How do I change the name servers for my domain name?

The service you purchased may include such features as domain forwarding, email, and a web site. Replacing Yahoo!'s name servers will render these features inactive. However, changing your name servers will not automatically cancel your service. You will continue to manage your WHOIS contact information through Yahoo!, and Yahoo! will continue to renew your annual domain registration.

Please note: Any changes that you make to your advanced DNS settings can interrupt your service. If you are not an advanced user, we strongly recommend that you not change these settings.

You can change your name servers using the "Change Name Servers" area of your Domain Control Panel.

To access the Domain Control Panel:

1. Sign in to your Business Control Panel. (If you have not yet signed in with your Yahoo! ID and password, you'll be prompted to do so here.)
2. Once signed in, you will see modules for each of your domain names on the "Manage My Services" page. Select the "Domain Control Panel" link that corresponds to the domain whose record you wish to edit.

To change name servers:

1. Click the "Manage Advanced DNS Settings" link on your Domain Control Panel.
2. Click the "Change Name Servers" button.
3. Do one of the following:
- Enter additional name server host names in the "Additional" fields.
- Replace the primary and secondary name server host names with those of your new domain name host. (You may not need to enter the IP addresses of the name servers. In most cases, only the host name of the name servers is required.)
4. Click the "Submit" button.


You'll return to the "Advanced DNS Settings" page, and your new name server will appear in the name servers list. While your changes will appear in the name servers within minutes, please be aware that it can take up to 72 hours for new records to propagate to all name servers on the Internet.

You can restore your name servers to their default settings on the "Advanced DNS Settings" page.

To restore name servers to their default settings:

1. Click the "Manage Advanced DNS Settings" link on your Domain Control Panel.
2. In the name servers section, click the "Reset to Default" button.
3. Confirm your choice by clicking "Reset to Default."

You'll return to the "Advanced DNS Settings" page, and your name servers will have been restored to Yahoo!'s default settings. While your changes will appear in the name servers within minutes, please be aware that it can take up to 72 hours for new records to propagate to all name servers on the Internet.

Tip: If you decide to change your name servers, and you currently pay for a service other than Yahoo! Domains, you may want to consider downgrading your plan so as not to pay for services you have rendered inactive.

source : help.yahoo.com

Twitter Gets MMS Photo Sharing in the UK

Allowing users to tweet out their pics from their mobile phones

Twitter may be slowing down in the US, but it's showing no signs of stopping elsewhere. One feature, which seems to drive growth as much as anything else, is its mobility. Since its inception, users have been able to send tweets via SMS, but Twitter is now taking it to the next level with the announcement of a brand new feature, tweets, and photosharing via MMS in partnership with Orange UK.

“Today, not only has Orange UK turned on Twitter SMS, but it has added a first-of-its-kind special enhancement. Orange UK users can also send picture messages (MMS) to 86444 in addition to text messages because of a site that Orange UK has created called Snapshot,” Kevin Thau, the head of Twitter's mobile department, writes. “Twitter does not charge for this service. It's just like sending and receiving messages with your friends — your carrier's standard messaging rates apply.”

Although, at one point, it looked like Twitter was ditching the SMS feature for good, texting tweets is making a comeback thanks to a number of new deals with carriers around the world. In the UK, users could already send tweets via SMS with Vodafone and O2, by sending a text message to 86444. Now, Twitter has also added Orange to the list and the feature is available through the same shortcode.

But the second part of the new partnership is a world first, as users can now send in photos to be shared on Twitter by using MMS. The photos themselves will be hosted by Orange and the accompanying tweet will link back to them. The only drawback is the fact that the service isn't completely free, as users still have to pay for the MMS at the standard rates. This feature could be rolled out in other parts of the world eventually, but seeing the service coming from Orange not Twitter, there are no guarantees that it will.

source : news.softpedia.com

Teen's Facebook update gets robbery charges dropped

Robbery charges against a New York teenager were dropped after the district attorney learned of a Facebook update he made at the time of the crime. This sounds like good news, but how does the DA know he was the one sitting in front of the computer at the time?

Most of the stories we report that involve people being noticed for their Internet activities at home have an unhappy ending. In the case of New Yorker Rodney Bradford, however, a Facebook posting made from his father's apartment turned into his get-out-of-jail-free card. Though Bradford's story is being jubilantly reported as a victory for Internet-addicted youth everywhere, it also raises questions about how much law enforcement should trust what's posted online.

Bradford, a 19-year-old Brooklyn resident, was arrested last month for allegedly robbing a man at gunpoint. This, in itself, was not a very newsworthy event—until his defense lawyer discovered that Bradford had made an update to his Facebook profile at the time of the robbery. Bradford had insisted that he was at his father's Harlem apartment at the time, and that the update was made from there. When the district attorney verified the claims with Bradford's father and stepmother and the IP information with Facebook, the charges against Bradford were dropped.

A spokesperson for the Brooklyn District Attorney confirmed to the New York Times that the Facebook update played a part in the charges being dropped. "The prosecution contacted Facebook. We were told of this alibi and we contacted people, researched and discovered that it was accurate," Jonah Bruno said.

This sounds like a happy ending for Bradford, but it's obvious to everyone—including Bradford's attorney—that the Facebook posting could have been made by someone else, and there would be no way to truly verify who was sitting in front of the computer at the time. Bradford's attorney brushes this technicality off as a "level of criminal genius that you would not expect from a young boy like this," but it doesn't take much of a genius to leave yourself logged in on someone else's machine (in fact, quite the opposite). A report circulated in September about a robber who decided to log into his own Facebook account at the victim's house during the robbing and forgot to log out—given that level of stupidity, it's not hard to imagine leaving yourself logged in at your own father's apartment.

John Jay College of Criminal Justice law instructor Joseph Pollini agrees—he told the Times that prosecutors should take more time to review the evidence before dropping charges thanks to an Internet posting. "Some of the brightest people on the Internet are teenagers. They know the Internet better than a lot of people. Why? Because they use it all the time," he said.

Law enforcement is facing this issue much more frequently these days. It's not just about blaming your cat for downloading child porn anymore—anyone who wants to do so can easily create alibis online with the help of friends or family, and it doesn't take an experienced hacker to figure out how.

source : arstechnica.com

Domain Name Yahoo

Yahoo will register your domains' names for under $10 a year, though as of
this writing, Yahoo is having a sale on domains for $2.99 per year. That's a
lot cheaper than some registrars I've seen that are still trying to charge
$20 or more just for domains.

Once you get your domain registered, you still need to host it somewhere.
Again, Yahoo has a simple answer, or several simple answers, in its
Geocities service. You can plunk down your domains for free at Yahoo
Geocities, but you'll have ads. For a nominal fee ($4.95 per month) you can
get 500 MB storage and 25 GB per month transfer -- that's more than enough
for most starter sites.

source : yahoo-domain-name-yahoo-hosting.blogspot.com

Yahoo Buys OMG.com Domain Name for $80,000

Domain Name Wire reported the sale last week on its weekly Sedo sales wrap, but we didn’t know the buyer at the time.

OMG.com, which commonly stands for “Oh My God” in shorthand and texting, does not currently resolve to a web site. As readers point out in the comments below, Yahoo has a popular celebrity gossip web site at omg.yahoo.com.

Yahoo is not only a domain buyer, but it also sells some of the domain names it doesn’t need. In June it sold the domain name Contests.com for $380,000 at a domain name auction in Washington, D.C. It appears the domain was acquired when Yahoo bought Broadcast.com, which owned the domain name. National A-1 Advertising bought the domain name at the auction.

This week the domain LMK.com, which stands for “Let Me Know” in shorthand, sold for $58,500. It’s unclear who the buyer is, as the domain hasn’t fully finished transferring.

source : domainnamewire.com

Leonids Meteor shower

What are the Leonids

The Leonids ([ˈli.əˌnɪdz] lee-uh-nids) are a prolific meteor shower associated with the comet Tempel-Tuttle. The Leonids get their name from the location of their radiant in the constellation Leo: the meteors appear to stream from that point in the sky. The 2009 display peaking on November 17 may produce more than 500 meteors an hour.

A meteor shower is a celestial event in which a number of meteors are observed to radiate from one point in the night sky. These meteors are caused by streams of cosmic debris called meteoroids entering Earth's atmosphere at extremely high speeds on parallel trajectories. Most meteors are smaller than a grain of sand, so almost all of them disintegrate and never hit the Earth's surface. Fragments that do survive impact with Earth's surface are called meteorites. Intense or unusual meteor showers are known as meteor outbursts and meteor storms, which may produce greater than 1,000 meteors an hour.

History

Earth moves through the meteoroid stream of particles left from the passages of the comet. The stream comprises solid particles, known as meteoroids, ejected by the comet as its frozen gases evaporate under the heat of the Sun which begins to warm the comet as it comes within the orbit of Jupiter. A typical particle is no bigger than fine dust. The main source of light of a meteor is caused by the solar wind, which fragments and atomizes the dust, and the resulting spray of microscopic debris collides with individual atoms of the atmosphere ionizing the air. The air molecules recombine and cool by giving off photons. Larger particles leave a stream of smaller particles and form a tail, which can leave a glowing trail in the atmosphere. Leonids in particular are well known for having such bright meteors. The meteoroids left by the comet are organized in trails in orbits similar to though different from that of the comet. They are differentially disturbed by the planets, in particular Jupiter (see also a full explanation by McNaught & Asher (1999)). The ensemble of the trails compose the meteoroid stream. Old trails are spatially not dense and compose the meteor shower background (a few meteors per minute), happening around November 17, but changing every year. Conversely, young trails are spatially very dense and the cause of meteor storms when the Earth enters one of these structures. Usual counts during a storm exceed 1000 meteors per hour, to be compared to the annual background (1 to 2 meteors per hour) and the shower background (a few per hour).

The Leonids are famous because their meteor showers, or storms, can be, and have been in a few cases, among the most spectacular. Because of the superlative storm of 1833 and the recent developments in scientific thought the Leonids have had a major effect on the development of the scientific study of meteors which had previously been thought to be atmospheric phenomena. The meteor storm of 1833 was of truly superlative strength. One estimate is over one hundred thousand meteors an hour, but another, done as the storm abated, estimated in excess of two hundred thousand meteors an hour over the entire region of North America east of the Rocky Mountains. It was marked by the Native Americans, slaves and owners, and many others. That same 1833 shower, near Independence, Missouri, was taken as a sign to push the growing Mormon community out of the area.

Other great Leonid storms were seen in 1866 and 1867. When the storms failed to return in 1899, it was generally thought that the dust had moved on and storms were a thing of the past. Then, in 1966 a spectacular storm was seen over the Americas. Leading up to the 1998 return, an airborne observing campaign was organized to mobilize modern observing techniques by Peter Jenniskens at NASA Ames Research Center. This resulted in spectacular footage from the 1999, 2001 and 2002 storms producing up to 3,000 Leonid meteors per hour. Initially, the exact location of the dust was unknown. A graph published in Sky and Telescope adapted from Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle and the Leonid Meteors(1996, see p.6) shows relative positions of the Earth and Tempel-Tuttle and marks where Earth encountered dense dust. This showed that the particles are behind and outside the path of the comet, but paths resulting in powerful storms were very near paths of nearly no activity. The work of David Asher, Armagh Observatory and Robert H. McNaught, Siding Spring Observatory, and independently of Esko Lyytinen in Finland, following on from the pioneering research by Kondrat'eva, Reznikov and colleagues at Kazan, is considered by most meteor experts as the breakthrough in modern analysis of meteor storms. Whereas previously it was hazardous to guess if there would be a storm or little activity, the predictions of Asher and McNaught timed bursts in activity down to five minutes. However, the relative brightness of the meteors is still not understood. The double spikes in Leonid activity in 2001 and in 2002 were due to the passage of the comet's dust ejected in 1767 and 1866. The 1833 storm was not due to the recent passage of the comet, but from a direct hit with the 1800 dust and the 1966 storm was from the 1899 passage of the comet. Examples of other streams accounting for spikes in activity include the 2004 June Bootids. Peter Jenniskens has published predictions for the next 50 years.

However, a close encounter with Jupiter is expected to perturb the comet's path, and many streams, making storms of historic magnitude unlikely for many decades.

In 2009 Leonids active between November 10-21, ranging from 300 to 400 predicted per hour

"There are no guarantees in meteor work ... observers should be alert as often as conditions allow throughout the shower, in case something unexpected happens, this year 2009 the best viewing spots will be Southern Asia, Northern and Eastern Australia".

The radiant point

Because meteor shower particles are all traveling in parallel paths, and at the same velocity, they will all appear to an observer below to radiate away from a single point in the sky. This radiant point is caused by the effect of perspective, similar to railroad tracks converging at a single vanishing point on the horizon when viewed from the middle of the tracks. Meteor showers are almost always named after the constellation from which the meteors appear to originate. This "fixed point" slowly moves across the sky during the night due to the Earth turning on its axis, the same reason the stars appear to slowly march across the sky. The radiant also moves slightly from night to night against the background stars (radiant drift) due to the Earth moving in its orbit around the sun. See "IMO" Meteor Shower Calendar 2007 (International Meteor Organization) for maps of drifting "fixed points."

Meteor showers are named after the nearest bright star with a Greek or Roman letter assigned that is close to the radiant position at the peak of the shower, whereby the declension of the Latin possessive form is replaced by "id" or "ids". Hence, meteors radiating from near the star delta Aquarii (declension "-i") are called delta Aquariids. The International Astronomical Union's Task Group on Meteor Shower Nomenclature and the IAU's Meteor Data Center keep track of meteor shower nomenclature and which showers are established.

The origin of meteoroid streams

Comet Encke's meteoroid trail is the diagonal red glow

A meteor shower is the result of an interaction between a planet, such as Earth, and streams of debris from a comet.

Comets can produce debris by water vapor drag, as demonstrated by Fred Whipple in 1951, and by breakup. Whipple envisioned comets as "dirty snowballs," made up of rock embedded in ice, orbiting the Sun. The "ice" may be water, methane, ammonia, or other volatiles, alone or in combination. The "rock" may vary in size from that of a dust mote to that of a small boulder. Dust mote sized solids are orders of magnitude more common than those the size of sand grains, which, in turn, are similarly more common than those the size of pebbles, and so on. When the ice warms and sublimates, the vapor can drag along dust, sand, and pebbles. Each time a comet swings by the Sun in its orbit, some of its ice vaporizes and a certain amount of meteoroids will be shed. The meteoroids spread out along the entire orbit of the comet to form a meteoroid stream, also known as a "dust trail" (as opposed to a comet's "dust tail" caused by the very small particles that are quickly blown away by solar radiation pressure).

Recently, Peter Jenniskens has argued that most of our short-period meteor showers are not from the normal water vapor drag of active comets, but the product of infrequent disintegrations, when large chunks break off a mostly dormant comet. Examples are the Quadrantid and Geminid showers, which originated from a breakup of asteroid-looking objects 2003 EH1 and 3200 Phaethon, respectively, about 500 and 1000 years ago. The fragments tend to fall apart quickly into dust, sand, and pebbles, and spread out along the orbit of the comet to form a dense meteoroid stream, which subsequently evolves into Earth's path.

Meteoroid trail between fragments of Comet 73P

The dynamical evolution of meteoroid streams

Shortly after Whipple predicted that dust particles travelled at low speeds relative to the comet, Milos Plavec was the first to offer the idea of a dust trail, when he calculated how meteroids, once freed from the comet, would drift mostly in front of or behind the comet after completing one orbit. The effect is simple orbital mechanics - the material drifts only a little laterally away from the comet while drifting ahead or behind the comet because some particles make a wider orbit than others. These dust trails are sometimes observed in comet images taken at mid infrared wavelengths (heat radiation), where dust particles from the previous return to the Sun are spread along the orbit of the comet (see figures).

The gravitational pull of the planets determines where the dust trail would pass by Earth orbit, much like a gardener directing a hose to water a distant plant. Most years, those trails would miss the Earth altogether, but in some years the Earth is showered by meteors. This effect was first demonstrated from observations of the 1995 alpha Monocerotids, and from earlier not widely known identifications of past Leonid storms.

In the 1890s, Irish astronomer George Johnstone Stoney (1826-1911) and British astronomer Arthur Matthew Weld Downing (1850-1917), were the first to attempt to calculate the position of the dust at Earth's orbit. They studied the dust ejected in 1866 by comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle in advance of the anticipated Leonid shower return of 1898 and 1899. Meteor storms were anticipated, but the final calculations showed that most of the dust would be far inside of Earth's orbit. The same results were independently arrived at by Adolf Berberich of the Königliches Astronomisches Rechen Institut (Royal Astronomical Computation Institute) in Berlin, Germany. Although the absence of meteor storms that season confirmed the calculations, the advance of much better computing tools was needed to arrive at reliable predictions.

In 1985, E. D. Kondrat'eva and E. A. Reznikov of Kazan State University first correctly identified the years when dust was released responsible for several past Leonid meteor storms. In anticipation of the 1999 Leonid storm, Robert H. McNaught David Asher, and Finland's Esko Lyytinen were the first to apply this method in the West. Peter Jenniskens has published predictions for future dust trail encounters, resulting in "meteor storms" or "meteor outbursts" for the next 50 years.

Over longer periods of time, the dust trails can evolve in complicated ways. One effect is that the orbits of some repeating comets, and meteoroids leaving them, are in resonant orbits with Jupiter or one of the other large planets - so many revolutions of one will equal another number of revolutions of the other. So over time since Jupiter will have the same relative position intermittently and it will tend to pull meteoroids into keeping that relative position. This creates a shower component called a "filament."

A second effect is a close encounter with a planet. When the meteoroids pass by Earth, some are accelerated (making wider orbits), others are decelerated (making shorter orbits), resulting in gaps in the dust trail in the next return (like opening a curtain, with grains piling up at the beginning and end of the gap). Also, Jupiter's perturbation can change sections of the dust trail dramatically, especially for short period comets, when the grains approach the big planet at their furthest point along the orbit around the Sun, moving most slowly. As a result, the trail has a clumping, a braiding or a tangling of crescents, of each individual release of material.

The third effect is that of radiation pressure which will push less massive particles into orbits further from the sun - while more massive objects (responsible for bolides or fireballs) will tend to be affected less by radiation pressure. This makes some dust trail encounters rich in bright meteors, others rich in faint meteors. Over time, these effects disperse the meteoroids and create a broader stream. The meteors we see from these streams are part of annual showers, because Earth encounters those streams every year at much the same rate.

When the meteoroids collide with other meteoroids in the zodiacal cloud, they lose their stream association and become part of the "sporadic meteors" background. Long since dispersed from any stream or trail, they form isolated meteors, not a part of any shower. These random meteors will not appear to come from the radiant of the main shower.

Notable meteor showers

Perseid and Leonid meteor showers

The most visible meteor shower in most years are the Perseids, which peak on August 12 of each year at over 1 meteor a minute. A useful tool to calculate how many meteors per hour are visible from your observing location is found here: http://leonid.arc.nasa.gov/estimator.html.

The most spectacular meteor shower is probably the Leonids, the King of Meteor Showers[10] which peaks on a day near 17 November. Approximately every 33 years the Leonid shower produces a "meteor storm", peaking at rates of thousands of meteors per hour. These Leonid storms gave birth to the term "meteor shower", when it was first realised during the November 1833 storm that the meteors radiated from near the star Gamma Leonis. The last Leonid storms were in 1999, 2001 (two), and 2002 (two). Before that, there were storms in 1767, 1799, 1833, 1866, 1867, and 1966. When the Leonid shower is not storming it is less active than the Perseids.

Extraterrestrial meteor showers

Any other solar system body with a reasonably transparent atmosphere can also have meteor showers. For instance, Mars is known to have meteor showers, although these are different from the ones seen on Earth because the different orbits of Mars and Earth intersect orbits of comets in different ways.

Although the Martian atmosphere has less than one percent of the density of Earth's at ground level, at their upper edges, where meteoroids strike, the two are more similar. Because of the similar air pressure at altitudes for meteors, the effects are much the same. Only the relatively slower motion of the meteoroids due to increased distance from the sun should marginally decrease meteor brightness. This is somewhat balanced in that the slower descent means that Martian meteors have more time in which to ablate.

On March 7, 2004, the panoramic camera on Mars Exploration Rover Spirit recorded a streak which is now believed to have been caused by a meteor from a Martian meteor shower associated with comet 114P/Wiseman-Skiff. A strong display from this shower was expected on December 20, 2007. Other showers speculated about are a "Lambda Geminid" shower associated with the Eta Aquariids of Earth (ie both associated with Comet 1P/Halley), a "Beta Canis Major" shower associated with Comet 13P/Olbers, and "Draconids" from 5335 Damocles.

source : wikipedia

Facebook, 325 Million Users and Counting

Once on top, it's hard to stay there. As other social networks can stand by to that statement, Facebook seems to be ignoring all critics that see its death in the hands of its own success. As the network reached a ground-breaking number of 325 million users, the company seems to be on track to reach the goal it
set in May of this year to achieve the 500 million users mark.

The service did not only take its goal seriously, but it came under par when supplying the tools and applications to keep their users interested and attract new ones. Facebook has constantly gotten better, upgraded its services and paid close attention to the details that previously ruined or brought down other social network juggernauts: real users on the site.

There is no point in proving that MySpace, Bebo or Hi5 are full of spamming bots and fake users that make your life a living hell whenever logging in on one of those services. This fact has now become common knowledge. And studying the cases of other social services, Facebook has taken all the right steps in keeping the mass of all those bots out of its service.

This is why the 325 million mark is such a big thing. For the biggest part, there are over 300 million real users on the website. Only by flipping through the official statistics page on Facebook, we see that about 50% of those users log in every day on the network.

Another measure of its success is the fact that about 70% of all users using the network are from outside the United States. With a balanced user base, the service has again surpassed networks like MySpace that only made it really big in the US, or Hi5 that is big in Latin, Eastern European and Hindu regions.

The thing to watch now: Facebook - 400 million users.

source : softpedia.com

Angelina Jolie Is One Dangerous Spy in ‘Salt’ Teaser Trailer

Star on her way to solidify her career as an action hero

Columbia Pictures is already preparing for the release of what it hopes will be next summer’s big action blockbuster, the spy movie “Salt,” starring Angelina Jolie. In doing so, the movie studio has released the first teaser trailer for it, first with Russian dubbing and then for English-speaking markets, without any dubbing whatsoever.

As we also reported on a few occasions before, “Salt” stars Angelina Jolie as Evelyn Salt, a CIA agent who might very well be a Russian spy, a sleeper. The hook of the film, as well as what makes it different from any other production of the type, the movie studio says, is that the viewers never really get a definite answer as to which is which, meaning, they only learn on which side Salt was at the end. The first teaser video, of course, makes things much easier.

The video, which arrived online just hours ago, shows mostly the moment that sets everything else in motion, namely the scene that leads to the conviction that Salt is a Russian sleeper. What follows next is a sequence of action and fight scenes that have Jolie running desperately, putting on a serious fight, causing car crashes and whatever else running spies usually do in this kind of movies. All in all, critics believe the trailer shows clear signs that Jolie is one step closer to solidifying her career as an action hero.

“Salt” is directed by Phillip Noyce (“The Bone Collector” and “Patriot Games”) and produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura (“Transformers” and “G.I. Joe”), and, as the team behind it was saying upon the release of the first photos from the set, it would certainly be unlike anything else we’ve seen so far. Just as a curiosity, the script for the film was penned with Tom Cruise in mind, so, when he backed out of the production, they had to go back and rewrite it altogether in such a way as to be suitable for a woman playing the main part.

“She’s a character you never know. People who think they know the real her may or may not. Those who think they can tell whether she’s in a disguise also may or may not. You’re supposed to be kept guessing. She tells you her agenda, but are you supposed to believe it?” di Bonaventura was saying earlier this year. Below is the first teaser trailer for “Salt” in full and without Russian dubbing. Enjoy.
source : softpedia.com

Amazon Launches Twitter Referral Program

Allowing users to earn money from purchases coming from their tweets

Twitter can't figure out how to make money from its service, or just doesn't want to rush into things, but others have started making some revenue on the microblogging service. Now, Amazon has come up with an interesting proposal. In an email, the company notified members of Amazon Associates that it had introduced a new Twitter sharing feature on the site, like so many websites had done in the past. But, unlike most share buttons, this feature can also earn the users some cash.

“Today we are excited to announce the launch of a new feature called Share on Twitter. You can access Share on Twitter from the Site Stripe and post to your Twitter account from Amazon detail pages in just two clicks,” the Amazon email reads.

“The Share on Twitter feature is easy to use. Simply log in to your Amazon Associates account and then visit any detail page on Amazon.com. By clicking on the Share on Twitter button in the Site Stripe, a new window will open and an Amazon-generated message is pre populated in the ‘What are you doing?’ text area of your Twitter account.”

This sounds innocent enough, after all, users should be able to share something they like or find useful. A little further down in the email, though, Amazon reveals that all of these links will earn the users money from referral fees that they receive for every purchase made by a user coming from their links.

This kind of referral fees isn't something new, in fact, the practice is common on many blogs and websites. But, most of the times, these specify the fact that they will earn money from the purchases from that link. On Twitter, though, that would be almost impossible, even if the users wanted to, as the 140 characters leave little room for explanations beyond the regular message and the link.

source : softpedia.com