NEW YORK - Amazon.com Inc. showed that it wasn’t being hurt by economic weakness and high fuel prices, reporting Wednesday that its second-quarter profits more than doubled and surpassed analyst expectations. The Internet retailer also raised full-year revenue projections.

Sales were strong in several sections of Amazon’s massive marketplace.

For the quarter that ended June 30, Amazon earned $158 million, or 37 cents through share. Amazon earned $78 million, or 19 cents per share, in the same quarter last year.

The company’s revenue climbed 41 percent to $4.06 billion, including a 35 percent leap in North American sales.

Analysts polled by Thomson Financial had expected earnings of 26 cents per share on $3.96 billion in revenue in the quarter.

Sales of things like books, CDs and DVDs rose 31 percent to $2.41 billion, while electronics and other general merchandise sales soared 58 percent to $1.53 billion.

One closely watched measure, the company’s net shipping cost, climbed to $128 million from $75 million a year earlier.

But Amazon also noted that revenue from shipping — which includes earnings from its membership-based two-day shipping program, Amazon Prime, and its third-party shipping program, Fulfillment by Amazon — rose to $186 million from $152 million.

by reason of the current third quarter, Amazon predicted sales of $4.20 billion to $4.43 billion; analysts had been looking for $4.23 billion in revenue.

The company increased its sales forecast for the rest of the year to a range of $19.35 billion to $20.10 billion. Analysts were expecting $19.60 billion.

NEW YORK - The movie-rental service Netflix Inc. is closing a base unit that finances independent movies, partly to avoid competing with Hollywood studios by which it partners for DVD and Internet distribution.

The financial impact on the company will be small, and solely four out of about 400 employees are losing their jobs.

But the offer for consideration could make it more difficult for smaller producers to find homes for their movies. Netflix‘ Red Envelope Entertainment had focused on bringing less-commercial projects to a broader audience. The unit acquired or helped finance independent films, distributing them in movie theaters while well as in the regular Netflix channels — DVD by mail and online streaming.

Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey said the company began the unit as an exact trial about two years ago, but ultimately decided that financing movies was not its forte. He said filmmakers still have plenty of outlets for financing and distributing movies, “and we don’t need to do that to get great titles on Netflix.”

Swasey said the company weighed the fact that it was many times in the same room with studio partners at film festivals, and “we didn’t want to compete” with them.

Movies distributed through Red Envelope — named for the red envelopes used to ship Netflix DVDs — include “Sherrybaby,” “No End in Sight,” and “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.” Red Envelope typically partnered through a larger company for theatrical release.

The decade-long battle over the Children Online Protection Act (COPA) took another turn this week when an appeals court upheld a lower court predominant that found COPA to be unconstitutional.

"COPA cannot withstand a strict scrutiny, vagueness, or over breadth calculus and in this manner is unconstitutional," according to a Tuesday ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

COPA provides for up to six months in jail, in addition to civil penalties, for those found guilty of posting information online for commercial purposes that's considered injurious to minors. As defined by dint of. the bill, material that's noxious to minors includes obscene communication, the depiction of sexual material that could be considered offensive, or material that lacks serious of literature, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.

The law was scheduled to go into effect onward October 21, 1998 but it immediately faced challenges in court and its enforcement was delayed.

The Court of Appeals found that the bill is overly broad and that other techniques like filtering or other parental controls would be more efficient than a law like COPA. Tuesday's ruling upholds a March 2007 District Court decision.

"COPA was not narrowly tailored to do duty for the government's compelling interest in preventing minors from being exposed to harmful material on the Web, was not the least restrictive means available to reality that interest, and was substantially overbroad," the court said Tuesday.

The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a Washington-based think tank, applauded the ruling.

"Throughout the record of legalized challenges to COPA, we have argued that the most effective way to save children online, and the means least restrictive of not parsimonious expression, is to give families the resources to control what their children see and do online," CDT General Counsel John Morris, said in a statement. "This empowers parents, respects the First Amendment and acknowledges the diverse sensibilities of American families."

The issue could now head to the Supreme Court.

Google is reportedly ready to purchase the Digg Web site for $200 million. The probe giant could beef up its news service with Digg, where readers select and vote without interruption stories from around the Web.

The rumors began about a week ago when images on Web sites suggested Google was testing voting methods.

Some reports say Google could complete the acquisition of Digg within two weeks, and Microsoft is said to be waiting in the wings if Google doesn't seal the deal. Digg has a three-year deal with Microsoft that would in a fair way end if the search giant absorbs the popular news site.

"This rumor has been on every side for a couple of months. otherwise than that this is the most concrete version of the rumor," said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. "Digg seems to be trying to create some sort of mandate for the company in order to get the highest return."

Digg Evolution

Digg describes itself as a portion for people to discover and share content from anywhere upon the Web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg claims to surface the best content as determined by user votes. Digg doesn't employ editors, but relies on its community to determine the most worthy headlines.

Diggers can push news, videos, images and podcasts. Once content is submitted, other people see it and vote on what they like best. Submissions that receive the most diggs are promoted to the site's front page notwithstanding millions of visitors to read. There is also a social-networking countenance as users launch conversations around stories.

"Digg is trying to evolve from a social news site into a 'recommendation engine' which uses the power of the common to promote certain kinds of results higher or to use that crowd wisdom to identify what are the best or most relevant items in a category. So that presents some interesting opportunities elsewhere for Google Maps or local search," Sterling related.

Google's Motivations

The question on many analysts' minds is why isn't Google building a Digg-like technology itself? Arguably, Google has built something similar in its social-voting-for-search experiments. Digg may have a more robust solution, though.

Is Google simply buying one of the highest-profile news-aggregating sites, mirroring the strategy it used with YouTube? Google bought the leader in online user videos at a life when there were simply about 10 competing sites, recognizing it as a display-advertising opportunity, Sterling said. But Digg is not YouTube.

"Digg is not a mainstream site like YouTube has become. Digg has also been surpassed in traffic by Yahoo Buzz, according to comScore. So it's not the leader. But Google isn't going to be able to buy Yahoo Buzz," Sterling said. "So maybe they have a range of motivations here potentially and they want to buy the property and $200 million is a lot of money, but not for Google."

Neither Google nor Digg could immediately be reached for comment.

In a ruling the American Civil Liberties Union is craft a clear victory for free speech, a federal court on Tuesday once again upheld a ban adhering a law that would criminalize constitutionally protected speech on the Internet.

The ACLU challenged the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) as unconstitutional on behalf of a broad coalition of writers, artists and health educators who use the Internet to communicate constitutionally protected speech.

"For years, the government has been trying to thwart freedom of speech on the Internet, and for years the courts have been finding the attempts unconstitutional," said Chris Hansen, senior staff attorney with the ACLU First Amendment Working Group. "The government has no more right to censor the Internet than it does books and magazines."

The History of COPA

Previously, a federal district court and a federal appeals court found that the online censorship law violates the First and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution. The Supreme Court upheld that decision, effectively banning enforcement of the law in June 2004, sending the case back to the district court to determine whether there had been any changes in technology that would affect the constitutionality of the statute.

Specifically, the court looked for technological changes, such as whether commercially available blocking software was still as effective as the banned law might be in blocking material deemed "harmful to minors." In March 2007, a district judge once again struck down COPA; the government again appealed, and on Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld the ban.

The ACLU's clients in the case include Salon Media Group, which runs the online magazine Salon.com; the Sexual Health Network, which operates sexualhealth.com; and Aaron Peckham, who owns UrbanDictionary.com. COPA would have imposed harsh criminal sanctions, including penalties of up to $50,000 per day and up to six months in prison, for material acknowledged as protected for adults yet deemed "harmful to minors."

"Our clients provide precious and necessary health and news information. Preventing adults from accessing this information under the guise of protecting children is not permissible," said Aden Fine, senior staff attorney with the ACLU First Amendment Working group. "There are more effective, less intrusive tools available to limit the sort of minors can access on the Internet."

COPA Ruling Is Democratic

In upholding the ban on COPA, the court again affirmed that COPA is unconstitutional because it is not tailored to advance the rule's interest in protecting children; there are less restrictive, equally effective alternatives to COPA; and COPA is unconstitutionally overbroad and vague.

"Throughout the history of legal challenges to COPA, we have argued that the greatest part effective way to protect children online, and the means least restrictive of free expression, is to give families the resources to control what their children see and do online," said John Morris, general counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology. "This empowers parents, respects the First Amendment and acknowledges the diverse sensibilities of American families."

The Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection is also pleased with the ruling. The ASACP created the RTA (Restricted to Adults) label nearly two years ago to better enable parental filtering and to demonstrate the online adult industry's commitment to helping parents prevent children from viewing age-inappropriate content, according to Joan Irvine, CEO of the ASACP.

"We feel filtering gives the parents the tool to be able to allow their children to see what the parents deem appropriate, and we give credit to that the adult entertainment industry has stepped up," Irvine said. "It's the effort; labors's responsibility to label its content, and then it's the responsibility of parents to use filtering technology to protect their children."

Google has launched Knol, its user-generated online encyclopedia, which it announced in December but had kept under wraps in private testing.

Although its goal and be at hand are similar to Wikipedia's– to tap the collective acquirements of Internet users within an encyclopedia format– Knol is different in several ways.

Knol will encourage writers to use their real names and stand behind their articles, and will give them the possibility to generate income from their work via Google ads.

"Every knol bequeath have an author, or group of authors, who put their name behind their content. It's their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good," wrote Knol product manager Cedric Dupont and software engineer Michael McNally in an official blog posting Wednesday.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, has a culture of anonymity in that contributors rarely use their real names, and no ads appear on the location.

In addition, Knol apparently will have more controls over submissions and edits than Wikipedia. In Knol, readers can suggest changes to articles, and the authors be in possession of the last word on whether to accept or reject the feedback. "This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it," the Google officials wrote. Readers will also be able to rate articles and write reviews of them.

In Wikipedia, anyone have power to make changes to articles and have them appear instantly online.

Although in the blog posting knols are described of the same kind with "authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects," a Google spokesman said that anyone can write an article.

"Google will have no advance knowledge of the content of a knol and we will not be doing editorial screening of content instructed by users and authors," he wrote via e-mail.

In addition, Google will encourage authors to use their real names, but will not require it, he said. Google will give authors the ability to have their identity confirmed via a telephone or credit card verification process. Articles penned by these authors will appear with a "verified" stamp, he said.

NEW YORK - Install a illiberal photo program to show put on the farther side pictures of your dog on Facebook, and you might find you’re verily spreading an ad.

Time Warner Inc.’s AOL said Wednesday it was integrating technology from its newly acquired Goowy Media Inc. to help advertisers pitch their products and services at social-networking sites, which have struggled to generate revenue notwithstanding heavy traffic.

Advertisers can buy ads for pet care and other services on AOL’s Widgnet advertising network, and they will run on certain applications for the online hangouts Facebook and AOL’s Bebo. Revenue would subsist shared betwixt AOL and the application developer, but not the social-networking sites.

In addition, advertisers can create programs known as widgets using Goowy’s technology and wrap an ad around them. Users of supported social-networking sites, which also include News Corp.’s MySpace and AOL’s AIM Profile Pages, can add the widget to their personal profile page, customizing it with, say, a photo of their own pet.

In a sense, users are doing the work of advertisers in spreading word of their brand and interacting with it.

AOL is offering this immoderate to advertisers already using AOL’s ad services elsewhere. That’s part of a broader effort by AOL to boost its advertising revenue and offset declines in legacy Internet access subscriptions.

“Widget-based advertising is gaining momentum in the industry,” said Lynda Clarizio, president of Platform-A, AOL’s advertising arm.

SAN FRANCISCO - Google Inc. is taking the wraps off an Internet encyclopedia designed to give people a chance to show distant from — and profit from — their expertise on any topic.

The service, dubbed “knol” in reference to a unit of knowledge, had been limited to an invitation-only audience of contributors and readers for the past seven months.

Now anyone with a Google login will be able to submit an article and, if they choose, have ads displayed end the Internet search leader’s marketing system. The contributing author and Google will share any revenue generated from the ads, which are supposed to be akin to the topic covered in the knol.

The advertising option could encourage people to write more entries about commercial subjects than the more academic topics covered in traditional encyclopedias.

Since Google disclosed its intention to build knol, it has been widely viewed as the company’s answer to Wikipedia, which has emerged as one of the Web’s leading reference tools by drawing upon the collective wisdom of unpaid, anonymous contributors.

But Google views knol more as a supplement to Wikipedia than a competitor, related Cedric Dupont, a Google product superintendent. Google reasons that Wikipedia’s contributors will be able to use some of the expertise shared on knol to improve Wikipedia’s existing entries.

With a seven-year lead start on knol, Wikipedia already has nearly 2.5 million English-language articles and millions more in dozens of other languages.

Knol is starting out with several hundred entries. The commencing topics covered include an overview of constipation through a University of San Francisco associate professor of gastroenterology and backpacking advice from one of Google’s own software engineers.

Unlike Wikipedia, knol requires the authors to sameness themselves to help the audience assess the source’s credibility. Google doesn’t intend to screen the submissions for accuracy, Dupont said, and instead will rely on its search formulas to highlight the articles that readers believe are credible.

Google has had mixed success so far in its attempts to expand beyond its ubiquitous inquire engine, which generates most of its profits. While products parallel its e-mail purpose have been hits, other forays like a listing system called “Base” and a social netting called Orkut haven’t fared as fully.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Drivers in most of the United States and some of the UK can find out where the police prosper traps and so-called red-light cameras are on the Internet — for free.

But, U.S. drivers can also download that information to their car's GPS system for a fee.

"We're hoping to expand the download service to London and the rest of Europe as soon as we can," said Shannon Atkinson, the 33-year-old founder of Njection.com.

"No one likes to get a ticket. No one likes to get hit by a red-light camera," he said, referring to the devices that snap pictures of cars running red lights.

Atkinson, whose full time do job-work is as a systems engineer, set up the website (http://njection.com) last summer. Most of the information on the speed traps is user generated, and gathered anonymously, he said.

Asked if he's had any complaints from law enforcement, Atkinson said the response has been to the contrary. "I've gotten lots of positive sustain life back from police officers. It's the idea of getting people to slow down in those areas and if this helps, they're apt."

But some municipalities may not be so thrilled. Atkinson said one side-effect may exist a lack of revenue from speeding tickets not issued.

(Editing by Toni Reinhold)

SAN FRANCISCO - Many banks are unwittingly nurture their online customers to take risks with their passwords and other sensitive account information, leaving them more vulnerable to fraud, new research shows.

The result is that even the most security-conscious Web surfers could catch themselves the victims of identity theft because they’ve been conditioned to ignore potential clues about whether the banking site they’re visiting is real — or a bogus site served up by hackers.

That’s the conclusion by University of Michigan researchers who found design flaws in 76 percent of the 214 U.S. financial institution Web sites they studied.

The study, to be presented Friday at a security conference, examined the sites of top banks and smaller institutions alike. The researchers aren’t detailing which banks had problems, however.

“We want banks to make the right decisions so people who are trying to be careful can do online banking securely,” reported the paper’s lead researcher, Atul Prakash, a professor of computer science and engineering.

The researchers found that many banks silently redirect users to third-party sites, plop “secure login” boxes on insecure Web pages, and improperly use Social Security numbers or e-mail addresses — which an outsider can outline out — as default user names.

All of those banking tactics put users at risk.

“Conventional wisdom is that the clients — or PCs — are inherently insecure devices,” said Avivah Litan, a banking security analyst with Gartner Inc. “What this study shows is that the servers — or the bank and other consumer-facing Web sites — are also inherently insecure.”

The study didn’t uncover vulnerabilities in the Web sites themselves, or problems with the sites’ coding that could allow criminals to break in. Instead, it found design flaws that teach people bad surfing habits.

One of the biggest problems: Even if the login boxes on banks’ pages are properly secured — meaning they send and receive encrypted data through a technology known as Secure Sockets Layer — if the replete serving-boy itself isn’t protected with the same technology, it’s more difficult to tell whether the site is real or fake.

SSL-equipped sites show a padlock icon in the address bar and signal not only the encryption technology but also that the site’s owner is legitimate.

Also: If users aren’t notified that they’re being taken to another site — say a bank uses a participator site for online bill-paying — then it’s hard to determine if the novel site is trustworthy, because the online registration certificate carries a different company’s name.

So even if they were inclined to dig that deep, consumers could still degradation victim to “phishing” scams because they’re accustomed to entering personal knowledge of facts into a site that isn’t their bank’s — and hasn’t been clearly vouched for by the bank.

Hackers could take advantage by sending them bogus pages dressed up find to one’s mind the bank’s Web site. That site would then redirect to another site under the criminal’s govern, and users might not question the redirection.

To fight that, the best protection remains: Don’t click on links sent in e-mails.