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After a New York Times magazine article exposed his bizarre business tactic of courting the worst customer feedback possible so that infuriated buyers would leave negative commentary online, boosting his Google search results, DecorMyEyes.com eyeglass proprietor Vitaly Borker has been arrested on charges of cyberstalking, making interstate threats, mail fraud, and wire fraud.

The original story about DecorMyEyes, published on November 26, detailed the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Borker's tactics of harassing, cheating, and bullying customers, sometimes under pseudonyms and often with threats of obscenity and violence, to the point that several of them contacted the police. He … Read more

commentary Plenty of Web sites this holiday season are offering tips about how to shop online without getting burned by dishonest merchants or con men.

Here's my advice: if in doubt shop at Amazon.

Amazon isn't perfect. I don't know any perfect stores online or off. But after 15 years of providing consumers with a safe shopping experience on the Web, the e-tailing pioneer deserves some applause. Don't believe me? Just read the testimonial given by Vitaly Borker, the man who operates what is now likely the most notorious retail store on the Internet.

On Friday, … Read more

commentary Internet shoppers once again have reason to question whether Visa and MasterCard are the best means for buying online.

People have taken to Twitter and online forums to express shock about a compelling expose published in The New York Times on Friday. The story focused on an online retailer with a dubious history of customer service that included responding to complaints from unhappy patrons by allegedly threatening their lives. The newspaper reported that Vitaly Borker, a resident of New York, had generated so many complaints from selling eyewear on his site, DecorMyEyes.com, that all the negative comments had … Read more

I was around 13 when one of the most beloved video games of the '90s, GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64, came out. It was incredible to fire up the multiplayer death match with my buds and crush pizza and six packs of Dr. Pepper.

Earlier this year at E3, Activision announced that GoldenEye 007 was headed to the Nintendo Wii. Fans rejoiced. With the game available as of today, many people are eyeing gun attachments for their Wii remotes, especially since the game is compatible with the Wii Zapper and other Wii controller gun accessories.

If you've ever … Read more

This story was updated at 4:50 p.m. PDT with a new headline, and additional comment from Microsoft.

Microsoft has taken the covers off a future update to its Bing Maps service that removes the need for its Silverlight browser plug-in to view an alternate mapping layer, and has also announced that it plans to remove its 3D map viewer. The changes will arguably make the service more approachable to the masses, but indicate that the company is going in a different direction with its online tools and technology platforms.

In a post on the Bing community blog, Bing … Read more

If you've never used an Eye-Fi SD card, it's a pretty great solution for using wireless networks to get photos and video you've just shot out of your camera and stored on your computer and/or uploaded to a favorite sharing site. Getting full access to that content from a computer other than your own, however, wasn't easy until today's launch of Eye-Fi View. The service lets you shoot and store to the company's cloud storage so you can view and share from just about any Web-connected computer and mobile device.

One of the … Read more

How confident are you that your computer is safe from an online attack?

Chances are you rely on vendors like Microsoft and Apple to let you know when a security update is ready to be installed. (Google updates systems automatically.)

But until a patch is released, that hole--known as a zero-day vulnerability--in effect makes your computer a sitting duck for anyone who writes an exploit for it and bothers to distribute it via e-mails and drive-by downloads on Web sites.

EEye Digital Security launched a Web site yesterday that lists current zero-day vulnerabilities and offers an archive on ones that … Read more

Speaking to the U.K.'s Official Nintendo Magazine, Hollis said he believes Activision sees more value in the franchise's name than in the quality of the title. And he's concerned that the company will allow its "business decision" to get in the way.

"I imagine it's a business decision, isn't it?" Hollis said in an interview with Official Nintendo Magazine. "'This name is valuable, let's use … Read more

TinEye, a Web-crawling Google Chrome extension, has the job of locating an image's site of origin. While you are on a Web site, TinEye will open a gallery filled with the page's images. After selecting the image you want, TinEye will try to find it in their database of 1,647,128,150 images and their respective sites. Though this service would be very useful, it failed to come up with a satisfactory amount of results during testing.

After the quick installation, a little T icon is installed to the right-hand side of Chrome's address bar. To … Read more