligently keeps a log of his runs and training, helps his coach by mapping out practice routes for the Panthers and even scouts possible opponents. In years past, doing all of that would have consumed a lot of time for the senior. But Wesalo now can do it with a few clicks of his mouse. The Internet has gradually influenced cross country and running. Almost any piece of information about runners, teams and performances can be found on Web sites.