You may recognize the programs. They go by names like "Vista Security 2012," "XP Antispyware 2012" and "Mac Defender." Yet, according to Enigma Software, these scareware programs are on the decline. In June, the FBI raided malicious programmers 12 countries including the U.S. and arrested ChronoPay's CEO Pavel Vrublevsky, whose Russian payments company was believed to be behind many of the applications.

Engima does not make mention of Mac Defender, but the malicious program was one of the first widespread Trojans to target Apple computers. Apple moved quickly to fix the problem with a series of security updates earlier this year. Apple is not known to issue weekly patches but the existence of these type of malware applications may force it in the future to be more proactive about security.

The way the FBI raids effectively cut down on scareware programs was to go after their payments systems.

"The FBI raids cut off the ability for the scareware makers and distributors to get paid and when they can't get paid by their victims, they shrivel up and go away," Enigma wrote.

Enigma is prudent in saying that, while the instances of these programs are down, it is likely a temporary cycle in the war against malware.

"Sadly, cybercriminals and scareware makers are smart. They're very good at what they do. And we have no doubt that sometime soon, they'll be back. They'll figure out another way to get their scareware out and to get paid by their victims. We expect that another cyber gang is going to step in and fill that void," the company wrote.

Image Sources: Enigma Software

You answered, and we culled your responses from Google Plus, Twitter and Facebook, and used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

Of course, because it's Google, this resource is a search tool. Although you can just click around and scroll through the stats displayed, it's more useful to actually perform a search if you're looking for specific data.

The data for the stats comes from a variety of international resources provided by the following vendors:

B2Bonline.com, BARB, BusinessWeek, Coke, Commission of the European Communities, Comscore, Core Metrics, Datamonitor, Deloitte, The Economist, eMarketer, Enders Analysis, Eurostat, Film Distributors Association, Financial Times, Forrester, GFK, Google Insights for Search, Greenbee.com, Guardian, HarvardBusiness.org, Hitwise, IAB, IFPI, IMF, Internet Retailing, Internetworldstats.com, JP Morgan, KMPG, Media & Marketing, Mediascope Europe, Mindshare, Motorola, Net Imperative, New York Magazine, Nielsen, NMA, Ofcom, Opsos MediaCT, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, QuickPlay Media Inc., Retail Week, Reuters, TGI Net, Times Online, TNS, Verdict Research, Wall Street Journal, WARC, YouTube, ZenithOptimedia, GM

It's strange that despite featuring global companies, Google has launched this valuable resource tucked away on the UK domain. Because of this choice, many of the stats provided have a UK or European focus. However, mixed in with the localized data are global stats as well as stats that focus on the user base of just one company. For example, Twitter. (e.g. Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women - HavardBusiness.org).

We hope that Google is simply using the UK as the testing grounds for this new utility and they'll soon launch something with a more global focus for everyone. Or even better, we hope they'll launch more regionalized versions of this same tool across all Google domains worldwide.

Thanks to Steve Rubel for sharing this new find.

In this postmodern world, we're all professionally fragmented jacks of all trades, and few of us have the patience (read: OCD) for learning enough CSS and Flash to allow us to keep up with the Jonses in terms of functional, sexy web design. Here are some cheat sheets, the Cliff Notes of site creation, if you will. Read on to discover four awesome, in-browser resources for creating your own beautiful corner of the web without the horror of code.

YourOwn.com: Edicy offers free vanity.edicy.com domains and publishing to any domain the user chooses for about $8.50 a month.

Choose Your Own Coding Adventure: Users can only pop the hood, so to speak, on HTML for sections of text. We couldn't find a way to, for example, change the color scheme or background image or page formatting.

SEO-riffic: Edicy lets users add keywords and descriptions, but not other metadata or tags for images or other media.

Zimplit: Fully Simple, Fully Editable

Zimplit is a resource we reviewed some time ago, but we feel it's perfect for this particular round-up. We were able to create a simple, elegant page within about a half hour. It's an open-source, dead-simple application that works just as well for code-free "dummies" as well as it does for those with an inkling or two about web design on the back end. For non-coders, a gallery of great design templates kick things off, and a simple 12-button toolbar does it all after that.

YourOwn.com: Vanity URLs on Zimplit.com are available, and regular domains (plus email addresses) are available starting at around $4.25 per month.

Choose Your Own Coding Adventure: Users have complete access HTML and CSS for their pages, making this a great resource for learning as you go.

SEO-riffic: Sorry, Charlie. You'll have to access the code to tweak your metadata and keywords.

Wix: Flash Sites for Flashy Folks

We're not going to lie: Creating a Flash site in Wix will take you a little more time. But for those who desire that Flash-y touch, this is one of the best free resources you'll find. This editor will present tools familiar to those familiar with other graphic design programs such as image editing or more GUI-oriented website editing programs. The effects, behaviors, animations, and other options offer complete control. Also, we adore the horde of multimedia gallery options. You've got slide shows, Apple-like sliders, and tidy matrices. But to be honest and fair, Wix is just as strangely buggy as any Flash service you've tried to use.

YourOwn.com: There's a whole slew of premium options. Users can elect to choose their own domains for as little as $4.95 a month. An ad-free site, however, costs a dollar a month more.

Choose Your Own Coding Adventure: We couldn't see any back end here, folks. But with all the design options available through the Wix interface, we're not sure you'll need much more.

SEO-riffic: "SEO Friendly" options start at $4.95 a month.

Amplifeeder: A Catchall for the NMDs Among Us

Another site we've reviewed before is Amplifeeder. What users create there may not qualify as full-on websites, but for those who are hip, Amplifeeder creates sites that are the living end in terms of social media aggregation. Really, we all create so much content across our various networks that a personal site can be static and even redundant. Amplifeeder uses great design templates to bring together blog posts, Twitter and Facebook updates, Flickr pics, YouTube videos, and any number of other social media happenings. The page we created is beyond cool and serves as a gorgeous, clean portal to all the places we really live online. Plus, the data you put here is all portable, backup-able, and restorable.

YourOwn.com: Hosting options are coming soon, according to site creator Jon Davies.

Choose Your Own Coding Adventure: Customize your heart out with a blank CSS slate.

SEO-riffic: This part's all up to you. Your SEO will be the moment of truth: What DO you really talk about and share most? Transparency meets SEO when Amplifeeder serves an aggregation of your social streams.

So there you have four great resources for website creation, from super simple to creatively complex. Now get out there and start souping up your web presence. We just made keeping up with the Joneses that much more competitive.

1. Recipe Puppy: Type in any ingredients you already have and recipe puppy will match them to a recipe.

2. Foodie View: A recipe website that incorporates restaurant reviews, search from major blog recipes and a healthy dose of food porn photography.

3. Recipe Matcher: This site is similar to Recipe Puppy but it uses drop downs in its search function.

4. Nibble Dish: Formerly Open Source Food, Nibble Dish is perhaps the best food porn / recipe site in existence. The site offers more than 2000 CC licensed recipes in addition to some extremely gorgeous high resolution images.

5. Top Secret Recipes: This site offers users the chance to take their favorite restaurant recipes and make them at home. Something tells me that the Carl's Jr section isn't going to be very healthy.

6. FoodNetwork: Offers users many of the recipes off the network including food by Emeril Lagasse, Bobby Flay and Giada de Laurentiis.

7. BBC and NYTimes Recipe Search: Both the BBC and NY Times offer recipe engines for their featured recipes. This is generally for people who are searching for a specific recipe from a previous show or article.

8. The Atlantic Monthly: These guys have an extremely sophisticated recipe site. It reads like the J. Peterman catalogue of food. If you aren't in a hurry, you can get some great recipes here.

9. Epicurious: Epicurious is a Condé Nast site that incorporates recipes from Gourmet, SELF and Bon Appétit. Recipes tend to be a little healthier and the service offers a recipe saving feature for members.

10. Tastebook: This site allows users to bookmark recipes from leading cooking sites as well as add their own recipes. Members can then create a physical cookbook. This is great for gifts.

11. Food.com: This is a recipe bookmarking service. Users can add the browser plugin and select their favorite recipes to save in their Recipe Box.

12. VideoJug: This site, while not specifically meant for cooking instructions, is a wonderful resource for budding cooks.

Chinese: How To Make Crab In Black Bean Sauce

13. Look and Taste: This site offers high quality professional instructional videos. The desserts section looks particularly useful for souffles and creme brulees.

14. All Recipes: This is a site dedicated to user-generated recipes (as opposed to professional recipes). The site also includes instructional video, user photos and a section for slow cooker recipes and a recipe saving tool.

15. Rouxbe: Rouxbe is a community where user-generated recipes are rated, certified and if worthy, made into professional cooking videos. After 30 days users must pay to access video recipes, but text recipes remain free.

16. YouTube: YouTube offers a selection of cooking videos from some great hosts. In particular, Toronto-based Korean cook Maangchi began uploading her videos in 2007 and has since developed a nationwide following complete with meet ups and popular classes across North America.

17. MyDamnChannel: Nobody ever expected rap artist Coolio to host his own cooking show, and it certainly is a fantastic voyage. While you may not find your culinary cravings here, the show is worth a look simply to watch Coolio throw dime bags of spice onto his creations.

18. Chowhound: While the site is perhaps best known for restaurant reviews, Chowhound has a good selection of cooking technique videos. If you can make it past the advertisements, the "You're Doing it All Wrong" series is the most informative.

We know this is just a small taste of the millions of resources available. If you've got a blog or site that you know our readers will love, let us know in the comments below.

What Should They Cover?

This time, Digg is again calling for your input, asking you to let them know what topics you're interested in by posting, digging, or burying comments on this thread.

As Richard mentioned earlier this morning, here at ReadWriteWeb, we've been concerned with many of Digg's problems for some time, specifically favoritism of certain publishers, manually taking power away from power users, manipulating the topics, issues with gaming, charges of censorship, the endless barrage of sensationalism, repetitive lists, and Kevin Rose stories on the frontpage. So, needless to say, we're very excited to see that some topics near and dear to our heart are currently at the top of the list of topics for the upcoming Townhall.

In fact, as it stands right now, a comment about the decline of tech stories on Digg is the number one comment with 146 diggs. We covered that subject back in April, when we released some exclusive graphs created just for us by Richard Cunningham, who utilized the Digg API. Clearly that's a topic important to the Digg community - our story was dugg 2225 times.

Other comments on the Townhall topic suggestion thread include the decline of quality stories in general, biased political coverage, Digg forums, word-based blocking, exposing buries (again!), and other feature suggestions for the site.

The Digg blog post also mentioned the upcoming changes to the comments system, a story that broke on Twitter, when Kevin accidentally (?) posted a link to a video about the new comments system and then quickly took it down.

What topics do you want to see discussed at the next Digg Townhall?

What's more, many of the comments to the Wikipedia post were thoughtful and added to the discussion. OK many of the comments were critical of the post, it must be said. But still, you could tell that people were passionate about the topic. Here's an example, comment 64 from Sandy:

"I use Wikipedia almost everyday. It's a great and very informative website. I look there for info before I check other information websites. And I see how they can get away with this but do I think it is fair and right? Absolutely NOT.

In fact, Poetry.com does the same thing. They have these poetry contests and people from all over are enticed into sending in their own personal work thinking they will be made famous and receive a big prize if they win, etc. But that doesn't happen at all. [...]"

So Yahoo Buzz is not only sending large quantities of traffic to blogs, it is also sending people that want to comment - and who leave interesting, informed comments. By contrast, digg and slashdot traffic usually doesn't result in many extra comments on blogs - those people usually leave their comments on digg / slashdot. That's fair enough, as those two sites have thriving communities. But to me and many other new media publishers, it's yet another plus to Buzz over digg and slashdot.

RWW on yahoo.com

Listen Up, Digg

Also, and I don't mean to harp on about this (but I will), digg's continued systemic problems are not helping them. Favoritism of certain publishers (whereby only a few publishers in each category dominate the digg frontpage), manually taking power off power users, manipulating the topics that get to the digg frontpage, issues with gaming, charges of censorshop, the endless barrage of sensationalism, repetitive lists and Kevin Rose stories on the frontpage - all of these things and more have damaged digg's brand.

Quite simply, Yahoo Buzz is looking more and more like the future of social news. Digg needs to take a few pages from Buzz's book if it's to survive in the mainstream.

Bigger and More Engaged Traffic

ReadWriteWeb has been pretty bullish on Yahoo Buzz. We published one of the few positive reviews of Yahoo! Buzz when it opened, and in March we published some traffic statistics from Yahoo! and called the site a game-changer. As we noted in a recent update, the "Buzz-effect" is potentially orders of magnitude larger than the similar "Digg-effect."

Yahoo Buzz isn't perfect - it is a select number of publishers (although still in my personal view much fairer to publishers than digg) and participation on the Buzz property itself is lower than on digg.

So it's not perfect... but the traffic it sends publishers is both bigger and more engaged with the original content than traffic sent by digg or slashdot.