Cody Taylor

Hugh Pickens writes “Dr Brent Coker, professor of Department of Management and Marketing at Melbourne University, says employees who surf the internet for leisure during working hours are more productive than those who don’t. A study of 300 office workers found 70 percent of people who use the internet at work engage in Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing (WILB). ‘People who do surf the internet for fun at work — within a reasonable limit of less than 20 per cent of their total time in the office — are more productive by about nine per cent than those who don’t,’ said Coker. ‘People need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration. Think back to when you were in class listening to a lecture — after about 20 minutes your concentration probably went right down, yet after a break your concentration was restored. It’s the same in the workplace.’ However, Coker warns that excessive time spent surfing the internet could have the reverse effect.”

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thomsomc writes “Joe Stewart from the Conficker Working Group has created an eye chart that allows for online identification of Conficker B and C infections. Using basic knowledge of the blacklisting that Conficker employs to avoid attempting to infect IPs that belong to popular Anti-Virus and security firms (including Microsoft), the group whipped up this very simple test to see if you can load content from the various pages. If you can see all of the images, you’re more than likely Conficker-free. According to Honeynet, ‘This detection method should be more reliable than network scanning based tests. Happy scanning!'” Related: Tech Fragments notes in passing that nothing much seems to have come of conficker’s dreaded April 1 deadline.

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gballard writes “After the constant furore raised by rights groups, ISPs and concerned citizens over the Australian Government’s planned ‘internet filter’, it seems that Australia Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is finally backing down. In a recent interview, the Minister conceded that many of the sites blocked by the filter were legitimate businesses (including, in one case, a Queensland dentist’s homepage) and changed his story on whether the planned filter would restrict ‘Refused Classification’ websites or use the broader (and more vague) criterion of ‘prohibited’. It’s a positive step, but as the article above suggests, at the moment it’s only one crack in the defenses of a censorship plan with broad ramifications for Australian internet users.”

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Adobe Illustrator is a powerful tool for illustrating various elements one can use for web pages and print design. However, it’s important to know what to do in order to powerfully use its tools and achieve certain effects. Let’s take a look at some of the best and Fresh Adobe Illustrator tutorials we’ve found in the Web so far.

The European Commissioner for Consumers today called out Facebook, Web advertisers, and Internet companies of all kinds to get better about transparency, privacy, and data protection—or regulators will step in.

According to Web analytics firm StatCounter, Firefox 3 has finally surpassed the popularity of Internet Explorer 7 in Europe. Internet Explorer’s total marketshare across all versions, however, still exceeds that of Firefox.

If you’re running your own web site, or planning to, you probably know exactly what kind of space, bandwidth, and features you’ll need, along with a price point. HostMonk finds web hosts based on those preferences.

Google on Tuesday is expected to announce more details of its venture capital fund, including a 0 million investment in the first year, according to a report Monday on The Wall Street Journal’s Web site that cited people familiar with the matter.

Karate Sid writes “An Irish adult website has blogged about the Irish domain registry banning adult domain names, including porn.ie and pornography.ie. The IEDR’s reasoning is that the words ‘porn’ and ‘pornography’ are offensive and immoral. Of interest is how Sex.ie took legal action against the IEDR — and proved that neither word is offensive — yet still lost the case, as the IEDR are the highest authority in Ireland when it comes to deciding what is and isn’t an offensive domain.”

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This article presents 30 new and fresh design blogs that are worth checking out. Weblogs featured here discuss web, graphic, and print design. There’s an OPML file to download at the bottom, if you want to import them into your RSS feed.