Yahoo's announcement puts it months ahead of Google and Microsoft, which only begin really making data anonymous after 18 months.

In April, the E.U. Data Working party found that the large search engines were violating E.U. data laws and need to purge data within 6 months or explain very well why they need to keep the data.

Doctors have reported the first ever case of someone using the internet while asleep.

She walked to the next room, turned on the computer, connected to the internet, and logged on by typing her username and password to her email account. She then composed and sent three emails.

She was shocked when she saw these emails, as she did not recall writing them.

The survey, conveniently carried out online and probably taking longer to complete than the average bunk-up, found that 46 per cent of women would rather go without sex for two weeks than give up the joys of the Internet for that long.

Surprisingly, a full 30 per cent of men also admitted they'd rather lose two weeks of sex than losing their, er, connection, with 39 per cent of men aged 18-34 willing to take up temporary celibacy compared to only 23 per cent of men aged 35-44.

Despite the advances in anti-spam technology and spammers getting sued, shutting down and having their service providers cut off their operations, the torrent of spam hitting email inboxes continues unabated.

A BBC story cites some earlier research that says spammers sending out 350 million messages a month can earn roughly $100 per day, while the entire massive Storm botnet could generate around $2 million per year.

But the underlying issue remains the fact that people click on spam and buy stuff through it. Changing that might be even harder than developing the perfect spam filter.

Upset about Bell Canada's system for allocating bandwidth fairly among internet users, the developers of the uTorrent P2P application have decided to make the UDP protocol the default transport protocol for file transfers.

By most estimates, P2P accounts for close to half of internet traffic today. When this traffic is immune to congestion control, the remaining half will stumble along at roughly a quarter of the bandwidth it has available today: half the raw bandwidth, used with half efficiency, by 95% of internet users.

The internet is only a stable system because application developers are gentlemanly with regard to the amount of traffic they shove onto the network.

Hoping to give its search engine a more personal touch, Google now lets users reshuffle results so their favorite Web sites get top billing and disliked destinations get discarded the next time they enter the same request.

Users will have to have a personal login to take advantage of the editing feature.

The decision to let people tinker with their results is a tacit acknowledgment that not even Google's seemingly omniscient search engine can possibly divine which Web sites will appeal to specific users.

PayPal, the online payment service that is a major target of phishers, has been caught sending customer emails that confuse its own login page with a third-party landing site that offers spyware protection and a bevy of other products.

This quick Yahoo search turned up this page showing a PayPal customer receiving the link more than two months ago. That's a long time for a financial services company to be sending their customers to an incorrect login page.

Times have changed, and that old address is a black hole for spam. You never check it, and you don't want to. But your stupid ISP, your stubborn family members and high school buddies insist on sending you important things there.

Once you've got a domain, set up your mail preferences so that every e-mail sent to the domain gets accepted.

On your new domain hosting service, redirect your *@[yourdomain.com] to your Gmail account.

Use the "Vacation reply" in Gmail (activate it in Gmail's Settings tab) to announce to each sender your new address.

ISPs are using the number of emails as a criteria because emails use up almost no bandwidth -- so no matter what the cap is, the answer is "a lot."

Focusing on emails is like telling someone that a full tank of gas in their car will allow them to travel six hundred million millimeters. That's meaningless for someone who wants to know if they can actually get from San Francisco to Los Angeles on a single tank of gas.

A Web hosting firm reportedly responsible for hosting roughly 75 percent of the world's spam went offline Nov. 11 after its primary Internet providers cut the company off.

Security researchers have accused McColo of hosting the command-and-control servers for a number of well-known botnets, including Rustock and Srizbi. In a report on McColo featured on hostexploit.com, researchers predicted if McColo were depeered, worldwide spam output would likely be cut in half.