Zen Monthly Newsletter

Microsoft is offering to replace counterfeit copies of Windows XP with the genuine article - completely free of charge. The scheme is exclusive to the UK and runs for the next 30 days. Aiming to "help people and small businesses that have been innocently duped by high quality forgeries", the initiative is designed to get information from users to help track down gangs of counterfeiters who are flooding the pre-Christmas market with high quality XP forgeries sold in convincing packaging complete with copies of the company's holographic logo.

Where do you find start-up money if you're launching a creative business? The government's Department for Culture, Media and Sport thinks it has the answer. "We know that raising finance can be a problem because most high street banks tend to perceive creative businesses unfairly as ‘high risk’ - possibly because they rely on intellectual property rather than fixed tangible assets. But there are alternatives to the traditional debt finance offered by the Banks". The Department's ‘money map’ Web site identifies funding schemes open to creative businesses, including many that are specific to particular areas in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the English regions.

The Plain English Campaign offers a Crystal Mark logo for printed documents that pass its rigorous 'less bull' testing, which it carries out with help from members of the public. Now the organisation is offering a similar stamp of approval - the Internet Crystal Mark - for Web sites, calling it "the only mark of clarity that matters".

The newest performance-based online advertising model making a hit in the USA is "pay-per-call", and it won't be long before it arrives in the UK. What America does online, the rest of the world eventually follows. A mutation of the pay-per-click (PPC) online advertising model, pay-per-call ads are keyword search engine listings that feature a free phone number that users can call to speak to a real person, rather than clicking through to a Web site. As with PPC, advertisers only pay when their ads generate a response. It’s a new way of using the Internet to find customers that works well for companies that don't have an e-commerce Web site, or don't have a Web site at all. The service comes from FindWhat.com, the American parent of London-based pay-per-click company Espotting.

Happy Birthday to the banner ad! It’s been 10 years since the first banner ad was used. There is debate over who actually used the first banner, but Wired magazine's HotWired site claims to have published the earliest example. Banner ads have had their ups and downs since then, but seem to have performed better recently as designers and site owners have realised that, like any online advertising, a banner has to be context-relevant to be fully effective.

Working under the banner 'Make Love Not Spam', Lycos is offering a screensaver to launch denial-of-service attacks on spammers' Web sites. The controversial move - something usually associated with hackers or spammers who abuse networks with large volumes of data - is designed to use the spare processing power of thousands of PCs to slow down spammers' Web sites to a helpless crawl. The company said the screensaver will feature a satisfying display showing the location and URLs of sites being attacked, which are selected by Lycos managers. A spokesman said: "This gives Internet users the opportunity to hit spammers where it hurts. Sending spam is not a minor misdemeanour. Spam causes billions of pounds of damage to the economy. This is why we are upping the ante in the fight against those responsible." But denial-of-service attacks are illegal in many countries and some organisations have criticised the move. Steve Linford, director of non-profit anti-spam group Spamhaus in London, said that Lycos had failed to think the idea through. "It's irresponsible of Lycos to put its name to this because it lends legitimacy to DDoS attacks," he claimed. "You can't break into a thief's house just because he breaks into yours. We don't support or recommend this practice. It's part of the degradation of the Internet that we're trying to stop." Yesterday, the Lycos download site seemed to be under attack itself, with some users unable to see anything except the message "Attacking spammers is wrong. You know this. You shouldn't be doing it".

Think you know how to spot a phishing scam? Take the MailFrontier Phishing IQ Test to see how you many messages might dangle their bait convincingly enough to fool you. MailFrontier sells e-mail security software and claims to be able to net these money grabbing e-mails before they hit your inbox.

Men, would you look silly in a dress? 'Phish percussionist' Jon Fishman did, but at least he was suffering for his art, albeit less than privately, when he appeared on stage in Las Vegas to demonstrate a fetching 'sonic fabric' outfit that he strokes with tape-head mittens to play music. Jon is not alone at the frontier of music playing garmentry, which is made from recorded audio tape; there's a retail shop selling such fashionable items on Madison Avenue and you can buy them online here:

Designers of geek gadgets inevitably take aim at the male half of the population, but worry about their product's WAF rating - the 'wife acceptability factor' that they imagine controls many an alpha male's purse strings. In truth, many women like gadgets as much as men, and the blog team of "top gadget girl writers plus the odd token bloke" at Shiny Shiny TV looks for gizmos with a bit of style that might appeal to the female decision maker in the family. They've covered a hi-tech jacuzzi, a vibrating duck, a bubble blowing machine, an intelligent perfume dispenser and, perhaps less wisely, an all-startling-pink rechargeable radio, now available in the best department stores for only £129.99.

The founder of music file-swapping company Napster is working on a highly secretive start-up, Snocap, reportedly an online music service designed to help the record industry profit from songs shared on peer-to-peer services. Other 'comeback kids' with new ventures attracting new venture capital include the founders of Miramba and Excite.

If you have ever pondered the possibility that one of the classic cartoon jokes - riding a bike with square wheels - might actually be possible, do try to get out more, but first raise a glass to the inventive genius of mathematician Stan Wagon. He's done it. Stan has constructed a bike that you can ride smoothly along an inverted catenary track that he reveals on his site at stanwagon.com... before passing on quickly to other preoccupations that include sculpting with snow in Colorado and solving the latest "Problem of the Week" set by Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota.

Funded by the DTI, British Telecom are planning in-your-car monitors to send details about the location and movement of vehicles to traffic control centres using wireless LAN technology. Sceptics think the tracking will mostly be about providing information to help the government implement automated road tolls, but BT say it will be a benefit to drivers, providing them with useful services including parking-space finders and traffic jam warnings.

With TV news images of cars tumbling down streets taken over by swollen rivers still fresh in our minds, this Web site by the Environment Agency that allows you to insert your postal code to assess the risk of flooding making waves at your front door some time soon may be of more than passing interest.

The FLOODsite project covers the physical, environmental, ecological and socio-economic aspects of floods from rivers, estuaries and the sea.

After decades of neglect, many of the parks and public gardens in Britain's most crowded areas have become unwelcoming, even threatening, places that are ignored or avoided by a majority of the local population. New Web site, CABE Space, aims to re-focus efforts to bring excellence to the design, management and maintenance of urban breathing spaces in our towns and cities.

NetRegs is an Environment Agency Web site helping businesses understand the often complex regulations governing their environmental obligations. Designed with small businesses particularly in mind, it covers both mandatory measures with legal ramifications, and good practice guidelines.

A California company using the Internet to peddle pornography is taking legal action against Google, alleging that the search engine is illegally helping people to gain access to its Web site with stolen passwords and view photographs from its collection without paying.

Microsoft's launch of its very own search engine was promised "this year for sure" and it turned up in fully-working beta form during November with an impressive 5 billion page index, which is about one billion more than Google. Or it was, until Google responded by announcing it was doubling its index to over 8 billion. The response from Google, which came within 24 hours, should calm shareholders' fears until Microsoft's full launch early in 2005, by which time the rival engine might have found another 4 billion pages of its own - and come up with a snappier URL than search.msn.com or search.msn.co.uk to challenge Google's long tenure as the world's favourite Web seeker.

The Creative Commons search engine is dedicated to finding copyright-free music, graphics, video and other content in a battle against "total control in a world where every last use of creative work is regulated and in which 'all rights reserved' (and then some) is the norm". Creative Commons persuades originators to set work free for non-commercial use. In the tradition of the free software and open-source movements, it says, it strives to offer creators ways to protect their works while encouraging their wider use, with 'some rights reserved' instead of the ubiquitous 'all'. The search engine was developed with the help of Nutch.org, an open-source search developer, and has been integrated into Firefox, a popular new browser that's nipping at the heels of Internet Explorer.