It was interesting, and unexpected, when the three top players in professional tax preparation decided that this year is the time to make a bigger noise about online professional tax preparation.

In fact, it was very unexpected that at the Illinois CPA Society's Midwest Accounting and Financial Showcase that both Intuit and CCH would make announcements. Intuit had been making announcements on the order of Hansel and Gretel dropping bread crumbs to mark a trail.

But CCH decided this year it was the place to talk about the delivery schedule of its online version of ProSystem fx Tax, along with other applications. These moves are detailed in "Online Tax: the Future Is Now?" in this issue. Call it what you want - Software-as-a-Software service, ASP (I like the simple Internet-based myself)- the fact that CCH, Thomson Reuters and Intuit have all put their plans on the table means they've decided that acceptance of online applications has gotten to the point, it's worth try to sell them more aggressively.

CUPERTINO, Calif. –  Symantec, which makes anti-malware software, has identified the 100 “Dirtiest Web Sites of Summer 2009," the 100 sites with the most threats detected by site ratings service, Norton Safe Web, as of August.

Forty-eight of these sites feature adult content. But the vendor said the list ranged in subject matter from sites dedicated to deer hunting, catering, figure skating, legal services, to buying electronics. Visiting sites, even without downloading or clicking on any element, can expose a user’s computer to infection or data theft. Symantec said  75 percent of these sites have distributed malware for more than six months.

The company posted the URLs  for 30 sites, which include kingfamilyphotoalbum.com,  wadefamilytree.org; texaswhitetailfever.com a divineenterprises.net, likaraoke.com. Ratings were based on the number of threats detected by Norton Safe Web, which crawls the Web looking for dangerous sites. Safe Web analyzes Web sites using signature-based file scanning, intrusion detection engines, behavioral detection and install/uninstall analysis to identify security risks including phishing sites, malicious downloads, browser exploits and links to unsafe external sites. Judging from the names, the published list does not include many of the adult sites.