Gadgetory

it's Wednesday November second 2011 I'm Bridget Carey on cnet com and it's time to get loaded you may be paying taxes soon on Amazon purchases that is if lawmakers get their way two Republican senators are introducing a bill to force amazon and other out-of-state online stores to collect sales taxes and it's being supported by retailers like walmart and bestbuy but this isn't just a Republican issue a few months ago some Democratic lawmakers proposed a similar action but according to wells fargo study even if amazon started charging tax it still would be ten percent cheaper than buying from walmart so you know when you get a facebook friend request from someone you don't really know but you see you have one front of commons so you figure maybe i met this person before you know they kind of look familiar and then you add them to your friends yeah well stop doing that there are fake accounts trying to dupe you into adding them and it's working a university was able to do thousands of users in Tuba friending bots and when there was just one friend in common where people were okay with saying yes to the connection when added as a friend the fake accounts could access profile information and collected two hundred and fifty gigabytes of personal data so next time you get a friend request from someone you don't remember don't just blindly click accept if you're going to buy a tablet this year perhaps as a gift you need to be careful not to buy a knockoff a report found more than 23,000 website listings for clone or counterfeit tablet computers in a single day to trick buyers into thinking they're getting a discounted ipad or motorola xoom they might blur the brand name and a photo some tips for spotting fakes if a strange sight is selling for one that's more than fifty percent less than everyone else it's probably too good to be true and this might go without saying for the savvy geek but it's also a fake if there's selling one that hasn't been released in stores yet if you didn't think there were enough daily deal Groupon clones out there already another one launched today with a simple name daily deals.com aside from timing the launch just when groupon is about to close the books on its IPO tomorrow daily deals calm markets itself as the anti groupon it won't do any local deals just national online merchants sprint nextel has formed a Mobile Security Council to fight the villainy that seeks to infect our handsets with malware it's a growing problem especially with Android phones McAfee found 44 Android malware threats just in the second quarter compared with four on blackberry and none on the iPhone the council consists of Ibn and cisco systems as well as phone makers like samsung and motorola but the two biggest players in mobile Apple and Google are not on the team that's like having to justice league without Batman or Superman those are your headlines for today I'm Bridget Carey for cnet com and you just been loaded