After years developing anti-spam technology and drafting legislation to outlaw spammers, the delegates at MIT's annual Spam Conference in Boston were overjoyed to see the culprit nailed.

Jeremy Jaynes was found guilty last November by a state court in Leesburg, Virginia, of sending more than 10 million unsolicited emails a day. He was hawking pornography, work-at-home schemes and stock-picking software. The spams are estimated to have earned him around $750,000 a month. He is now on $1 million bail, forbidden from using the internet and will be sentenced this month. The jury has recommended he gets a nine-year jail term.

Jaynes's operation was run from a chaotic office in Raleigh, North Carolina. Cabling to 16 high-speed internet links snaked everywhere and there were CDs packed with spammed email addresses and servers holding spam emails. Even as the police arrived, spamming was in progress.

Project Honeypot, the brainchild of Chicago lawyer Matthew Prince, is taking advantage of a clause in the CAN-SPAM act that makes harvesting email addresses for spamming purposes illegal.

According to the SpamHaus Project--a U.K.-based antispam compiler of blacklists that block 8 billion messages a day--a new piece of malicious software has been created that takes over a PC. This "zombie" computer is then used to send spam via the mail server of that PC's Internet service provider. This means the junk mail appears to come from the ISP, making it very hard for an antispam blacklist to block it.

ISPs in the United States may have already been hit. "We've seen a surge in spam coming from major ISPs. Now all of the ISPs are having large amounts of spam going out from their mail servers," Linford said.

Linford predicts that ISPs will see a growth in the volume of bulk mail they send and receive over the next two months, with spam levels rising from 75 percent of all e-mail to around 95 percent within a year.

According to New York Times, spam has actually gone up [Free registration required. You gave real info, right?] since the CAN-SPAM act went into effect. There is a graphic in the article that illustrates this increase. Before the CAN-SPAM act was passed, spam was about 60% of all e-mail traffic. Now it's 80%. In a we-told-you-so quote, Steve Linford, the founder of the Spamhaus Project, says CAN-SPAM legalized spam by giving bulk advertisers permission to send junk e-mail as long as they followed certain rules. Slashdot covered this story last year. For companies that offer offshore "bulk advertising" servers, business is booming. A survey from Stanford University estimates the global cost of spam in terms of lost productivity to be at 50 billion $ and 17 billion $ in the US alone. CAN-SPAM does give prosecutors some leverage to go after the merchants - but it must be proved that they knew, or should have known, that their wares were being fed into the illegal spam chain.

An influential congressional committee has dropped a political bombshell by suggesting that a tax originally created to pay for the Spanish American War could be extended to all Internet and data connections this year.

The congressional report comes not long after the Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department said they were considering how the Spanish American War tax should be reinterpreted "to reflect changes in technology" used in "telephonic or telephonic quality communications."

Congress enacted the so-called "luxury" excise tax at 1 cent a phone call to pay for the Spanish American War back in 1898, when only a few thousand phone lines existed in the country. It was repealed in 1902, but was reimposed at 1 cent a call in 1914 to pay for World War I and eventually became permanent at a rate of 3 percent in 1990.

Mozilla contributor Henrik Gemal wrote last week in a blog that a phishing detector has been added to Thunderbird. This feature is likely to be available in the next release of Thunderbird, version 1.1, according to the Mozilla bug report.

With the new Thunderbird feature, when a user clicks on a link in an e-mail that appears to be a phishing URL, the detector will prompt the user with a dialog box before the Web site is opened, Gemal wrote. The detector is triggered if the URL has a numeric Internet Protocol address rather than a domain name, or if the URL does not match the address displayed in the link text.

Firefox, the Mozilla Organization's browser software, and Mozilla Suite, its Internet application package, can already detect some phishing scams, according to a posting on the Mozilla news site, MozillaZine. These applications will warn people who try to visit a URL that includes an unnecessary username--a trick used by phishers to hide the true domain name of a site.

Aggrieved Verizon customers are invited to join a class action that seeks damages arising from the US ISP's enthusiastic email filtering policies. Philadelphia law firm Kohn, Swift & Graf, P.C. filed suit this week against Verizon on behalf of a DSL subscriber in a civil case that seeks class action status.

Since 22 December, mail servers at verizon.net have been configured to reject connections from Europe and other parts of the world including China and New Zealand by default, according to Reg readers and industry sources such as MessageLabs.

John Vincenzo, a spokesman for Verizon, told us that the "vast majority" of Verizon's 4m dial-up and DSL customers are happy with its "long standing" policy on spam and virus filtering. He conceded that some otherwise legitimate email has been blocked but gave no indication that Verizon has any plans to review its policy.

According to Vincenzo, spam complaints come from spammers themselves.

"IRC is often portrayed by the media as a haven for illegal activity. The author of IRC Hacks set out to find whether or not this was true. His conclusions are quite alarming, suggesting that 99.9% of IRC usage is illegal although he backs up IRC by saying that it is also used for lots of constructive purposes and is used by open source software developers." Update: 01/21 05:17 GMT by P: The author claimed it was merely 99.9% of traffic "to the top 60 channels" that is illegal, not 99.9% of all IRC traffic.

US ISP Verizon is persisting with a controversial policy of blocking email sent from Europe. Since 22 December, mail servers at verizon.net have been configured not to accept connections from Europe by default.

Verizon is blocking ranges of IP addresses belonging to British and European ISPs (the IP space from RIPE, APNIC, and more) in a misguided attempt to reduce spam. Domains are only unblocked following complaints, with Europeans effectively treated as guilty till proven innocent.

Verizon media relations manager Ells Edwards told Wired that he didn't know when the ISP would lift its blockade. "Normally these things abate in a matter of days," Edwards said.

Verizon three million DSL customers waiting for emails from Europe were advised to use alternative forms of communication. "If it's really important you might want to make a phone call," he said.

Google has fully integrated the past 20 years of Usenet archives into Google Groups, which now offers access to more than 800 million messages dating back to 1981. This is by far the most complete collection of Usenet articles ever assembled and a fascinating first-hand historical account.
We compiled some especially memorable articles and threads in the timeline below. For example, read Tim Berners-Lee's announcement of what became the World Wide Web or Linus Torvalds' post about his "pet project". You can find more in-depth information about the archive here.

Plenty of people have been talking about just how silly it is for so many newspapers to force registration on users, seeing how it cuts down on the market size to which the paper can sell to advertisers, and drives users to other sites instead, since they don't want to go through the hurdle. It looks like at least one newspaper is looking for a much more reasonable middle-ground. They're asking for voluntary registrations. Basically, you can see the article just fine without registering. They just ask for registration info at the top of the page. You can even make that box go away, if you want. This way, they still get those people just passing-by who would never register, and when people do register, it's likely to be good, targeted data, rather than useless, dirty data.