One in four gives fake Net names

According to a report, more than a quarter of people online have lied about their name and more than one in five has done something online they regret, says the BBC.

The behavioural and psychological impacts of online life are outlined in a report from the security firm Norton.

The report suggests two-thirds of Web users have been hit by cyber crime, with the costs and time to resolve the crime varying widely around the world.

Google Instant aims to change the way people search, reports CNet News.

Instead of search as an outcome, Google is trying to get people to think of search as a process in which users constantly refine the query without actually "searching", or hitting the button to produce a concrete result.

Google is betting, in a world of nearly instant communication, that search is going to have produce an answer just as fast as updates are spat out from Twitter or other real-time Web services. It's a bit chaotic at first and will certainly throw a few searchers off their game, as well as make those in the search-engine optimisation game a little anxious.

Researchers have uncovered sophisticated attack code circulating on the Internet that exploits a critical vulnerability in the most recent version of Adobe Reader, writes The Register.

The click-and-get-hacked exploit spreads through e-mail that contains a booby-trapped PDF file that remains virtually undetected by most anti-virus programs, according to Mila Parkour, the security researcher who first alerted Adobe to the threat.

It was being sent to a small group of individuals who “work on common issues,” he said, causing him to believe they were narrowly selected by the attackers.

Police forces across Europe have conducted co-ordinated raids on business and domestic premises to collect evidence against alleged unauthorised file-sharing operations, reveals Computing.co.uk.

The raids were ordered by police in Belgium, acting on behalf of copyright owners who claim their digital goods are being distributed illegally, and include action in the UK, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Hungary, Belgium, Norway, Germany and Sweden.

The majority of police activity seems to have been focused in Sweden, including raids on Umea University and PRQ, an ISP which hosts, among other entities, WikiLeaks, which recently hit the headlines over the disclosure of classified military documents concerning the war in Afghanistan.