The CIA is quietly funding federal research into surveillance of Internet chat rooms as part of an effort to identify possible terrorists, CNET News.com has learned.

Their proposal, also disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, received $157,673 from the CIA and NSF. It says: "We propose a system to be deployed in the background of any chat room as a silent listener for eavesdropping...The proposed system could aid the intelligence community to discover hidden communities and communication patterns in chat rooms without human intervention."

The Yener and Krishnamoorthy proposal says their research will begin Jan. 1, 2005 but does not say which IRC servers will be monitored.

"I don't know about chat-room surveillance, but doing research on issues related to terrorism is certainly legitimate," Teich said. "Whether the CIA ought to be funding research in universities in a clandestine manner is a different issue."

Mary Anne Layden, co-director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Therapy, called porn the "most concerning thing to psychological health that I know of existing today."

Pornography addicts have a more difficult time recovering from their addiction than cocaine addicts, since coke users can get the drug out of their system, but pornographic images stay in the brain forever, Layden said.

"Pornography really does, unlike other addictions, biologically cause direct release of the most perfect addictive substance," Satinover said. "That is, it causes masturbation, which causes release of the naturally occurring opioids. It does what heroin can't do, in effect."

It is unclear what the consequences of Thursday's hearing will be since it was not connected to any pending or proposed legislation.

Domain names could become easier to hijack as a change in domain transfer rules takes effect Friday. Under new rules set by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), domain transfer requests will be automatically approved in five days unless they are explicitly denied by the account owner. This is a change from current procedure, in which a domain's ownership and nameservers remain unchanged if there is no response to a transfer request.

"Failure by the Registrar of Record to respond within five (5) calendar days to a notification from the Registry regarding a transfer request will result in a default 'approval' of the transfer," the new rules state. "In the event that a Transfer Contact listed in the Whois has not confirmed their request to transfer with the Registrar of Record and the Registrar of Record has not explicitly denied the transfer request, the default action will be that the Registrar of Record must allow the transfer to proceed."

Messaging security vendor CipherTrust Inc. on Monday released a new component of its IronMail appliances designed to stop spam messages before they get to customers' networks.

If a particular IP address racks up too many messages with scores of 100, the system drops connection attempts from those machines for a period of time, typically a few days.

Most spammers use rotating groups of proxies to send their messages and often will simply move on to another one if a particular IP address is blackholed. But that technique will be of little use against systems such as Connection Control that can quickly identify machines being used as bulk mailers and ignore them.

Warlick said Connection Control blocked nearly 4,000 individual IP addresses the first night that it was installed on Cox's internal network. The company's total mail volume dropped by about 40 percent.

The missive offers 4.6m email addresses on an "Unbelievable Secrets" CD for £29.95 along with bulk mail software that can send "30,000+ emails per hour".

Straun Robertson, an IT lawyer at solicitors Masons, said it was almost certain that the email addresses were not collected properly. This leaves both the seller and purchaser of the CD at risk from prosecution for offences against the Data Protection Act. Complaints would have to be made to the Information Commissioner.

It also reasonable to assume that the bulk mail package bundled with the CD would be used without the consent of those in the firing line. So users of the software are violating Privacy in Electronic Communications regulations, introduced across the European Union in recent months.

Cheques and postal orders should be sent to an address in west London. Two Register reporters checked out the address - it is a business services centre on bijou Marylebone High Street surrounded by designer shops and up-market restaurants. The boxes are available on a variety of contracts and a company worker assured us that the firm doesn't bother checking addresses given by box holders. After office hours a shutter comes down separating the boxes at the front of the store. Box-holders get a swipe card so they can open boxes outside normal working hours.

Some publishers, still clinging to the ad revenue from pop-ups, are exploiting a workaround in IE and other Web browsers to send pop-up ads despite blocking software. In one example, visitors to the Drudge Report Web site who use the Service Pack version of IE or Mozilla.org's Firefox browser with a pop-up blocker will nevertheless receive a pop-under ad if they click a link on the page.

Pop-ups have played a controversial role in the world of online advertising since the dot-com bust, when the ads started coming out in force. At the time, Net publishers of all stripes were starved for ad revenue and willing to let advertisers get in their visitors' faces. Consumers complained loudly, and publishers slightly acquiesced by introducing the less-intrusive pop-under, which springs up behind a Web page.

Falk eSolutions, which sells technology to deliver online ads, has said its software will deliver "the guaranteed pop." When its ad server detects pop-up blocking software on a person's machine, it will deliver what's called a floating ad, or rich-media ad, instead. Many publishers such as Ifilm and AtomShockwave are practicing this technique so as not to lose ad revenue.

In recent weeks, more companies have started bringing advertising to RSS feeds, the popular platforms for aggregating content from multiple sites in a single place. In the past, RSS feeds have typically been free of ads.

Gary Stein, a senior analyst at JupiterResearch, estimates that less than 10 percent of RSS feeds have ads and noted that no large advertisers have latched onto RSS-based advertising.

So far, forays into RSS advertising have not been flashy. Most ads are text-based and made to be clearly distinguishable from editorial content.

Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs, said in an e-mail that most serious blog readers use RSS regularly and that it makes sense to start advertising on feeds along with blog websites.

Instant messaging is everywhere nowadays, but people who use it may be surprised to know how trivial it is to listen in on their private conversations. Snoopers can use tools like tcpdump and aimsniff to tap into the contents of the messages. But with a little free software, IMers can be secure in the knowledge their conversations are, well, secure.

Gaim-Encryption is a Gaim plug-in that enables secure conversations over existing IM networks, and, like Gaim itself, Gaim-Encryption is available for most platforms. GNU/Linux users have a number of options, including non-official Debian sources, an RPM, or a tarball. Windows users can download the executable and install it normally.

Every time you IM someone the first IM will be in clear text. Alternatively, you can tell Gaim-Encryption to always encrypt to a given user by selecting his name from your Buddy List and right-clicking on the preference saying "Turn auto-encrypt on."

And you thought Google's 1-GByte Gmail was big: Hellacious Riders, an online motorcycle magazine, announced that it launched a 100-GByte Email service to its users. The firm extended its offer with a challenge to THG readers for a 1000 GByte account.

Google claims in its promotion of Gmail that users never will have to delete emails again, due to the pure dimension of its service. Hriders.com, based in Irvine, California, believes that one Gigabyte simply is not enough and offers what Google presented as a bug to some users in the week after Gmail's launch: A whopping 100 GByte.

Up to today, Weiss has signed up 52 million users in countries - a number which he wants to grow significantly to be recognized as record: "We would like to be included in the Guinness Book of Records for the world's largest mailing list," he said.

This could possibly be the worst viruses yet! Earlier this month Microsoft announced a problem in their GDI driver that processes the way JPEG images are displayed. Someone has finally posted an exploit to Usenet. Easynews, a premium Usenet provider, found the virus Sunday afternoon. Up-to-date information about how we found it and what it does is located at www.easynews.com/virus.txt. When this picture is viewed it installs remote management software (winvnc and radmin) and will connect to irc.