Terrorists have not engaged in a nationwide plot to annoy pilots with laser pointers, according to the FBI.

The FBI investigated 8 incidents over the past two weeks in which pilots reported seeing laser beams in their cockpits. The lasers appeared most often during takeoff and landing and were seen in Texas, Oregon, New Jersey and Ohio. As it turns out, the laser attacks were likely the result of accidents or just horseplay.

Ever vigilant, the FBI is now investigating a new laser incident after United Airlines pilots reported seeing a green light when taking off from Nashville International Airport. The pilots were able to complete the flight and landed unharmed here in Chicago.

A report claimed that Verizon is dumping email sent to the USA from outside the country.

And, it continues, the practice started on Christmas Eve. The filing on the message board claims that a rep for Verizon couldn't understand why any US citizen would want email from abroad.

It continues that Verizon would need a list of email addresses so it could let them through.

The FTC has just issued its final report on how it will define Spam with regards to the federal CAN-SPAM act. According to the FTC, bulk e-mail is commercial if it includes advertising and promotion or if the subject line or beginning of the message would be reasonably considered to be advertising or promotion. This is very similar to the proposed rules that were announced back in August. The modified rules also deal with the issues of transactional messages (an e-mail regarding an order that also includes advertising) and relationship-based e-mail (messages about product updates, etc).

Microsoft has been knocked back in its increasingly bizarre domain name grab by Spanish company Mocosoft.

Domain arbitrator WIPO, meeting in Spain, has decided that Microsoft is not entitled to the domain "mocosoft.com" despite the fact that some of the same letters appear in both companies' names. The site hosts a long list of downloadable applications.

The decision comes on the back off a year-long crusade by Microsoft to take ownership of all and any domains that even sound like its own name. Most famously, Microsoft lawyers descended on 17-year-old student Mike Rowe in January insisting he hand over his domain "mikerowesoft.com". The claim was clearly ludicrous but following heavy press interest, Microsoft went into PR mode and Mike Rowe was dazzled into handing over the domain by a plethora of gifts.

The spam chain is complex. Basically, though, most people responsible for sending spam are based in the US, though a growing number are now organized criminals in Eastern Europe and Russia. China is the location of choice for the servers that host the spammers' websites and for buying and selling lists of spam zombies, or personal computers (PCs) deliberately infected with spam-enabling viruses.

Each spam message invariably contains a link to a site where the tiny minority that respond (perhaps 0.1% of the total) can complete their transactions. Most of these sites - some 68% of them, according to a report released by anti-spam firm Commtouch in October - are to be found on servers based in China. In addition, according to Steve Linford, president of Spamhaus, a London-based spam-blocking service, China also dominates the market for buying and selling lists of zombie PCs, which are peddled by virus writers on Internet forums also found on Chinese servers.

Why China? Quite simply, because it is the only major market where spammers can do just about anything they want. Spamming remains legal, and persuading police to act against those providing them services has proved next to impossible. As Linford says: "They choose China because of the website hosting. For proxies you can use Brazil, Argentina, Russia. But the Internet service providers in [these places] will kill their websites straight away. This is the crux of the problem."

Computer users across the world continue to ignore security warnings about spam e-mails and are being lured into buying goods, a report suggests.

More than a quarter have bought software through spam e-mails and 24% have bought clothes or jewellery.

The research, which covered 6,000 people in six countries and their attitudes towards junk e-mails, revealed that Brazilians were the most likely to read spam.

A third of them read unsolicited junk e-mail and 66% buy goods or services after receiving spam.

This was despite 38% of people in all countries being worried about their net security because of the amount of spam they get.

Lately there has been a lot of discussion on the net about how to make money off RSS, which, depending on whom you ask, stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, but which many publishers and bloggers hope will turn into a Really Sweet (revenue) Stream.

Like e-mail alerts, RSS is highly targeted, because it serves headlines only to people who have signed up for them. (In this sense, it's more "pull" than "push.") The difference is that RSS can deliver up-to-the-second content. Not only that, but from the perspective of publishers, it could end up a pretty elegant solution to spam, since antispam filters often make it difficult for publishers to reach readers via e-mail.

A campaign by Lycos Europe to target spam-related websites appears to have been put on hold.

Earlier this week the company released a screensaver that bombarded the sites with data to try to bump up the running costs of the websites.

People were encouraged to download the screensaver which, when their PC was idle, would then send lots of data to sites that peddle the goods and services mentioned in spam messages.

Monitoring firm Netcraft analysed response times for some of the sites targeted by the screensaver and found that a number were completely knocked offline.

Try a sustained transfer of 101 gigabits per second between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles on Internet2. That's the speed hit by an international team lead by Caltech last week, the second year in a row the "High Energy Physics" team has won the Supercomputer Bandwidth Challenge.

The heart of the new effort is the new FAST congestion control algorithm for high performance TCP, developed by the Caltech Netlab team. The effort also involved an powerful collection of hardware, including seven 10 Gbps links to Cisco 7600 and 6500 series routers, and four dedicated wavelengths of National LambdaRail. (The Caltech press release details all the hardware used in breaking the Internet2 Speed Record.

Lycos Europe has started to distribute a special screensaver in a controversial bid to battle spam. The program - titled Make Love Not Spam, and available for Windows and the Mac OS - sends a request to view a spam source site. When a large number of screensavers send their requests at the same time the spam web page becomes overloaded and slow.

The servers targeted by the screensaver have been manually selected from various sources, including Spamcop, and verified to be spam advertising sites, Lycos claims. Several tests are performed to make sure that no server stops working. Flooding a server with requests so that the server is unable to respond to the volume of requests made - a process known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack - is considered to be illegal.