A man who put his life up for auction on eBay found it wasn’t worth quite as much as he thought when he settled for around A$100,000 ($96,000) less than his target price.

Ian Usher, 44, held the seven-day auction of all his belongings, including his three-bedroom home in the west Australian city of Perth and a trial for his job at a rug store, after the break-up of his five-year marriage.

Bids had reached as high as A$2.2 million, only for Usher to discover there had been a glitch on eBay’s system which allowed the participation of non-registered bidders who had put in bogus offers.

In the end, the winning bidder agreed to pay A$399,300 ($380,286) for all of Usher’s worldly goods, which also include his friends, a motorcycle and a jetski. According to the eBay website, the mystery buyer, whose user name is “mslmcc”, is in Australia and has a 100 percent feedback score.

Usher, who gave regular updates on the auction on his Web site www.alife4sale.com, now plans to travel in search of a new life.

The Internet’s key oversight agency relaxed rules Thursday to permit the introduction of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new Internet domain names to join “.com,” making the first sweeping changes in the network’s 25-year-old address system.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers unanimously approved the new guidelines as weeklong meetings in Paris concluded. ICANN also voted unanimously to open public comment on a separate proposal to permit addresses entirely in non-English languages for the first time.

New names won’t start appearing until at least next year, and ICANN won’t be deciding on specific ones quite yet. The organization still must work out many details, including fees for obtaining new names, expected to exceed $100,000 apiece to help ICANN cover up to $20 million in costs.

Domain names help computers find Web sites and route e-mail. Adding new suffixes can make it easier for Web sites to promote easy-to-remember names - given that many of the best ones have been claimed already under “.com.”

New names could cover locations such as “.nyc” and “.berlin” or industries such as “.bank.” The hefty application fees could curb a rush for individual vanity names, though larger companies might claim brands like “.disney.”

The new guidelines would make it easier for companies and groups to propose new suffixes. ICANN had accepted bids in 2000 and 2004, but reviews took much time, and one - “.post” for postal services - remains pending more than four years later. Ultimately, only 13 have been approved in those two rounds.

The streamlined guidelines call for applicants to go through an initial review phase, during which anyone may raise an objection on such grounds as racism, trademark conflicts and similarity to an existing suffix. If no objection is raised, approval would come quickly.

Although a large Internet service provider has backed away from technology that tracks subscribers’ Web use in order to deliver personalized advertising, two other broadband companies said Wednesday they are BurlingtonFreePress.com AP NEWS”>still considering whether to deploy it.

Phone companies Embarq Corp. and CenturyTel Inc. have both completed trials of the same tracking system, from online advertising company NebuAd Inc., and are now considering whether to proceed.

The largest U.S. Internet provider that had been actively looking at Web tracking, Charter Communications Inc., announced Tuesday that it had canceled its planned test because customers had raised concerns.

The technology gathers data on the interests of Web surfers by looking at the sites they visit. It passes the information to online advertising companies, without revealing a surfer’s identity, so they can display more relevant ads on Web sites. For instance, a surfer who visits sites about dogs might see more banner ads for dog food.

The system has been criticized by privacy advocates and legislators. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, wrote to Charter asking it to put the test on hold to give time for discussions. Markey chairs the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is getting ready to vote later this week to open up the Internet naming convention to allow more options.

On Thursday at its meeting in Paris, ICANN, the not-for-profit organization charged with overseeing the Internet’s naming scheme, will vote on a proposal that would allow companies to purchase new generic top-level domains ending in almost anything they want. So instead of being limited to .com, .org or .co.uk as the last letters of their Web addresses, companies or organizations could add their company name to the end of their URL. For example, eBay could become .ebay or Intel could be .intel. Even cities could name their Web sites .newyork or .berlin.

But the new names, which could be ready in 2009, won’t come cheap. As a result, it’s unlikely that individuals will be able to take advantage of the new naming conventions to create more personalized Web sites. The exact price to register these new names isn’t yet known, but some experts predict it could cost about $50,000 to register a new domain name.

Movie ticketing and entertainment site Fandango Inc. said Monday it has acquired Movies.com from Walt Disney Co. for an undisclosed amount.

Los Angeles-based Fandango, which is owned by Comcast Corp., sells tickets for 1,300 theaters nationwide. It said it will now handle the movie ticketing functions for Movies.com, which is mainly an entertainment Web site.

Movies.com, which previously partnered with MovieTickets.com for ticketing, was owned by the Walt Disney Internet Group. Philadelphia-based cable TV system owner Comcast said the purchase price was minimal.

Fandango said it had 6.3 million monthly unique visitors to its Web site in May compared with 1.9 million for Movies.com. Both sites were launched in 2000.

Last month, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was the target of a public complaint that it wasn’t doing enough to fight spam and bogus websites. The complaint was made by anti-spam service Knujon, which suggested that most spam-related websites were funneled through 20 ICANN-approved registrars based in the United States and overseas. The company said that ICANN, despite being repeatedly notified that the registrars’ WHOIS records were filled with false address and contact information for millions of spam sites, did not follow its own mandate to force WHOIS compliance among the worst offenders.

Now, Knujon founder Garth Bruen has formally requested ICANN to shut down the Beijing-based registrar at the top of the list, Xinnet Bei Gong Da Software. According to a new document that Bruen sent to ICANN this week, none of the WHOIS records in a sample of 11,000 alleged spam sites registered through Xinnet and reported by Knujon to ICANN’s Whois Data Problem Report System were corrected in a six-month period ending in May 2008. In many cases, says the document, Xinnet does not have “any Whois record data for review while the sites are still active.”

EBay Inc buyers and sellers using its PayPal online payments service will be protected from fraud for the full value of auction purchases, expanding a more limited program, eBay said on Thursday.

The company, fighting to keep sellers off rivals such as Amazon.com Inc, also said sellers with top ratings would get an improved 20 percent discount on auction fees.

EBay has been taking steps this year to reward its best sellers and give new incentives to buyers, including coupons.

Later this year, eBay will refund buyers using PayPal up to the full price of items bought on the site in case of fraud. Sellers will be protected from fraudulent credit card use.

Registrations for Internet addresses ending in China’s “.cn” have surpassed those for the global “.net,” showing the continued rapid rise in Internet use in the communist nation.

A study by VeriSign Inc., which runs the “.net” databases and other core directories for helping computers find Web sites and route e-mail, found that “.cn” overtook “.net” sometime in the first quarter of 2008.

VeriSign did not provide registration breakdowns but said “.cn” registrations grew 23 percent from the previous quarter and were triple those in the same period in 2007.

The organization that runs Germany’s “.de” domain pegged “.cn” registrations at 11.8 million and “.net” at 11.6 million as of May.

The findings come as China reported that the number of Internet users there has soared to 221 million, by some measures tying the U.S. online population as largest in the world.

There’s no threat of “.cn” overtaking “.com” any time soon, however. The “.com” suffix, which VeriSign also runs, is the overwhelming leader, with 76.5 million registrations worldwide, while “.de” is second with 12.1 million, according to the German group.

Yahoo Inc. is offering free e-mail accounts under two new designations in an effort to attract Web surfers unhappy with their current addresses.

The Sunnyvale-based company expects to begin registering new addresses under the domains of “ymail” and “rocketmail” around noon PDT Thursday at http://mail.yahoo.com .

It will be the first time that Yahoo has offered e-mail accounts under umbrellas other than its own company name since it became a correspondence conduit in 1997.

Yahoo began offering free e-mail shortly after its $80 million acquisition of Four11 Corp., which included the rocketmail domain. Rocketmail users at the time of the acquisition were allowed to keep their existing accounts, but Yahoo hadn’t accepted any new addresses under that name until now.

The diversification into new e-mail designations is being driven by the difficulty that people are having as they try to find an appealing e-mail handle under the Yahoo domain.

Verizon Communications Inc. is boosting the speed of its FiOS fiber-optic Internet service in 10 states.

The FiOS service areas of California, Delaware, Indiana, Maryland, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington will see new plans that nearly double Internet speeds, Chief Operating Officer Denny Strigl said in remarks to be delivered at a conference Wednesday.

The faster speeds were already available in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, where competition from cable is particularly fierce, and in Florida, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

With the speed increase, Verizon is now providing the same speeds in all 16 states where FiOS is available. It comes at a time when cable companies are preparing a big boost to their own Internet services.

The fastest FiOS Internet service, for $139.95 per month, will provide downloads at 50 megabits per second and uploads at 20 megabits per second, up from 30 mbps downstream and 15 mbps upstream. Slower plans are being upgraded as well.

Verizon spokeswoman Bobbi Henson said existing customers will not be moved to the new plans and speeds unless they ask. Most customers are on plans that are slightly cheaper than the equivalent new plan, she said.

The prices are for customers who have annual contracts and have Verizon’s landline phone service. New Yorkers and Virginians get a price break on the fastest plan: It’s $89.95 in their states.

FiOS is available to 10 million homes, and Verizon plans to cover 18 million homes by 2010.

In the comments prepared for a speech at a telecom trade show in Las Vegas, Strigl said more speed increases are in the works.

“We’ve already had successful trials of the 100-megabit home, which will be a reality faster than anybody thinks,” he said.

Meanwhile, Comcast Corp., the biggest cable TV operator, is upgrading its network to offer download speeds of 50 mbps in 20 percent of its service area by the end of the year. Other cable companies are following suit.

Ever wonder whether you’d be better off working some place else?

A new Web site called Glassdoor.com is trying to make it easier to find out by compiling free snapshots of the current salaries paid by hundreds of major employers, along with reviews anonymously written by current and past workers.

“We think it’s super important that people are able to find a job where they can go home happy at the end of the day,” said Robert Hohman, Glassdoor’s co-founder and chief executive.

The Sausalito-based startup’s other founders include Rich Barton, CEO of online home appraisal site Zillow.com.

By providing free access to sensitive salary information and sometimes blunt reviews of companies, Glassdoor is bound to upset some employers, predicted Jupiter Research analyst Barry Parr.

With identity theft on the rise and personal information at a premium, it’s never been more important to be cautious about what you reveal online.

Social-networking sites such as Facebook have largely usurped chatrooms and forums — at least in the grown-up world — as fun places to hang around online and engage in harmless distractions. Unfortunately, they’ve also replaced chatrooms in the tabloid consciousness as the place where pedophiles go to pick up victims.

But while we conscientiously monitor our kids’ internet use and apply restrictions to the sites they can visit and the times they’re allowed to go online, we may be putting ourselves in other sorts of danger.

Having taught your kids to chat only to people they know and to limit the amount of personal information they give out, consider whether you practice what you preach.

Announcing to the world (via your Facebook profile) that you’re bungee-jumping at Victoria Falls tells us you’re still game for a laugh. If your profile also states your birth date, home town, address and phone number, along with a reference to your current and past employers, you’ve left yourself wide open to someone becoming the new you.

In the past, a tell-tale answerphone message stating that you’re on holiday would have been brilliant news for an opportunist thief. The equivalent these days is the careless status update or unprotected online profile that enables a cybercrook to sell on your personal details.