The names Google gives to its services can be a bit confusing at times, especially since there are so many of them. For example, Adwords and Adsense look and sound very similar but they deal with two different transaction types. While Adwords deals with spending money, Adsense deals with earning money. A 12-year-old boy in Spain managed to confused the two services and ended up with a bill of 100,000 euros ($111,490). The Register reports: Jose Javier, 12, had signed up for Google's Adwords program in order to make money from advertisements placed alongside YouTube videos of his band, the Torrevieja llamada Los Salerosos -- en ingles, the Torrevieja Fun Guys -- named after the Alicante town in which he lives. Unfortunately, for the young musician, Google's AdWords program is for those wishing to advertise at cost, rather than run advertisements for profit. According to a report from Spanish daily El Pais, Jose and a friend planned to buy instruments, play music, get rich and buy a mansion by subscribing to the service. By early September the account was being billed by Google, receiving charges which reportedly rose quickly from an initial 15 euros ($16.72) to 19,700 euros ($21,960.57) at a time until the amount owed hit six figures. Google's statement noted that AdWords has age restrictions in place and encouraged families to familiarize itself with its Safety Center, but the boy's mother complained to El Pais that it was too easy for her son to make the purchases from Google, requiring him only to provide his savings account details, which he did in mid-August. Thankfully, Google was kind enough to cancel the outstanding balance on its Adwords service.

You asked, he answered!

Perl creator Larry Wall has responded to questions submitted by Slashdot readers. Read on for his answers...

Almost a year ago you had a chance to ask professor Kevin Fu about medical device security. A number of events (including the collapse of his house) conspired to delay the answering of those questions. Professor Fu has finally found respite from calamity, coincidentally at a time when the FDA has issued guidance on the security of medical devices. Below you'll find his answers to your old but not forgotten questions.

DaaZ asks: "I'm a webmaster (and more) for a small Internet company and discovered a neat feature in Symantec's Norton Antivirus 2004 that might shake some fragile nerves looking at diminished revenues outlook. This feature is an ad blocking tool that very successfully blocks banners on websites, based on a simple keyword identification. It seems to place itself between the download and render engines of Explorer (I haven't tried with other browsers yet, lack of time) and removes code based on a keyword query. We have a rotating banner code on our Web site and with ad blocking enabled, it's completely gone from the source, and so are all our images that link to an external site. It even strips images that are not advertising banners, but simply images that link to an external site! We all hate advertisements, but as with public TV, it's the reason we can get it for free (provided you buy the nice TV and the cables and the storage unit and the TiVo, and the..." Does NAV2004 have some kind of feature where certain sites can be exempt from ad blocking (in the case you do wish to support a site with ads)? I believe the choice to block banner ads belongs to the consumer, not Symantec, and it should be more than a "yes-or-no" choice. If banner ads fail, more and more sites will be forced into a pay model, and the days of the "Free Internet" will be almost over. Do you think banner ads are still an effective way to offset the cost of a website, or has their time passed? If so, what do we replace them with?