Internet sales tax will force small businesses to abide by tax codes in 9,646 different jurisdictions

Every business could face 46 separate audits (from the 45 states that collect sales taxes plus the District of Columbia).

Legislation on internet sales tax could subject small online businesses to up to 46 state audits. And since sales taxes vary among thousands of tax jurisdictions across the country, the chances that auditors will find mistakes—and slap the business owners with penalties—are very good. If truth-in-advertising requirements applied to legislation, says Heritage Action’s Dan Holler, the Marketplace Fairness Act would be renamed the Tax Audits from Hell Act of 2013.

 

 

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Google sees spike in government requests to remove content

In the Transparency Report’s latest edition, Google has revealed that the final six months of 2012 saw an increase in government requests to remove content — often YouTube videos. Google received 2,285 such requests (compared with 1,811 during the first half of 2012) that named a total of 24,179 pieces of content for removal (compared with 18,070 in the preceding period).

 

 

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500 million unique visitors access Wikipedia and other sites owned by the Wikimedia Foundation every month

Unique visitors across the network of sites increased to 517 million last month.

Wikipedia and other websites owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, including Wikibooks,Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons  now get more than 500 million unique visitors every month.

 

 

 

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Future of crowd-mobbed vigilantism

One of the blast sites on Boylston Street near the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon.

There is a lot of restless energy surging through the web.A legion of Internet investigators are scrutinizing every available photo of the Boston Marathon finish line, searching for clues that will help nab a killer. At Reddit, Imgur and a zillion blogs, notes are being shared, theories propounded — and, without question, innocent people are getting slandered.

 

 

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For $68 you can become internet famous

Santiago Swallow

One of the most famous people that no one has heard of is Santiago Swallow. His Twitter profile shows a handsome man with high cheekbones and dirty blond, collar-length hair.  Next to his name is one of social media’s most prized possessions, Twitter’s blue “verified account” checkmark. Underneath it are numbers to make many in the online world jealous: Santiago Swallow has tens of thousands of followers.  Swallow sends tweets that are cryptic nuggets of wisdom that unroll like scrolls from digital fortune cookies: “Before you lose weight, find hope,” says one. Another: “To write is to live endlessly.”

 

 

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What is Bitcoin? This video explains it in less than 4 minutes

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/63502573[/vimeo]

Bitcoin, launched in 2009 by an anonymous developer, is an intriguing technological and financial experiment. Quartz reports, there has been a recent spike in value (approximately 1,300% since the beginning of the 2013).  Starting your own currency is “not as complicated as it sounds. All you need is a system other people can understand and, most importantly, trust,” according to The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson.

 

 

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The truth about email

What’s a normal inbox?

Everyone spends way too much time on email, and everyone has their own strategies and techniques for dealing with the deluge. Usually those techniques are a melding of Web, desktop, and mobile tools that we find least objectionable. But the tools, tips and tricks that work for one person tend to work poorly for another. Products designed to “help” often are more of a hindrance and force the adoption of new workflows that run counter to years of training.

 

 

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Bitcoin: The revolution of digital currency

Several brick-and-mortar businesses across the US have started accepting the virtual currency.

Bitcoin is a cryptographic digital currency that is not underwritten by any government. Bitcoin is designed to be secure and can’t be counterfeited and can be used with anonymity because the software underlying the currency operates on  decentralized peer-to-peer network. What started out in 2010 as an underground currency for grey-market activities, has since grown to a $400 million worldwide market for buying everything from pizza to domain names. In an attempt to prevent inflation, the number of Bitcoins in circulation will continue to grow automatically at an ever-decreasing rate, according to the laws of its software, until reaching maximum of 21 million coins shortly after 2030. There are just over 10 million today.

 

 

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