A study released last month by the security firm Postini found that unwanted messages now account for 91 percent of all e-mail, and over the past 12 months the daily volume of spam rose by 120 percent.

A separate report by California-based IronPort Systems concluded that worldwide spam volumes increased from 31 billion messages daily in October 2005 to 61 billion messages per day in October 2006.

Image spam reached a new high of 25 percent of total spam volume in October 2006, an increase of 421 percent in a year, according to IronPort.

"Spammers are using advanced mathematical and graphical techniques like random modification of image pixels and dynamic construction of images from multiple components to bypass spam filtering tools," he said.

The politics of unwanted email is changing with China set to overtake the US any day now as the originator of most Irish inbox clutter.

Figures for November from Irish email monitoring firm IE Internet show that although the US is still the world leader with 27 per cent of dodgy emails originating there, this is a huge drop on October's figure of 48 per cent.

China is now second in the monthly world rankings of spam-producing countries, followed by Britain (21 per cent), France (15 per cent), India (seven per cent), and Turkey (four per cent). South Korea doesn't figure in the top six global spam machines for the first time in several months.

Meanwhile, as the world's spam merchants have been getting ready for their Christmas onslaught, virus writers have been busy too.

Two new viruses made it into the top five this month: W32/Warezov and W32/Tricky-Malware. And both are spreading fast, according to IE Internet.

An official document posted to Digg today summarizes an agreement between the U.S. and Russia in which Russia has agreed to close down AllofMP3.com, and any sites that "permit illegal distribution of music and other copyright works."

"This agreement sets the stage for further progress on IPR issues in Russia through the next phase of multilateral negotiations, during which the United States and other WTO members will examine Russia's IPR regime," states the document.

The document specifically names AllofMP3.com as an example of the types of Web sites that they will shut down. We contacted AllofMP3.com and the company sent us an official statement stating their legality. It says that the company has offered to remove illegal music at the copyright holders' requests.

A fellow teaching himself Seam has come up with a clever Web app called 10 Minute Mail. It gives you a valid e-mail address — instantly — for use in registering at Web sites. Ten minutes later (more if you ask), it's gone. You can read mail and reply to it from the page where you create the throw-away address. Limited utility, yes, but easy and free.

A confidential analysis of Internet search queries and a random sample of Web pages taken from Google and Micrsoft's giant Internet indexes showed that only about 1 percent of all Web pages contain sexually explicit material.

The ACLU said the analysis, by Philip B. Stark, a professor of statistics at the University of California-Berkeley, did not appear to substantially help the Justice Department in its effort to prove that criminal penalties are necessary to protect minors from exposure to sexually explicit information on the Internet.

Internet service providers (ISPs) should be made legally liable for the damage caused by "denial of service" (DoS) attacks carried out via their networks, a leading internet lawyer says.

The idea of requiring ISPs to guard against DoS attacks will be strongly resisted by the companies concerned, says Malcolm Hutty of the London Internet Exchange, an association of London-based internet providers. "That idea is guaranteed to fail," he says. "It's not the ISP's fault that DoS attacks happen - it is the computer's fault for allowing the bots to be planted."

"Recognising DoS attacks is not easy," Hutty says. He notes that the public blog of the Internet Governance Forum, an event in Athens, Greece, last week was so popular that its servers went down. "That was not a DoS attack," Hutty says, "but it looked like one. How is the ISP to know that it is not genuine site popularity, rather than some nefarious purpose?"

Ollie Whitehouse of antivirus firm Symantec in the UK says criminals could begin encrypting their attack commands if ISPs start inspecting every packet they handle. "That will make spotting a DoS attack a whole lot harder for an ISP," he says. Hutty agrees: "If we try to tell the good traffic from the bad, it'll only incentivise the bad guys to make it more indistinguishable."

The Brazilian senate is considering a bill that will make it a crime to join a chat, blog, or download from the Internet without fully identifying oneself first. Privacy groups and Internet providers are very concerned, and are trying to lobby against the bill, but it seems they won't have much success.

If approved, it will be a crime, punishable with up to 4 years of jail time, to disseminate virus or trojans, unauthorizedly access data banks or networks and send e-mail, join chat, write a blog or download content anonymously.

A Morocco-born computer virus that crashed the Department of Homeland Security's US-VISIT border screening system last year first passed though the backbone network of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement bureau, according to newly released documents on the incident.

The workstations at the front end of US-VISIT run Windows 2000 Professional, so they were vulnerable to attack. Those computers are administered by the DHS' Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, which learned of the plug-and-play vulnerability Aug. 11, according to the new documents.

But as CBP started pushing the patch to its internal desktop machines Aug. 17, it made the fateful decision not to patch the 1,313 US-VISIT workstations.

On Aug. 18, Zotob finally hit the US-VISIT workstations, rapidly spreading from one to another. Phone logs offer a glimpse of the mayhem that ensued. Calls flooded the CBP help desk, with callers complaining that their workstations were rebooting every five minutes.

By then, Wired News had already filed a Freedom of Information Act request with CBP seeking documents about the incident. The request received a cool response. An agency representative phoned us and asked that we withdraw it, while refusing to answer any questions about the outage. When we declined, CBP misplaced the FOIA request. We refiled it, and it was officially denied, in total, a month later. After an administrative appeal went unanswered, we filed a federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, represented by the Stanford Law School Cyberlaw Clinic.

Allofmp3 sells music priced by file size at somewhere around a tenth of the cost per track of Western services like iTunes. America and record industry bodies say it does not pay any royalties and is illegal.

Allofmp3's owners maintain that as a Russian business it complies fully with local copyright law. It has achieved second position behind Apple in the UK digital music market, largely by word of mouth.

US trade representative Susan Schwab has been a prominent public critic of Allofmp3. Her office recently placed the company on a "notorious markets" list, and a speech last month blasted Russian authorities for allowing the site to operate freely.

An Allofmp3 spokesman local media: "Susan Schwab markets us so effectively - she could already be our press secretary."

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone has announced data transmission at a rate of 14 terabits per second over a single optical fiber. The paper claims the previous record was "about 10 Tbps." In the new experiment, NTT sent data over 160 kilometers (nearly 100 miles) of optical fiber, in 140 channels of 111 Gbps each.