Sweet (dis)SOLVE is a beverage sweetener made from organic sugar wrapped in a soluble organic starch that melts into the drink without adding calories, odor or taste. It was among the prize-winning projects on display at the second White House Science Fair, which seeks to inspire in math and science.

Obama joked with Downtown Magnets High School junior, Hayley Hoverter, 16, saying “tell me when I can buy stock.”

The president also mentioned Hayley and her project in his remarks following the tour, saying her project “potentially could save up to two million pounds of trash each year, and that’s just at Starbucks.”

When Hayley was six years old, her mother brought her along to work at Starbucks and the young girl found the volume of discarded sugar wrappers distressing.

“I was able to see firsthand, at a young age, the impact on the environment,” Hayley said in October after being named the Best Young Entrepreneur in the 2011 Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship National Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge.

More than 30 student teams representing 40 different competitions and organizations exhibited their projects at Tuesday’s event.

“I’ve said this many times — if we are recognizing athletic achievement, then we should also be recognizing academic achievement and science achievement,” said Obama, who regularly hosts championship-winning teams at the White House in a tradition dating back to the Reagan administration.

“If we invite the team that wins the Super Bowl to the White House, then we need to invite some science fair winners to the White House as well.”

(©2012 CBS Local Media, a division of CBS Radio Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Wire services contributed to this report.)

A symptom checker starts the process. Based on the symptoms that they’re having, the app will take them on a series of additional questions and direct them toward the kind of provider that they need to see for that particular problem.

Then the application also guides you to the nearest provider for the type of care you need. If it’s urgent care, you’ll be directed to a Texas Medclinic or other nearby offices.

The application was created by two emergency room physicians and launched in 2007.

About 40 percent of Americans are carrying around smartphones these days and people are demanding access to useful information on their personal devices. Texas Medclinic wants to be part of the trend.

The app, however, is no replacement for an emergency room.

“You know, if you’re having a serious medical emergency, you should call 9-1-1 and not download an app and look it up on your phone,” Texas MedClinic CEO Dr. David Gude said. “But outside of that, it gives people some good direction and good ideas.”

On a support forum for Verizon, users in California, Colorado and some other Midwest states are reporting a lack of connectivity.

Joanna Stern, Senior Reviews Editor at The Verge, tells KNX 1070 that Verizon has confirmed the outage.

According to Stern, within the past couple of months, Verizon has experienced a couple of these outages.

“We had one earlier in the month on Dec. 8, and then we had one back in April which was a full on 4G network failure. There was no 4G anywhere. It wasn’t like what we are seeing today with come people having [service],” she said.

HAWTHORNE (CBS) — NASA has selected Southern California’s SpaceX to launch the first commercial cargo run to the International Space Station.

Since the U.S. space shuttle program has ended, NASA must find an alternative method to deliver supplies to the astronauts still manning the space station.

Hawthorne-based SpaceX employs 1,600 people, and hopes to revive the aerospace industry in SoCal by moving into low earth space travel.

Garret Reisman is a former astronaut and manager of Space X’s Dragon Rider project. He says this is the beginning of a new era in space travel.

“This is going to be the first time that a spacecraft that’s built by a commercial company flies into space and docks at the International Space Station,” says Reisman. “This is something only space shuttles and Russian Soyuz spacecraft have done before.”

NASA says the launch of the Dragon space capsule will take place Feb. 7. at Cape Canaveral from a launch pad refurbished by SpaceX.

Technology bloggers are asking if our cellphones are spying on us after a security researcher said a piece of software hidden on millions of phones was recording virtually everything people do with them.

Amid a broad outcry, Sen. Al Franken (D- Minn.) is calling for an investigation. A class-action lawsuit has been filed against the software’s maker, Carrier IQ Inc. of Mountain View, Calif.

The software, which Carrier IQ says is used on some 150 million mobile devices, appears relatively innocuous. It does watch what owners of Sprint Nextel Corp. and AT&T Inc. smartphones do with them, including what people type and the numbers they dial. But it doesn’t seem to transmit every keystroke to the company. Instead, it kicks into action when there’s a problem, like a call that doesn’t go through, and it lets the phone company know.

“It is software that is developed in partnership with carriers with the intent to improve network performance. As far as we can tell, it meets this description in execution,” said Tim Wyatt, principal engineer at Lookout, a cellphone security company.

“In line with our privacy policy, we solely use CIQ software data to improve wireless network and service performance,” AT&T said in a statement.

Carrier IQ says the data its software gathers is stored by the phone companies or at Carrier IQ’s facilities. It doesn’t sell the data to third parties. Phone companies, of course, already are custodians of a wealth of private information, including whom you call, where you surf and what your text messages say.

The brouhaha started a few weeks ago, when a programmer named Trevor Eckhart documented Carrier IQ’s workings with videos on his blog. The software company threatened him with a lawsuit if he didn’t take the information down. The Electronic Frontier Foundation took on Eckhart’s case, and the company backed down.

Eckhart posted another video this week, showing Carrier IQ’s software logging keystrokes on an HTC EVO 3D from Sprint.

A central privacy worry is what kind of data Carrier IQ is retaining.

Andrew Coward, a Carrier IQ vice president, said the software doesn’t record every keystroke or send information about all of them back to the company. The only keystrokes it cares about are specific administrative commands, including those instructing the software to phone “home.” The rest it discards, Coward said.

“We never expected to need the content of SMS messages, so we didn’t code for it,” Coward told The Associated Press in an interview.

Apple Inc. has said it has stopped supporting Carrier IQ in most of its products. Separately, the company came under fire last year over location-tracking features of the iPhone and made a software change to keep data on users’ movements for less time.

For now, there’s no easy way to uninstall the Carrier IQ software without unsanctioned third-party software. Coward said it is “too early to tell” whether the company will make any substantial changes to the software because of the uproar.

(TM and © Copyright 2011 CBS Local Media, a division of CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2011 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

A recent survey conducted by CareerBuilder reports that nearly half of U.S. workers have plans to shop on Cyber Monday, but says about 60 percent of companies plan to block internet access.

And California-based Robert Half Technology – a research firm – says another 23 percent of bosses will be monitoring computer use on Cyber Monday to search for people who are shopping instead of working.

Meantime, ShopperTrak reported that the holiday shopping season started out strong with Black Friday sales up over 6.6 percent as compared to the same day in 2010.

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» Consumer Savings Expert Shares Cyber Monday Tips

KNX 1070’s Kim Marriner reports that the sophisticated gadgetry – developed by military contractor Raytheon – will be installed in 2,500 patrol cars.

The cost, about $20 million, will allow for faster response times and permit deputies to get data on suspects instantly.

In addition, high-tech computer systems will allows deputies to pull up mug shots, check the FBI database, and even get fingerprint information on the spot.

In the past, this technology was only available to analysts in the sheriff’s stations.

Several other policing agencies are currently in talks with Raytheon to obtain similar technology.

The material, which is made up of 99.99 percent air, acts like a solid and has a”micro-lattice cellular” architecture that allows it to retain its shape.

(credit: UCI)

Researchers at UCI, Caltech and Hughes Research Labs released a photo of the small cube of metal which can be seen sitting atop a dandelion fluff, but not weighing it down.

“The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than human hair,” said Hughes Research Lab researcher Dr. Tobias Schaedler.

He is the lead author for the study, which was printed in this week’s edition of the science journal “Nature.”

Another Hughes researcher, William Carter, pointed to the Eiffel Tower and Golden Gate Bridge as architectural examples of incredibly light and weight-efficient structures.

“We are revolutionizing lightweight materials by bringing this concept to the nano and micro scales,” he said.

The new material was developed under a research grant the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

It will be usable for ultra-lightweight batteries or devices that need lightweight sound, vibration or energy-absorbing uses.

(©2011 CBS Local Media, a division of CBS Radio Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Wire services contributed to this report.)

The Internet’s most popular — and powerful — search engine will soon expand its search index to include user comments on Facebook as part of Google’s traditional search results.

While private users will still be protected, any comments made on Facebook forms on other websites or public pages within the social networking site will be indexed and open for all the world to see.

The controversial change comes as Google looks to expand its reach to any user content currently hiding from its all-seeing search robots — usually in comment systems like the one used on Facebook and other popular sites.

While Google has pledged to take “precautions to avoid performing any task on a site that could result in executing an unintended user action,” not everyone is cheering its latest indexing tool.

Developers are concerned that the new effort could disrupt confidence for users who may feel uncomfortable leaving comments on their respective websites without revealing them to Google — and the rest of the Web community.

In issuing the proclamation Saturday, the governor wrote that the products that Jobs introduced “changed the way the entire world communicates.”

The commemoration comes the same day Apple is planning a memorial for Jobs at Stanford University. The Wall Street Journal reports invitations have gone out to Silicon Valley luminaries and other people close to Jobs.

Apple tells the newspaper that the Sunday evening event is private.

Jobs, who co-founded Apple Inc. and was the mastermind behind popular gadgets such as the iPhone and the iPad, died Oct. 5 at age 56 after struggling for years with pancreatic cancer.

The journal reports a small private funeral was held a week ago.

(© Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

But when it comes to unannounced Apple products, the fun never stops. Some have even suggested that Apple might have more than a single iPhone ready to go. That was the gist of a note put out earlier this month by J.P. Morgan Analyst Mark Moskowitz who expects two new smartphones this year. Fueling the fire was none other than former U.S. vice president (and more importantly, Apple board member Al Gore, who also hinted last week that Apple may launch two iPhones. His exact quote: “Not to mention the new iPhones coming out next month,” Gore said during the Discovery Invest Leadership Summit in South Africa.

One big difference this time around: No Steve Jobs on hand to preside over the festivities. With Jobs’ resignation as CEO, this product debut will mark CEO Tim Cook’s official coming out party. And barring a last-minute bait-and-switch, this promises to be quite a big deal as iPhone 5 will be the first Apple device available on the three biggest carriers in the U.S.–AT&T, Verizon and Sprint. (No official word yet on Sprint but several reports recently confirm that an announcement is in the offing.)

The press invites sent off the predictable media scrum as the rumors swirling around what may – or may not – get packed into the next iPhone have been building since late summer. Benefiting from the intense speculation, shares of Apple have continued to soar. Despite several Dow-wide market meltdowns this summer, the company’s stock remains near its 52-week high and was hovering around $403 by early afternoon.

Only one big downside on the horizon: Now that the iPhone 5 is about to become the real deal, how will all the rumor-mongers fill that missing void in their lives? Ah, of course: iPhone 6.

Currently, your friends can add your name to a photo without your consent or knowledge. You can remove it later, but only after lots of others may have seen the embarrassing shots. Now, you can insist on pre-approval.

This won’t affect whether your friends can add a photo of you, only whether your name is attached to it. That affects how easily people can search for the photo based on your name.

Facebook said Tuesday that the change is in response to user requests.

Instead of going to a separate settings page, the new controls will be on users’ pages, next to the posts and photos they share.

The changes will start appearing Thursday.

(© Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

It’s the latest effort to combat a problem that has grown with the advent of smart phones and social networking sites.

Last year a convicted child molester used a cell phone smuggled into prison to search his victim’s Facebook and MySpace web pages, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in announcing the agreement with Facebook. The inmate then sent sketches to the 17-year-old victim’s home.

Though he hadn’t seen her in at least seven years, the inmate used photos from her social networking pages to accurately draw the clothes she wore and the way she styled her hair, the department said.

“Victims who fought hard to put their offenders behind bars are being re-victimized,” said department spokeswoman Dana Toyama. “It’s evolving as Facebook has become a huge social networking site and a place for gang members to talk and coordinate inside and outside prison. This is just one example of what they can do.”

Inmates are permitted to retain Facebook profiles that were created before they went to prison, according to the department. But Facebook will disable the account if it is used while the inmate is behind bars.

Prison officials said the problem has grown worse because of the growth in smuggled cell phones. Six years ago the department confiscated 261 devices, compared to 10,760 last year and 7,284 in the first half of this year.

Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said prison officials’ best response is to keep smart phones and other Internet devices out of prisons.

“We will disable accounts reported to us that are violating relevant U.S. laws or regulations or inmate accounts that are updated by someone on the outside,” he said in an e-mailed statement. “We will also take appropriate action against anyone who misuses Facebook to threaten or harass.”

Noyes said Facebook has been cooperating with law enforcement for some time whenever it is notified of problems, but Toyama said California had previously asked Facebook to remove inmates’ pages without success.

“We’ve really only been successful in taking down one account so far. After this, we’re looking to be able to do this more,” Toyama said.

She said the Federal Bureau of Prisons first announced Monday that Facebook had agreed to take down any account that prison officials can confirm has been updated while an inmate is in prison. The bureau’s National Gang Intelligence Center also reported a growing problem of inmates with active Facebook accounts, Toyama said, but she could not provide a copy of the report because it is a confidential law enforcement bulletin.

The California corrections department’s gang and victims’ services investigators routinely monitor social networking sites for inmates’ postings or communications on their behalf, Toyama said. The department said it has found numerous times when inmates threatened victims or made unwanted sexual advances.

Earlier this year, they reported investigating an inmate they suspected was posting messages to his mother and others from behind bars. They confirmed the inmate had a smuggled cell phone, but Toyama said they have not confirmed that he was using it to update his Facebook account.

(© Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

But amid such growing popularity, security experts are now reporting that attacks on smartphones are growing fast — and attackers are becoming smarter about developing new techniques.

“We’re in the experimental stage of mobile malware where the bad guys are starting to develop their business models,” said Kevin Mahaffey, co-founder of Lookout Inc., a San Francisco-based maker of mobile security software.

Last week, security researchers uncovered yet another strain of malicious software aimed at smartphones that run Google’s popular Android operating system. The application not only logs details about incoming and outgoing phone calls, it also records those calls.

That came a month after researchers discovered a security hole in Apple Inc.’s iPhones, which prompted the German government to warn Apple about the urgency of the threat.

Wrong-doers have infected PCs with malicious software, or malware, for decades. Now, they are fast moving to smartphones as the devices become a vital part of everyday life.

Some 38 percent of American adults now own an iPhone, BlackBerry or other mobile phone that runs the Android, Windows or WebOS operating systems, according to data from Nielsen. That’s up from just 6 percent who owned a smartphone in 2007 when the iPhone was released and catalyzed the industry. The smartphone’s usefulness, allowing people to organize their digital lives with one device, is also its allure to criminals.

All at once, smartphones have become wallets, email lockboxes, photo albums and Rolodexes. And because owners are directly billed for services bought with smartphones, they open up new angles for financial attacks. The worst programs cause a phone to rack up unwanted service charges, record calls, intercept text messages and even dump emails, photos and other private content directly onto criminals’ servers.

Evidence of this hacker invasion is starting to emerge.

– Lookout says it now detects thousands of attempted infections each day on mobile phones running its security software. In January, there were just a few hundred detections a day. The number of detections is nearly doubling every few months. As many as 1 million people were hit by mobile malware in the first half of 2011.

– Google Inc. has removed about 100 malicious applications from its Android Market app store. One particularly harmful app was downloaded more than 260,000 times before it was removed. Android is the world’s most popular smartphone operating software with more than 135 million users worldwide.

– Symantec Corp., the world’s biggest security software maker, is also seeing a jump. Last year, the company identified just five examples of malware unique to Android. So far this year, it’s seen 19. Of course, that number pales compared with the hundreds of thousands of new strains targeting PCs every year, but experts say it’s only a matter of time before criminals catch up.

“Bad guys go where the money is,” said Charlie Miller, principal research consultant with the Accuvant Inc. security firm, and a prominent hacker of mobile devices. “As more and more people use phones and keep data on phones, and PCs aren’t as relevant, the bad guys are going to follow that. The bad guys are smart. They know when it makes sense to switch.”

When it comes to security, smartphones share a problem with PCs: Infections are typically the responsibility of the user to fix, if the problem is discovered at all.

The emergence in early July of a previously unknown security hole in Apple Inc.’s iPhones and iPads cast a spotlight on mobile security. Users downloaded a program that allowed them to run unauthorized programs on their devices. But the program could also be used to help criminals co-opt iPhones. Apple has since issued a fix.

It was the second time this year that the iPhone’s security was called into question. In April the company changed its handling of location data after a privacy outcry that landed an executive in front of Congress. Researchers had discovered that iPhones stored the data for a year or more in unencrypted form, making them vulnerable to hacking. Apple CEO Steve Jobs emerged from medical leave to personally address the issue.

The iPhone gets outsize attention because it basically invented the consumer smartphone industry when it was introduced in 2007. But Apple doesn’t license its software to other phone manufacturers. Google gives Android to phone makers for free. So, Android phones are growing faster. As a result, Google’s Android Market is a crucial pathway for hacking attacks. The app store is a lightly curated online bazaar for applications that, unlike Apple’s App Store, doesn’t require that developers submit their programs for pre-approval.

Lookout says it has seen more unique strains of Android malware in the past month than it did in all of last year. One strain seen earlier this year, called DroidDream, was downloaded more than 260,000 times before Google removed it, though additional variants keep appearing.

Lookout says about 100 apps have been removed from the Android Market so far, a figure Google didn’t dispute.

Malicious applications often masquerade as legitimate ones, such as games, calculators or pornographic photos and videos. They can appear in advertising links inside other applications. Their moneymaking schemes include new approaches that are impossible on PCs.

One recent malicious app secretly subscribed victims up to a service that sends quizzes via text message. The pay service was charged to the victims’ phone bills, which is presumably how the criminals got paid. They may have created the service or been hired by the creator to sign people up. Since malware can intercept text messages, it’s likely the victims never saw the messages — just the charges.

A different piece of malware logs a person’s incoming text messages and replies to them with spam and malicious links. Most mobile malware, however, keep their intentions hidden. Some apps set up a connection between the phone and a server under a criminal’s control, which is used to send instructions.

Google points out that Android security features are designed to limit the interaction between applications and a user’s data, and developers can be blocked. Users also are guilty of blithely click through warnings about what personal information an application will access.

Malicious programs for the iPhone have been rare. In large part, that’s because Apple requires that it examine each application before it goes online. Still, the recent security incidents underline the threat even to the most seemingly secure devices.

A pair of computer worms targeting the iPhone appeared in 2009. Both affected only iPhones that were modified, or “jailbroken,” to run unauthorized programs.
And Apple has dealt with legitimate applications that overreached and collected more personal data than they should have, which led to the Cupertino, Calif.-based company demanding changes.

“Apple takes security very seriously,” spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said in July. “We have a very thorough approval process and review every app. We also check the identities of every developer and if we ever find anything malicious, the developer will be removed from the iPhone Developer Program and their apps can be removed from the App Store.”

A criminal doesn’t even need to tailor his attacks to a mobile phone. Standard email-based “phishing” attacks — tricking people into visiting sites that look legitimate — work well on mobile users. In fact, mobile users can be more susceptible to phishing attacks than PC users.

The small screens make it hard to see the full Internet address of a site you’re visiting, and websites and mobile applications working in tandem train users to perform the risky behavior of entering passwords after following links, new research from the University of California at Berkeley has found.

The study found that the links within applications could be convincingly imitated, according to the authors, Adrienne Porter Felt, a Ph.D. student, and David Wagner, a computer science professor.

They found that “attackers can spoof legitimate applications with high accuracy, suggesting that the risk of phishing attacks on mobile platforms is greater than has previously been appreciated.”

A separate study released earlier this year by Trusteer, a Boston-based software and services firm focused on banking security, found that mobile users who visit phishing sites are three times more likely to submit their usernames and passwords than desktop PC users.

Mobile users are “always on” and respond to emails faster, in the first few hours before phishing sites are taken down, and email formats make it hard to tell who’s sending a message, Trusteer found.

Still, mobile users have an inherent advantage over PC users: Mobile software is being written with the benefit of decades of perspective on the flaws that have made PCs insecure. But smartphone demand is exploding, with market research firm IDC predicting that some 472 million smartphones will be shipped this year, compared with 362 million PCs. As a result, the design deterrents aren’t likely to be enough to keep crooks away from the trough.

“It’s going to be a problem,” Miller said. “Everywhere people have gone, bad guys have followed.”

(TM and © Copyright 2011 CBS Local Media, a division of CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2011 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

The free App, available on iTunes, includes news, sports, entertainment and weather, along with live audio and streaming video clips to keep viewers up-to-date while on-the-go.

Users can also get information on the latest money-saving deals around LA and guides that will ensure a great night on the town or day with the kids.

The App connects users not only to CBS2 and KCAL9 News, but also to KNX 1070 News Radio and KFWB News Talk 980.

To download the new CBS Los Angeles App, visit iTunes or search for “CBS LA” in the App Store.

The automaker is scrapping CD players in its new vehicle models and opting to instead install USB sockets for iPods and other digital music players.

Ford says all of its new cars will have a computer hub, which will allow drivers to access their music libraries from the Internet.

Once he took over women’s email accounts, George Bronk searched their folders for nude or semi-nude photographs or videos sent to their husbands or boyfriends and distributed the images to their contact list, prosecutors said.

The emails went to families, friends and co-workers. Women in 17 states, the District of Columbia and England were victimized.

“This case serves as a stark example of what occurs in so-called cyberspace. It has very real consequences,” Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Lawrence Brown said. “The intrusion of one’s profile is no different than intruding one’s home.”

Bronk, 24, pleaded guilty in January to charges that included computer intrusion, false impersonation and possession of child pornography.

Brown sentenced him to four years in state prison for the charges related to the Facebook and email offenses, and added eight more months for charges related to child pornography.

Bronk’s attorney, Monica Lynch, said her client took responsibility for his actions and showed remorse. She had sought a sentence of one year in local jail with probation afterward, or two years in state prison with no probation.

Brown based his decision on a sentencing recommendation by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Bronk was living in the Sacramento suburb of Citrus Heights with his parents in December 2009 when he began scanning Facebook with the intent of taking over email accounts. The practice continued until last September.

He looked for email accounts on Facebook pages then gleaned enough personal information from postings to answer basic Internet security questions, such as the name of an elementary school or favorite color.

After he changed passwords and took over accounts, Bronk would search folders for compromising photos and distribute them publicly, prosecutors said.

He even taunted some of the women in online exchanges and coerced at least one into sending him more explicit photographs by threatening to distribute the pictures he already had.

Danielle Piscak, 22, of Parkland, Wash., told The Associated Press earlier this year that she was able to contact the person who had hacked into her email account and ask why he was doing it. She said Bronk’s reply was, “Because it’s funny.”

There was no current phone listing for Piscak, and a Facebook message seeking reaction to the sentence was not immediately returned.

The case illustrates the vulnerability of all Internet users, said prosecuting attorney Robert Morgester of the state attorney general’s office.

“The victims we went to said `I had very robust passwords.’ But it didn’t matter how robust the password was if the recovery question is easy,” he said. “Lost your password? What’s your favorite color or what high school did you go to? Or what’s your dog’s name? And he was able to glean that information from social media.”

Investigators used information from Bronk’s confiscated computer to email questionnaires to 3,200 of his Internet contacts, asking if they had been victimized. Forty-six women said they had.

Investigators also said they found 172 email files with explicit photographs on Bronk’s computer.

Lynch has said her client was immature, unemployed and bored while he cared for his ailing parents.

His parents declined comment after the sentencing.

At a hearing earlier this year, his mother, Joyce Bronk, said her son told them he needed help for a drinking problem then began attending Alcoholics Anonymous and taking classes to be trained as an emergency medical technician.

“This was an Internet persona he created when he was a drunk,” she said at the time as a way to explain his actions.

Authorities began the investigation after one victim called Connecticut State Police, which referred the complaint to the California Highway Patrol.

Victims turned up in Alabama, Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Virginia and Washington.

Bronk was arrest in October.

He had hoped to become a paramedic but will not be able to because he will have to register as a sex offender as a result of his crimes, his attorney said.

(© Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

When you buy a $50 deal on Groupon for $20, the merchant only makes about $10 and may possibly earn your future business. Groupon collects the other $10.

The consumer really is the winner – but only the company can deliver on its promise.

“‘Are you with Groupon,’” Christine Remo was asked, “and I say yes and she says, “‘What a nightmare.’”

Remo of Newport Beach purchased two $20 Groupons — a $100 value — from The Paper House, a stationary store in Costa Mesa.

“I liked personalized stationary so I thought, ‘I’d use something like that!’” Remo said.

She placed the order for custom-made note cards in person and was told her stationary would be ready in three weeks. It was perfect timing, since part of her order was a gift for a friend.

“So three weeks went by and 4 weeks went by and I thought, ‘Where’s my stationary? So I started calling and again I couldn’t get any answer on the telephone.’”

In fact, Christine was never able to reach The Paper House by phone. When she drove 15 miles to the store’s location to inquire about her order, she says she was told it wouldn’t be ready any time soon.

“My jaw dropped and I said, ‘Months? What do you mean months? I was told three weeks,’ and she said, ‘Oh no…we must have gotten a thousand responses from Groupon.’”

Remo feels The Paper House should have been up front with her about the overwhelming demand created by the Groupon deal when she originally placed the order.

“Don’t tell someone that it’s going to be three weeks. Tell them, ‘I’ve got to tell you, this could be a problem…let me explain what happened.’ I would have been more than happy to wait…just tell me.”

Remo filed a complaint that day to the Better Business Bureau which gave the company an “F” rating for seven outstanding complaints. Within days she received her order but feels badly for the dozens of other customers still waiting and blogging about it.

“When I went on to Yelp it was a nightmare,” Remo said.

Not only did customers complain on Yelp…so did the owner of The Paper House, who declined to speak with us on camera.

She wrote that participating in Groupon was the worst business decision she’d ever made…that she was ill-advised by Groupon when they estimated she’d sell 300 deals but sold 1,018 instead.

Business journalist Rocky Agrawal says The Paper House is not alone. Groupon encourages merchants to sell as many vouchers as possible.

“For a lot of service businesses it can be really hard to fill the demand. I’ve heard of a story of a salon in Austin that used Living Social which is a Groupon competitor. They sold somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 vouchers for the salon,” Agrawal said.

Too many spa treatments to handle…it would have taken them 2- 3 years to fulfill the vouchers. The salon closed its doors.

“If you’re calling up expecting to get a salon appointment in the next week…it’s not going to happen….so you have to be prepared for that,” he said.

If you find yourself in this situation, shopping expert, Michele Ashamalla says Groupon is great about refunding vouchers or giving back credit toward future deals. She also recommends taking the time to research a company on sites like Yelp and Google and encourages reading through fine print carefully for restrictions and expiration dates.

“I think people feel pressured to buy it because of the time crunch,” Ashmalla said. “There’s a psychological feel like, I better get in there.”

Christine Remo also recommends asking friends and neighbors if they liked doing business with a local merchant before purchasing the deal.

“There’s no such thing as the last good deal and don’t be afraid of losing the deal because you’re taking a little extra time to do some investigation,” Remo said. “It’s not worth it. I mean I finally got my stationary but look what I had to go through!”

The Paper House still does not have an operating business phone.

We called the owner’s cell phone, who explained customers can email or walk in to do business.

She also says they are still filling orders from last September’s Groupon.

We should mention that Christine Remo was pleased with how her personalized stationary turned out, once she picked it up.

Groupon did not respond to our email request for an interview.

Under rates introduced Tuesday, households that want both DVDs and Internet streaming will have to buy separate plans totaling at least $16 per month. It’s effective immediately for new members and Sept. 1 for existing subscribers.

Netflix Inc. had been including both options in a single package that started at $10 per month.

The $8 monthly price for only Internet streaming remains unchanged.

This marks the first time that Netflix hasn’t bundled online streaming with its DVD-rental plans since it began sending video over high-speed Internet connections in 2007. Internet streaming provides more immediate gratification, but typically doesn’t include the latest releases.

(© Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

The partnership announced Tuesday calls for Facebook and Time Warner to use their clout to raise awareness about bullying and encourage more people to report the abuses when they see them.

Facebook’s participation reflects a growing recognition that its online social network consisting of more than 750 million people has become an outlet for harassment as well as friendship.

The anti-bullying campaign will be waged on the Internet, TV and radio and Time Warner magazines People, Time and Sports Illustrated. It’s being billed as “Stop Bullying: Speak Up,” a theme that Time Warner’s Cartoon Network has been trumpeting since last year.

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The new feature will also have a group chat function.

Facebook had only said Zuckerberg would be announcing “something awesome” Wednesday.

Wednesday’s announcement comes a week after the launch of Google Plus, which is only available by invitation.

The plans will cost between $30 and $80 a month, ranging from two to 10 gigabytes of data usage.

If you go over your monthly allotment, you’ll be hit with a $10 surcharge for each gigabyte.

Verizon says the new plans will apply to new and existing customers who are upgrading to a Smartphone.

AT&T and T-Mobile have already scraped unlimited data options.

The pop star and the new management of Myspace will explain their ideas at a press conference Aug. 17.

Irvine, Calif.-based online ad network Specific Media said Wednesday afternoon that it had bought Myspace from News Corp. The deal was for $35 million, mostly in stock.

Hours later, Specific Media said in a second release that Timberlake had become a part owner and would be a creative force behind the social network’s revival.

Timberlake wasn’t mentioned in the deal’s initial announcement because his partnership agreement hadn’t been completed until just before Specific Media’s Myspace purchase was made public.

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Based on papers filed on Friday, Zynga Inc. hopes to raise up to $1 billion in an initial public offering.

This amount will likely change. That’s because its bankers will now determine how many shares should be sold and at what price.

It’s the fourth and likely biggest in a crop of high-valued Internet IPOs recently filed or expected soon. LinkedIn Corp. and Internet radio service Pandora Inc. were first to go public. Daily deals site Groupon Inc. has also filed to go public soon.

Zynga’s filing follows LinkedIn’s sizzling stock market debut last month. Pandora also had a strong IPO but its shares later declined. Unlike Pandora, though, Zynga had a profit last year.

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Stone, 37, said Tuesday on his blog that he will work with the company “for many years to come,” but that the most effective use of his time now is to “get out of the way” of Twitter’s crew and leadership team until he’s called upon to be of some specific use.

Stone says he plans to focus on helping schools, nonprofits and company advisory boards. He’s also relaunching Obvious Corp. with fellow Twitter co-founder Evan Williams to develop new projects.

The move comes as Twitter has been trying to build upon its popularity to make more money by selling more ads. The privately held company doesn’t disclose its finances, but research firm eMarketer Inc. estimates Twitter will bring in advertising revenue of about $150 million this year.

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