Washington – The Internal Revenue Service has reported that about 23.1 million individual income tax returns reported nonfarm sole proprietorship activity, a 4.7 percent increase since tax year 2006 and that these sole proprietorships reported profits of $280.6 billion in 2007 as it released the summer issue of the Statistics of Income Bulletin, which features sole proprietorship data for tax year 2007.

Issues are published quarterly with this issue also featuring articles about Individual Noncash Contributions, S Corporations, Foreign-Controlled Domestic Corporations, Corporate Foreign Tax Credit and Sales of Capital Assets.

Washington - The Internal Revenue Service has produced video and audio products to help taxpayers take advantage of the 2009 tax provisions in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act with the launch of YouTube video and iTunes podcast sites.

The video site at www.youtube.com/irsvideos provides Recovery, tax tips and how-to videos in English, Spanish, American Sign Language and other languages. Its focus will
be on the provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Videos will highlight the $8,000 first-time homebuyer’s credit for those who purchase a house this year, the sales or excise tax deduction on new car purchases and the expanded credits for education and energy conservation.

The channel debuts with seven Recovery videos in English and ASL and eight in Spanish. There will also be a video on using the IRS Withholding Calculator. The calculator can help those who have more than one job or working spouses calculate if they need to make adjustments.The iTunes site offers IRS podcasts about ARRA tax credits. Those without an iTunes account can access these podcasts, in English and Spanish, on the IRS.gov’s Multimedia Center.

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.