Washington, Sept 9: Move over drugs, smoking and even gambling, for a new compulsion has hit today’s youth – Internet addiction.

The new finding will make mental health professionals face a new affliction, besides compulsive gambling or even the ‘age-old’ smoking and drug addiction.

Louise Nadeau, from Universite de Montreal’s Department of Psychology, is now investigating this newly found compulsive affliction, in which large number of people are continuously hooked on to the Internet for hours.

Tokyo - In high-tech Japan, not only programmers provide protection from viruses and other computer bugs, but also the gods.

At Tokyo's Kanda-Myojin Shinto shrine, the faithful can bring their computer and have the priests use centuries-old ceremonies to ask the gods for help and protection for their computer, a shrine spokesman said Friday.

The shrine is located near the Akihabara quarter, Tokyo's technology hub and popular destination for geeks and lovers of the latest electronic gadgets.

London, Aug 27: Scientists at Carnegie Mellon have found a way to thwart hack attacks that intercept data passing from a personal computer to a website.

Since the "man-in-the-middle" attacks involve hi-tech hackers who have total control over data streams, such activities are hard to spot.

The defence mechanism involves sites designated as trusted "notaries".

Software compares responses received by trusted websites and tells users if it looks like data is being intercepted.

Washington, August 26: Carnegie Mellon University experts say that they have developed a low-cost system that can reduce the risk of eavesdropping on Internet communications.

The researchers say that their system, called Perspectives, can also offer protection against attacks related to a recently disclosed software flaw in the Domain Name System (DNS), the Internet phone book used to route messages between computers.

Hamburg - It's a bit like buying property with just a building frame on it. The dimensions are predetermined, but what kind of heating to use, wood floors or tiles, how the windows should look - that's all left for the customer to decide. Barebones PCs work on the same principle. They contain only the case, power supply and motherboard. Everything else is customer selected.

While the term "Barebones" technically applies to all PCs that do not come with a complete preinstalled set-up, the term has come to take on a different meaning. Tom Seiffert from the hardwaremaker Shuttle near Hamburg notes that the term now refers to PCs with a distinctively small physical profile regardless of whether they come fully configured.

Bonn, Germany - The German Federal Agency for Security in Information Technology (BSI) in Bonn is warning about a new and especially tricky security hole affecting internet users. The hole is related to the Domain Name System (DNS) and hence potentially affects all web users.

The DNS translates the names typed by the user into a numeric-based IP address. It's has been no secret for some time that hackers can manipulate DNS servers to redirect users to different sites without the users' knowledge.

"But now there are malicious programs that actually exploit this hole in the DNS," says BSI's Matthias Gaertner. "And unfortunately, not all providers have patched the hole on their DNS servers."