PayPal has generated its fair share of controversies over the years, but it has begun to stir up another one by adding new transaction fees that affect all customers—without telling anyone about them. The company slipped the fees in with a more general update to its “send money” service in June, but because the changes were so well hidden, the Internet has been slow to wake up to what amounts to a good increase in PayPal’s income.

Under the previous system, fees were charged based on the type of account the receiver was using as well as where the money was coming from. If the receiver was a premium or business account owner, he or she was charged 30¢ plus 2.9 percent of the transaction—the same applied to all accounts if the money was coming from a credit or debit card instead of a PayPal balance or directly from a bank account. People using personal accounts could make all these payments to anyone else for free.

In June, PayPal made a number of changes to its User Agreement and posted an update to the PayPal Blog. At that time, director of product marketing Heinz Waelchli wrote that PayPal had now begun allowing those with business and premium accounts to make personal transfers to friends and family for free. This, in itself, is a welcome update—I use my PayPal account to receive payments for items I sell on Etsy, but now I can send money to my brother from the same account without either of us having to give PayPal a cut.

What PayPal failed to do was inform users of the fact that any transfer having to do with goods or services will be charged the 3¢ 2.9 percent fee no matter who or where it’s coming from. This includes payments sent from personal accounts as well as payments made after someone has sent you a request for payment (even if that request has nothing to do with goods or services).

For example, a personal account sending another personal account money for a one-time payment for, say, mowing your lawn was not previously charged any fees on either side, but is now charged the usual transaction fee (the sender gets to decide who pays). The only way to avoid this is by selecting “gift” when making the transfer—something you can’t do if you’re following through on a purchase or invoice from someone. And, if you fall into this category (which many people do), it’s likely that you had no idea about the changes until just now.

Researchers said on Tuesday that they are seeing something unusual in the malware world–a virus that targets a development environment.

The virus, dubbed Win32.Induc, was written to infect applications built with Delphi, according to Nick Bilogorskiy, manager of antivirus researcher at Sonicwall. Delphi is used to write Windows programs, including database applications.

When an infected program is run on a machine running Delphi, the virus infects any software that gets compiled on that machine. The virus spreads the executable file of itself as well as the source code. It looks for a compiler on the infected system and re-compiles the source code, inserting its code into any programs compiled on the system.

“This malware just spreads; it doesn’t delete files or do anything malicious,” he said. “But if you create software and you have this code in it, the software will be blocked by antivirus (technology).”

Developers whose systems are infected will pass the infection on to the programs they are creating, Bilogorskiy said.

A 14-year-old boy was in critical condition in hospital with kidney failure after repeated beatings at an Internet rehabilitation camp in southwest China, state media said Wednesday.

The incident in Sichuan province took place just weeks after another teenage boy was beaten to death at a similar rehabilitation centre in the south of the country where his parents had sent him to cure his Internet addiction.

The death triggered outrage on the Internet in China and drew worldwide publicity, while medical experts called for specific laws and regulations on the diagnosis and treatment of Internet addiction.

Sony Corp.’s move to cut the price of its PlayStation 3 console by $100 comes well ahead of the holiday season and should boost sales not just for Sony but the video game industry as a whole during this important period.

The 80-gigabyte PS3 will now cost $299 and a slimmer, lighter one is planned for the same price. Consumers have long been waiting for the price cuts, and sales have lagged in recent months as a result.

Software developers will be able to start charging for applications downloads to Palm Inc’s high-profile Pre smartphone with the company’s launch of an e-commerce beta program set to start in mid-September.

Developers will still have the choice of giving apps away for free, but Palm said on Tuesday that software providers who want to charge for Pre apps will get 70 percent of revenue from the sale. The remaining 30 percent would go to Palm in an arrangement that mirrors Apple Inc’s app store.

International Business Machines Corp is looking to the building blocks of our bodies — DNA — to be the structure of next-generation microchips.

As chipmakers compete to develop ever-smaller chips at cheaper prices, designers are struggling to cut costs.

Artificial DNA nanostructures, or “DNA origami” may provide a cheap framework on which to build tiny microchips, according to a paper published on Sunday in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Microchips are used in computers, cell phones and other electronic devices.

“This is the first demonstration of using biological molecules to help with processing in the semiconductor industry,” IBM research manager Spike Narayan said in an interview with Reuters.

“Basically, this is telling us that biological structures like DNA actually offer some very reproducible, repetitive kinds of patterns that we can actually leverage in semiconductor processes,” he said.

The research was a joint undertaking by scientists at IBM’s Almaden Research Center and the California Institute of Technology.

Radiohead offered a new song for free download Monday, “These Are My Twisted Words,” which is available from the band’s official Web site.

“We’ve been recording for a while, and this was one of the first we finished. We’re pretty proud of it,” multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood writes on the site. “There’s other stuff in various states of completion, but this is one we’ve been practicing, and which we’ll probably play at this summer’s concerts. Hope you like it.”

It has been 15 years since Marc Andreessen developed the Netscape Internet browser that introduced millions of people to the Internet.

After its early success, Netscape was roundly defeated by Microsoft in the so-called browser wars of the 1990s that dominated the Web’s first chapter.

Mr. Andreessen appears to want a rematch. Now a prominent Silicon Valley financier, Mr. Andreessen is backing a start-up called RockMelt, staffed with some of his close associates, that is building a new Internet browser, according to people with knowledge of his investment.

“We have backed a really good team,” Mr. Andreessen said in an interview earlier this summer. A moment later, Mr. Andreessen appeared to regret his comment, saying he was not ready to talk about any aspect of the company.

But Mr. Andreessen suggested the new browser would be different, saying that most other browsers had not kept pace with the evolution of the Web, which had grown from an array of static Web pages into a network of complex Web sites and applications. “There are all kinds of things that you would do differently if you are building a browser from scratch,” Mr. Andreessen said.

A researcher looking into the attacks that knocked Twitter offline last week discovered another, unrelated security problem.

At least one criminal was using a Twitter account to control a network of a couple hundred infected personal computers, mostly in Brazil. Networks of infected PCs are referred to as “botnets” and are responsible for so much of the mayhem online, from identity theft to spamming to the types of attacks that crippled Twitter.

Jose Nazario with Arbor Networks said he found a Twitter account that was used to send out what looked like garbled messages. But they were actually commands for computers in a botnet to visit malicious Web sites, where they download programs that steal banking passwords.

The affected Twitter account was taken down. Twitter didn’t immediately respond to e-mails for comment.

Nazario said what appeared to be the same person was doing the same thing on an account with a Google Inc. service called Jaiku, which is similar to Twitter.

Google said the affected account was shut down.

I have several gmail accounts, while I was checking my mail, I noticed that in my trash folder there were deleted messages that do not belong to this mail account.

Here is what happened.

I logged into account A read some messages and deleted others. Then I logged into account B and did the same. Now in account B I went into the Trash folder and noticed that it contained messages from account A.

This is potentially a very serious bug especially if you check your mail on public computers because the person logging into gmail after you may see your deleted mail messages.

In the screenshot below you can see the messages in red box which do not belong to this account.

I must say this only happens with 2 accounts, other gmail accounts I have do not have this problem, so I don’t know what caused this problem, and why these two accounts only

Google has lifted the lid on a new version of its search engine, allowing users to look at the results it will generate.

The new engine, looks the same as the current one but ranks results differently, which could affect businesses who rely on Google results to drive traffic.

In a blog posting late Monday, Google Inc. says the new engine, code-named “Caffeine,” will be faster, more accurate and more comprehensive.

The public testing of the new engine comes two weeks after Microsoft Corp. struck a deal to replace Yahoo Inc.’s search engine, with its own Google competitor, called Bing. Yahoo Search and Bing are the second and third most popular engines after Google.

A federal court has found enough evidence to decide that RealDVD, the software that enables users to copy DVDs and store digital duplicates on a hard drive, violates U.S. copyright law.

U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel on Tuesday issued a preliminary injunction that will prevent RealNetworks from selling the $30 software until a jury can decide the issue. That will undoubtedly keep RealDVD and Facet, Real’s prototype DVD player, off store shelves for an indefinite period. Facet also makes digital copies and stores them to a built in hard drive.

The decision represents a major victory for the film studios, which had accused Real of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and breach of contract in a lawsuit filed last fall. Had the decision gone against the film studios and its trade group, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), it would have been an affirmation that consumers have the right to copy their DVDs for personal use. Right now, when a DVD owner loses or breaks a disc, they conceivably must purchase another copy. RealDVD and Facet eliminate the need for discs once copies are made.

But the MPAA argued that Facet and RealDVD are pirate tools that enabled users to copy and redistribute movies and could cost the industry billions. The MPAA has maintained that under the DMCA, consumers do not have the right to copy films–ever.