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Ever worry that that gadget you spend hours holding next to your head might be damaging your brain? Well, the evidence is starting to pour in, and it's not pretty. So why isn't anyone in America doing anything about it?

EARLIER THIS WINTER, I met an investment banker who was diagnosed with a brain tumor five years ago. He's a managing director at a top Wall Street firm, and I was put in touch with him through a colleague who knew I was writing a story about the potential dangers of cell-phone radiation. He agreed to talk with me only if his name wasn't used, so I'll call him Jim. He explained that the tumor was located just behind his right ear and was not immediately fatal—the five-year survival rate is about 70 percent. He was 35 years old at the time of his diagnosis and immediately suspected it was the result of his intense cell-phone usage. "Not for nothing," he said, "but in investment banking we've been using cell phones since 1992, back when they were the Gordon-Gekko-on-the-beach kind of phone." When Jim asked his neurosurgeon, who was on the staff of a major medical center in Manhattan, about the possibility of a cell-phone-induced tumor, the doctor responded that in fact he was seeing more and more of such cases—young, relatively healthy businessmen who had long used their phones obsessively. He said he believed the industry had discredited studies showing there is a risk from cell phones. "I got a sense that he was pissed off," Jim told me. A handful of Jim's colleagues had already died from brain cancer; the more reports he encountered of young finance guys developing tumors, the more certain he felt that it wasn't a coincidence. "I knew four or five people just at my firm who got tumors," Jim says. "Each time, people ask the question. I hear it in the hallways."

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SEO is an acronym for "search engine optimization" or "search engine optimizer." Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including:

See Google's SEO guide for the complete text.

Many people are intrigued by the idea of obtaining a ready-made list of email addresses they can send promotional emails to. Why wait months to slowly build up your own list of email addresses when you can piggy-back (for a price) on someone else's efforts?

While the idea seems attractive, there's a big trap waiting for anyone pursuing this course of action without care.

The important issue is how you come to obtain that bulk list of email addresses. And here we distinguish between renting a list (list rental) and buying a list.


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Microsoft tries to put fear of God into scareware vendors
By Joel Hruska | Published: September 29, 2008 - 09:20PM CT

Microsoft and Washington State officials announced a new partnership today aimed at fighting scareware in general and one specific vendor in particular. Today isn't such a good day for one James Reed McCreary IV, of The Woodlands, Texas. Mr. McCreary is the sole director of Branch Software, which created the Registry Cleaner XP program, and the CEO of hosting company Alpha Red. Scareware, it should be noted, isn't malware—at least, not technically. Instead of installing its own set of viruses, worms, or Trojans, a scareware program tricks the end user into believing he or she needs the program to correct a nonexistent error within the operating system. This type of falsified error was a common tactic in the days before Windows XP's SP1 (supposedly) closed the door that made the random pop-ups possible; I still remember seeing ads pop up on customers' desks insisting that they needed to download Program X for $9.99 to fix this issue.

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