In a move that would make Chuck Norris proud, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott announced today that the state of Texas had reached an agreement with Tagged, Inc., a social networking site that was accused of tricking users into providing access to their address books. As part of the agreement, Tagged has to pay $250,000, which includes the cost of the state's investigation.

After Tagged had access to a user's address book, the social networking site sent messages that appeared to come directly from the user, offering to share photos with the recipient. When a recipient tried to view the pictures, which often didn't even exist, they were prompted to sign up, giving Tagged access to their address book and continuing the deceptive practice.

It's still October and already schedules are filling up with things to do to prepare for Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas, Hanukkah and more.

On top of the normal things that need done -- changing your oil, sending out cards, finding time to work out -- you still need to shop for gifts, which is no small matter.

A recent analysis of shopping habits, sponsored by search engine Bing, found that in the process of searching for the right gift and looking for the best deal, the average American will lose $114 this year.

E-mail addresses can tell people a lot about you.

Your username, or what's in front of the @ symbol can tell potential employers, dates and associates about your political affiliations, year of birth, what school you went to and even your affinity for elf culture.

Did you know that what comes after the @ sign can be more revealing than your cleverly chosen username?


A new trend report published by Credit Karma ranks e-mail domains by the average credit score of Credit Karma users. The data shows that BellSouth and Comcast users have the highest ratings, perhaps because they come with a paid Internet service.

Gmail comes in third, leading the pack of free e-mail services with an average credit score of 681, which is close to the average credit score for 45-54-year-olds and the average credit score for California, Oregon and Washington state.

For a while Google has been protecting users of its popular Gmail service from phishing e-mails by rejecting any message it knows is fake from senders such as eBay and PayPal.

This week Google announced a new tool that makes it even easier to know if an e-mail is legit. Gmail users can now enable a new feature "Authentication icon for verified senders" which places a key icon next to e-mails that have been verified as "Super-Trustworthy" by Gmail.

Right now the Super-Trustworthy designation will only appear on e-mails from eBay and PayPal since they have completed the numerous steps needed to get verified, but the Gmail team expects to roll this designation out to banks and other senders shortly.

We all know not to give out our Social Security number on social networking and other websites, but new research indicates that it is possible to determine one out of every ten social security numbers knowing only a place of birth and birthdate! In states with lower numbers of births the odds are even better.

Technology has made it cheaper and easier than ever for others to find out when you were born, but sadly it won't be to send you a present on Facebook. The study points out that birth information can be found on numerous social networking sites, or purchased cheaply, for "almost every adult in the United States".

His name is Sanford Wallace, and his alleged spamming might possibly make him the most disliked man on the Internet. Facebook has a civil lawsuit pending against him, which has been stalled by his filing for bankruptcy. Myspace has already been granted a $230 million judgment against him for slinging pornography and gambling links onto its site. At last however, Sanford Wallace may have to face the music by doing hard time.

PC World has reported that the courts have determined that Wallace has set himself up for criminal prosecution. The article states in part: "Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California referred Sanford Wallace to the U.S. Attorney General's Office for criminal proceedings for allegedly violating an injunction that prohibited him from accessing Facebook."

When it comes to restaurants, all they want is your money...and your email address. Once they have this bit of information, they can shoot you an email with a come-hither picture of their newest burger at 11 a.m. on Tuesday morning. You know, right about the time that you can barely stop yourself from eating your co-worker's bagged lunch. This is a powerful marketing opportunity which means many restaurants will gladly bribe you with free food for an email address. Nicole's Nickels has a feast of free restaurant offers available to anyone willing to sign up for a newsletter or fanclub.

Some of the best offers include:

• Red Robin - Free Birthday Burger
• Johnny Rocket's - Free hamburger
• Texas Roadhouse - Free Appetizer
• Dairy Queen - Buy One Get One Blizzard
  
• Coldstone - Free Ice Cream on your birthday

You can head over to Nicole's Nickels where there are direct links to more than 20 free food offers. From experience, you should sign up a day or so before you plan to go, rather than 15 minutes before dinner, since it can take a little while for the coupon to show up in your inbox.

If you don't feel like cluttering up your inbox with all the other emails you'll be getting, you can create a free email address just for these offers, or do what I do, and filter all incoming restaurant emails into a special folder that I can search when I need a coupon.

Still hungry? Check out WalletPop's Best Restaurant Deals!

The only people who don't know about text messages these days are 90-year-olds and infants. Even if you don't use the feature, it is available on nearly every phone in use. Recently, text messaging overtook voice use on cell phones for the first time, indicating that texting is here to stay. Even with email-capable devices, text messaging has retained its popularity despite a 160-character limit. While you might think this limit is in place to force subscribers to send more messages, making more money for telecoms, it can actually be traced back to a typewriter in Germany, circa 1985.

That's when Hildebrand, the father of text messaging, was working on a new way to send text messages to phones. Limited by the bandwidth and clunky entry systems, his team set out to find the correct number of characters for a text message. After determining that most comments and questions were fewer than 160 characters, they chose it as their text message length, and thus set the standard for text messages, known as SMS, or short message service.

About the same time the FBI issued a warning this week that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Assistant Commissioner Thomas S. Winkowski didn't actually write an email akin to the Nigerian letter, I received a curious email from an Irish bank.

OK, it came from a university email address. But it was extraordinary nonetheless. What this bank official, "Myles Gallagher" was proposing was astounding.

In the normal Nigerian letter, greed and sympathy are at play. We feel bad for the poor official who wrote the letter and by helping him out of his jam we profit. A win-win.

But what old Myles is dangling is something entirely different. He admits in his variation of this letter (which still has people falling for it) that he's up to no good. He's simply looking for a plausible accomplice. That, of course, is anyone who cares to respond.

How confident would you feel in your finances if you could click one button and see what your bank statement would look like for the next month taking into account all of your bills paychecks and credit card payments? It sounds pretty good, almost too good; but that's exactly what you can do with Rudder.com.

Rudder is a new financial tool that focuses on what is going to happen to your money rather than analyzing what you have done with it in the past. This pro-active look at your finances lets you know what you can do with your money to affect your financial situation right now. Best of all, it's one of the lowest maintenance personal finance tools I've ever used; you don't even have to log in to rudder, they will email you a snapshot of your dashboard every morning.

If that's too often, you can choose to get the emails on whichever days you want. Choosing your email frequency is just the beginning of the Rudder customization options. While there are plenty of tools, or widgets as they are known in Rudder, you can choose which ones make sense for you. By adding or removing widgets from your dashboard you'll also change what your daily email update looks like, so if you only care about the "Bills" and "What's Left" widgets you won't be bothered by the "Spend Meter" or any other feature that Rudder rolls out in the future.

Enough with the introductions, let's check Rudder out!

The Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required) that "Fraudsters are using the logo of the Internal Revenue Service combined with the promise of federal stimulus money to dupe cash-strapped people into divulging credit-card information to a phony Web site, the International Trademark Association said.

The phishing email uses pictures of the President and Vice President to offer recipients their chunk of the federal stimulus package. Fill out the form and you've given the crooks all they need to steal your identity.

Now, I've been trying to limit my grandfatherly lectures about how messed up our society is, but think about it: People receive emails from someone claiming to be the federal government offering them some unsolicited cash, and it's deemed believable enough to send bank account information.

Whatever happened to "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country"? The free marketeers worst fears have come true and we are rapidly turning into a crybaby nation that sees the government as the solution to its financial woes.

Deal sites and coupon repositories are a dime a dozen, which can make it difficult to find the coupons you want from the stores you frequent without a lot of searching. That's where a new service from FreeShipping.com, called MyCoupons, comes in. My Coupons boasts a wide array of retailers, over 1,000, but its goal is to provide a narrowed down list filled only with offers from retailers you shop at.

The initial selection of retailers is impressive and while some coupons are nothing more than a link to weekly specials, there are plenty of valuable coupons. Even with the 37 stores I added to my coupon page, it was easy to find coupons for $10 off my next purchase at ebags.com, $10 off a $20 purchase at Aeropostale and numerous other 10-15% off coupon codes.

After you setup your account, which only takes a few minutes, you can choose to have your coupons emailed to you once a week, or just when there is a new coupon posted to your select group of retailers. This is a handy way to make sure you don't miss out on any good deals. Another cool feature is the ability to share your coupon list with others either via email or linking to your page. For example if you want to see my store selections you can visit Josh Smith's My Coupon Page and see the deals I am tracking.

If My Coupons can continue to provide the same high value, up-to-date coupon codes it has right now, it could change the online coupon landscape. The only downside to tailoring your coupon page in this fashion is that you're more likely to miss out on the truly amazing deals that only come to light on dedicated deal sites like fatwallet and dealnews.com. In the end, My Coupons does exactly what claims to and does it superbly -- earning it a spot in this dealhunter's toolkit.

I rarely read the spam that comes my way, but every once in awhile, I'll look at a few of them, just out of morbid curiosity. I don't click on links, of course.

And something struck me about the most recent email that has offered to make me rich beyond my wildest dreams. It was familiar enough. It came from some poor lady in South Africa whose rich husband was murdered by some political thugs, and if only I could let her wire all of that money of hers into my bank account for her to get later, I'd get a cut of her $12 million. Something like that. I didn't look at it for long. But what jumped out at me was how this woman said she had reached me:

I got your contact through network online hence decided to write you.

Sure, the sentence construction is poor, but the two words that caught my attention were, "Network online." Obviously, this spammer is thinking of Facebook, MySpace or some other online network. At least I assume so. And it just made me think that as unsophisticated as this letter was, it was slightly more sophisticated than in the past, where I would receive these letters from people who didn't really explain how they found me.

And while it may seem like nobody should be falling for this sort of thing in 2008, in 2007, $3.2 billion dollars were lost to these sorts of emails -- phishing -- in the United States.

It used to be pretty simple. Wake up, brush your teeth, talk to your spouse and kids, go work, come back, watch TV, straighten up the house or play with the kids, and go to bed. The next day: repeat.

Now, of course, the lines are blurred. We're often emailing our kindergarten's teacher with an apology for not bringing this week's snack and then rushing off to a meeting with the boss. Or we'll be at home in bed, watching late night TV and answering email -- from a client at work.

All of this means that things get complicated when employers and their employees don't get along, since when lawsuits arrive, email leaves one of those paper trails that can help bolster or destroy someone's case.

Several days ago, the 30th anniversary of spam came and went.

We're talking email, and not Spam, the food product. Anyway, I looked at quite a few articles that ran on the day of the anniversary May 3 or around then, like this story that originally appeared in The Washington Post, and I can't find any that quoted the man who began it all, Gary Thuerk. I was particularly interested in what he might have to say because I was lucky enough to interview him for Entrepreneur magazine during the 25th anniversary of spam.

At the time, I was getting more spam than I ever had in my life. I get a lot now, but in 2003, I was bombarded, and my computer was riddled with viruses and Trojan horses and other fun things. So when I was assigned to interview Thuerk, I had a lot of choice words prepared for him. I was going to light into him like a barbecue. I couldn't wait to pummel him with my gratitude for what he did on May 3, 1978, which is to be the first to send an unprompted email to a small but select number of people who had email, and he tried to sell these elite computer users, naturally, a new type of computer. I admit I wasn't thinking like a professional, but had made this personal. I wanted to do my best 60 Minutes Mike Wallace impression, and for Thuerk to fold like a house of cards and apologize for unleashing such a rotten practice into the world.