A new subgenre of malware that ransoms your PC is now stalking the internet for victims, says a security developer. The so-called "ransomware" locks up your PC and demands $35 to return control to you is on the prowl, said Alex Eckelberry, CEO of Sunbelt Software Distribution in Clearwater, Florida. Victims of the Delf. ctk Trojan horse are told to dial a 900 number that can be traced to a payment processor used by hardcore pornography Web sites, he added.

For the first time, anyone can get a message printed on a piece of the multicolored confetti dropped during New Year's Eve in Times Square. One can use the internet to type the message on a "Wishing Wall Online. "

A woman was charged Tuesday with contributing to the delinquency of a minor after being found responsible for posting on the Internet a video of a two-year old child smoking a cigarette. Authorities said 33-yaer old Sandra Venery, who was apprehended Sunday, posted the video on the popular social networking website MySpace.

"W00t," an exclamation of joy or excitement used by online gamers and hardcore Internet chat enthusiasts, is the word that best sums up 2007, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The word took the Word of the Year prize in Merriam-Webster's annual poll of favorite new terms such as "facebook," a verb that means to look up someone's profile on the popular online social networking site Facebook, and "blamestorm," to hold a meeting in order to find out who to blame.

It's now official: there is no truth to the rumor that space travelers engage in sex. "We do not have such experiments in our country," said Valery Bogomolov, deputy head of the Institute of Bio-Medial Problems, commenting on a widely circulated document on the internet about an alleged 1996 sex experiment made by NASA on 10 sexual positions. "There is no proof. . . that on any mission cosmonauts had sex," he told a news conference in Moscow on Wednesday, Interfax reported. "Cosmonauts, too, are regular people, but. . . I have not heard about any sex in orbit. "