Depending on who you are talking to there were several very different reasons why the Internet was created, whether it was military command and control (Curtis LeMay told me that), to create a new communication and commerce infrastructure (Al Gore), or simply to advance the science of digital communications (lots of people). But Bob Taylor says the Internet was created to money. And since Bob Taylor was, more than anyone, the guy who caused the Internet to be created, well, I’ll believe him.

Taylor, probably best known for building and managing the Computer Systems Laboratory at XEROX PARC from which emerged advances including Ethernet, laser printing, and SmallTalk, was before that the DARPA program manager who commissioned the ARPANet, predecessor to the Internet. Taylor was followed in that DARPA position by Larry Roberts, Bob Kahn, and Vint Cerf -- all huge names in Internet lore -- but someone had to pull the trigger and that someone was Bob Taylor, who was tired of buying mainframes for universities.

A quick tweak of the power options and you can soon have your PC set up to shut down automatically if it’s left unattended for a while. But Windows isn’t exactly smart about how this happens, and you may sometimes find your system is closed even if it’s busy downloading something, or running some lengthy CPU-intensive task.

Install SmartPower, however, and it’s a different story. The program allows you to create far more flexible rules about when your PC should sleep, and when it needs to wake up, which can be a great way to save you time, energy and money.

I'm out of the office today attending Freshman orientation with my daughter. We were at San Diego State University for day-long lectures a month ago, but I saw something today either missed before or that is new (I'm convinced it's the latter). The East Commons has two Samsung charging stations that promote Galaxy S II and S3. It's simply brilliant marketing.

Think about it. Education is considered to be an Apple stronghold; some of that is reality, some perception. Two days ago, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said about fiscal Q3: "We achieved all time record Mac sales to US education institutions during the quarter. We sold more than twice as many iPads as Macs to US education institutions. We are extremely pleased with these results".

Now here’s an interesting thing. A couple of days ago Samsung disabled the Google local search function from the international version of its Galaxy S3 handset, preventing users from being able to search their phone’s apps and contacts. It was believed to have been done as a result of a patent dispute with Apple, and followed the search-on-device disabling update that hit Galaxy Nexuses in the US.

Users were understandably up in arms because they weren’t told that installing the new stability update would remove the universal search feature, and probably a fair few of them felt compelled to join the boycott Apple movement as a result. (Fortunately I didn’t update my S3 so my opinion didn’t change. Not that it would have.)

Popular social network Facebook posted its second quarter financial results on Thursday afternoon, revealing a net loss of income for the site at the end of its first quarter as a publicly traded company, but also revealed the huge amount of cash earned from its initial public offering.

Facebook showed a net loss of $157 million, a significant decline against its total income last year, which was $240 million, but this came after a hugely improved revenue flow.

If you’re running Windows 8, but like the look of Apple’s new Mountain Lion OS, you can use a skin pack to assuage some of your UI envy, without dumping Metro in the process (which may be a good or bad thing, depending on how you feel about the new tiled interface).

The Mountain Lion Skin Pack for Windows 8 Consumer Preview was obviously designed for the earlier trial version of Windows 8 (the clue is in the name), but it works just as well in the release candidate. It won’t actually transform Windows into Mountain Lion, so you won’t get cool features like apps that match their iOS counterparts, cloud-based sync features or AirPlay mirroring, but it will at least give you a reasonable flavor of Mountain Lion’s aesthetics.

Residents of the Kansas City metropolitan area are close to having access to super-fast Internet as Google unveiled its fiber-to-the-home service on Thursday. For as little as $70 per month, Google will provide 1 Gigabit Internet service to customers in both Kansas City, Mo. and Kansas City, Kan.

The service will also include a television component for an additional $50 per month. Deployment depends on the number of consumers that pre-register in a specific area: Google will only complete runs of fiber-optic cable to where the demand is highest.

Black Hat keynote speaker Shawn Henry, the former executive assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response and Service Branch, started off the day after opening remarks from Jeff Moss, founder of Blackhat. Moss wondered if now was the time for the cyber-security sector to take a more aggressive/offensive approach. Moss mentioned working for a former employer years back, a firewall manufacturer that had a product that would launch specially crafted code in response to an attacker, sort of an early offensive DoS attack. This was an early attempt by security professionals to cause pain by going on the offensive.

But since DoS attacks aren’t exactly a legal offensive tactic nowadays, what to do? He recommends civil action, a la recent Facebook actions where attackers were sued in civil court. But what happens when attackers are overseas? Mr. Moss is hopeful that responding in a civil manner would “encourage” other countries to implement legal protections to stop current and future attack attempts abroad.

It has not been a good day for messaging services.

Both Twitter and Google Talk experienced service problems Thursday, with Google Talk down for much of the morning and Twitter until early this afternoon. As of press time, neither Twitter nor Google had given specific reasons for the downtime.

Today marks the day when Facebook lets everyone know of their financial state, with the company announcing their second quarter 2012 results this evening when the market closes. Perhaps not so coincidentally, a rumor of a new Facebook branded phone from HTC has surfaced right before the company's financial announcements.

HTC and Facebook have collaborated before, and the result was the HTC Status. The device is no longer available from AT&T, and let's just say it's not due to high demand. HTC is currently in a weak financial state, and their smartphones make up about 14 percent of the market in the United States. So, from the start there is a limited reach.

Hot on the heels of its official launch of OS X Mountain Lion, Apple has also updated its own web browser for Lion users. Safari 6 for Lion includes some of the improvements found in the browser shipped with Mountain Lion, while missing out on others.

Key improvements found in Safari 6 for Lion include a unified search and Address bar, bringing Safari into line with rival browsers. It also sees the introduction of an Offline Reading List, Do Not Track privacy feature and new password pane.

Patent settlement talks between Apple and Samsung have been planned for a while, and despite the major importance they have to both companies, it wasn't until last week that executives met to discuss whether they can agree on ending the quarrel between them. So what happened? They couldn't set their differences aside as the settlement talks have hit a bump in the road, not agreeing on each other’s value when it comes to patents.

After numerous meetings in court it's clear that settlement is the best option, but the companies haven't yet arrived at a compromise, and the two companies' other legal disputes haven’t been put on hold, as Apple is still trying to resolve an issue it has with Samsung in a San Jose federal court on July 30.

How many times do you look at your phone when you are at your computer? If you are working in an office you may well have done the decent thing and turned down your volume – this means that there is no way of knowing when you receive an SMS or some other notification that you may need to see. This is where DeskNotifier and DeskNotifier for Android can help, enabling you to see notification in Windows.

You’ll need to install both the desktop and Android version of the app and you can choose between using it when your phone or tablet is connect to your computer via USB, or over Wi-Fi. Whenever a notification appears on your Android device, a similar alert will be generated in the form of a taskbar balloon popup. You can also choose to have a sound played, but if you have switched off sounds on your Android device, this may only be useful if you are useful headphones.

Hackers are having a field day these days. No one is safe. But that doesn't mean that Microsoft or other companies aren't trying to design mitigation techniques to keep hackers out.

In that vein, Microsoft released the enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) which is designed to help prevent hackers from gaining access to your system. Yesterday, the company made available a preview version of EMET 3.5, introducing four new mitigation features construed at mitigating Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) attacks.

If you regularly help to fix issues with other people’s PCs then you’ll know that trying to understand those problems is the first major hurdle. They may have told you that their system is slow, for instance, but could this be malware? Resource-hungry software? Hardware issues? It could take a while to find out.

But that’s where Webroot’s System Analyzer comes in. The program is a small (669KB) portable executable which scans your target system at a click, and within a minute or two will display a report highlighting any issues which need your attention.