How much have you spent on the net this year?

Not the money you pay to your internet provider, but stuff you buy from a website. Because if it’s less than £705 and you’re a woman, you had better hit the e-shops fast.

According to a survey done by the Royal Mail, we’ll spend a massive £15 billion online this year, with one fifth of it going in the four weeks before Christmas.

And each of the six million women shoppers will have spent £705 by the time the year is out.

Men spend even more - £871 – although it probably doesn’t go on presents for their wives and kids!

It isn’t just small stuff like CDs, either.

More and more people are buying furniture, electrical goods and clothes over the net. Electronic goods, like handheld computers, phones and digital cameras, are also popular.

Of course, the Royal Mail has an interest in all this online shopping since it will get to deliver a lot of it, and make some money in the process.

But it does seem that more and more internet users are putting aside their worries about security and reliability and using the web to get the things they want.

Take care

This is great, but even experienced online shoppers need to remember to take care out there.

Whenever you’re going to buy from a website make sure you know the postal address of the firm – if it’s not on their site, be suspicious.

And if they are outside the UK, remember you might not have the same legal protection if they mess up.

Even if you’re using an established company, check that you’ve got the right website – type it in carefully yourself.

This is important because some fraudsters set up fake sites that look the same as the real one so they can steal your credit card details.

And make sure that if you’re paying online that the shop uses a ‘secure’ website.

It should say ‘https’ instead of ‘http’ in the website address, and show a little closed padlock at the bottom of your browser.

Lastly, don’t forget that if you’re buying from a firm in the UK then you have the right to send the goods back if you don’t like them – as long as you do it promptly.

And you have the right to a full refund if they don’t arrive by the date you agreed. If you take care then you can have a happy e-Christmas instead of the cheats and criminals having one.

You can find out more at the Office of Fair Trading.

Have you been caught out shopping online?
Click here to have your say!

Viruses and worms are two of the biggest problems for anyone who uses the internet.

A virus is a program that can hide in another program, infecting it like a cold virus infects your cells.

And a worm is a program that can make copies of itself, usually over the internet.

There are lots of worms and viruses out there, and security companies try to keep track of them and help ordinary users protect themselves.

According to one of these companies, MessageLabs, a worm called SoBig was the third most common on the net this month.

MessageLabs, which scans people’s e-mail for them, found over 250,000 copies of SoBig in e-mails it was treating.

This is a bit surprising since SoBig was programmed to stop spreading itself around on September 10.

There seem to be two reasons for this.

The first is that when it started to spread, back in August, the first thing it did when it infected a computer was to link to a specific website and get some extra instructions from there.

These were the instructions that told it to stop spreading on September 10.

But as soon as it was spotted, this website was closed down. So lots of copies of SoBig don’t know that they are supposed to have stopped by now.

The second reason is that lots of people have the wrong day, month or even year set on their computer clocks.

The copies of SoBig on these people’s computers don’t realise how late it is!

So perhaps we need to remind everyone using an internet-connected computer to check the date and time – it could help get rid of at least one computer nasty.

Have you been infected?
Click here to have your say!