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With the economy continuing to be in a vulnerable place and the unemployment rate still a concern for everyone, many people are worried about how they are going to make ends meet.  Financial experts have warned us about the dangers of living beyond our means, but sometimes unexpected and unfortunate things happen like losing a job, car trouble which may require a new (and expensive) transmission or an unexpected illness or injury may have occurred.  At the end of the day you are responsible for making sure funds are available to carry out your financial commitments.  Sometimes, those of who find themselves in this predicament will turn to other means to supplement their income or to provide just enough money to get by.

Have you ever received a phone call from a person claiming to be from Microsoft? Well, Microsoft has now started to warn people that they may receive a call from scammers claiming to work for Security Departments of various well known organizations such as Microsoft.

**UPDATE: Lamar Smith, the chief sponsor for SOPA has released a statement on Friday January 20th indicating he is pulling the bill "until there is wider agreement on a solution". This decision comes after a heated couple of weeks where supporters and protesters had heated arguments and culminating on yesterday's blackout and several congressmen dropping their support for both PIPA and SOPA. 

Need to research something on Wikipedia? Tried Reddit? You have probably found out by now that those sites and as many as 7,000 others are on “virtual strike” today January 18^th to protest against SOPA. Need a refresher course on what SOPA is? Click here for a small summary.

Mashable released their list of their top 15 most shocking social media disasters and we couldn’t help but wonder, what went wrong? How could they not see this coming? Almost all of these individuals suffered major damage to their reputation and as we all at BrandProtect know, once lost it is very hard to get it back.

The latest party to publicly show their discontent with the Stop Online Piracy Act is the hacker group Anonymous. Late Wednesday night the hacker group announced they would go silent on January 18^th as a sign of solidarity with those groups already protesting against SOPA and Protect IP Act. Anonymous joins Reddit and possibly Wikipedia on the list of online entities that are going quiet on January 18^th to protest against SOPA – Google and Facebook have been rumored to join as well.

A new generation of Facebook Scams has emerged just in time for the launch of Timeline – Facebook’s new profile layout. And while these changes have more than one user celebrating Facebook’s evolution, there are a large number of defectors who are begging Facebook to let them revert back to their old profiles.

Just in time for Christmas, a nasty rumour started spreading indicating that the site vatican.xxx had been purchased by someone not belonging to the religious organization. A spokesperson commented on Vatican radio that they had tried to purchase the domain but that someone had beat them to it. Chaos ensued as the press had a field day speculating on what the content of the new site would be.

By Dylan Sachs and Minal Pithia

With the recent news of even more malware on the Android Market (and the subsequent Microsoft offer of a free Windows Phone for some of those affected), people are getting more and more concerned that their devices, personal information - or worse, their bank balance - are going to be targeted.

Accredited registrars can now purchase .XXX domains on a first-come, first-serve basis. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers and ICM Registry have finally released their latest attempt at supervising access to porn sites. The new .XXX domains are meant to filter access to adult content and give Internet users a heads-up of the site’s contents.