Starting Monday, MSN will grant use of Web DAV tools only to paid subscribers of Hotmail, which starts at $19.95. However, Hotmail subscribers who have previously used the technology, an estimated 5 percent to 10 percent of its total 187 million customers, will be able to continue to use it for free through March or April of 2005.

"We've seen spammers exploiting this Web DAV protocol, and we're going to make a change to help curb its abuse. New spammers won't be able to set up of free accounts" to send junk e-mail, said Brook Richardson, lead product manager for MSN communications services.

If you've ever seen a smack-head handcuffed to a bed gibbering uncontrollably because he can't get a fix, then be afraid, because that's what you'll look like after two weeks of internet-free cold turkey.

While this cruel "qualitative" torture was inflicted on just 13 households containing 28 guinea pigs, a broader "quantitative" trawl of 1,000 web addicts found that 48 per cent of respondents could not go without the internet for two weeks. This unwillingness to even contemplate disconnection from the digital world was confirmed by Yahoo! chief sales officer Wenda Harris Millard, who reported: "This study is entirely indicative of the myriad ways that the internet, in just ten short years of mainstream consumer consumption, has irrevocably changed the daily lives of consumers. This is true to the extent that it was incredibly difficult to recruit participants for this study, as people weren't willing to be without the internet for two weeks."

The internet's most popular search engine Google has been accused of supporting Chinese internet controls by omitting contentious news stories from search results in China.

Researchers at Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT), a US company that provides technology for circumventing internet restrictions in China, have discovered that the recently-launched Chinese version of Google News omits blocked news sources from its results.

Google admits to omitting some news sources within China but says this is meant to improve the quality of the service.

"In order to create the best possible news search experience for our users, we sometimes decide not to include some sites, for a variety of reasons," says a statement issued by the company. "These sources were not included because their sites are inaccessible."

Based on the half-dozen hires in recent weeks, Google appears to be planning to launch its own Web browser and other software products to challenge Microsoft.

Google has wooed Joshua Bloch, one of the main developers of the Internet programming language Java, from Sun Microsystems.

The company also hired four people who worked on Microsoft's Web browser, Internet Explorer, and later founded their own company. One of them, Adam Bosworth, is credited with being a driving force not only behind IE, but Microsoft's database-management program, Access.

Microsoft employee Raymond Chen has compiled unique evidence of the explosion of spam: he's saved every spam message and virus-laden e-mail he's received at work since 1997.

Not willing to stop there, Chen graphed the spams and viruses to create a cool visual representation of one man's malicious traffic.

Actually, the graph is an interesting view, for it visually demonstrates the explosion of spam in 2002, its continued rage in 2003, and finally, in 2004, a bit of a fall-off as enterprise filters and defenses come into play.

"You can see that in late 2003, the blue dot density [which shows spam received] diminished considerably. That's when mail administrators found a filter whose false-positive rate was low enough to be acceptable," Chen wrote.

The recent launch of two services -- a brand new, fully three-dimensional chat-room product known as IMVU, and AOL Instant Messenger's new 3-D SuperBuddy icons -- is putting the spotlight on a major shift by the leading IM providers toward making graphical avatars a fundamental personalization feature.

According to a study by comScore MediaMetrix, more than 250 million people use instant messaging regularly. And IDC estimates that more than 7 billion instant messages are sent every day. According to AOL senior director of corporate communications Krista Thomas, AIM's users are known to spend six hours a day on average with their IM client open.

"Avatar-based IM is a curiosity right now," said Jeff Hester, who runs the instant-messaging watchdog site, BigBlueBall.com. "It's cute, but I don't think many people have embraced it as something they couldn't live without. It feels a little like a solution in search of a problem."

Scammers have caught on to the allure of Gmail and are using the Google e-mail service for a "phishing" scam to harvest e-mail addresses and passwords.

The "Gmail Team" asks users to give away their Gmail addresses and passwords to get the invites.

For those account holders genuinely given Gmail invites to hand out by Google, a click is all it takes to get a friend onboard. A message saying "You have 6 Gmail invitations. Invite a friend to join Gmail!" appears in the user's status bar, for example.

Why the scammers are after the usernames and passwords is, as yet, unclear. One possibility is to use the accounts to send spam. Another is the potential to search though the e-mail messages for any financial details left lying around in e-mails. With up to a gigabyte of storage per account, that's a lot of e-mail to trawl though.

US firm Savvis was allegedly earning up to $2 million a month from 148 of the world's worst spammers, a former employee had claimed.

Along with C&W US's 3,000 business customers, Savvis inherited 95 major spammers who make their money by sending out millions of unsolicited e-mails a day with the standard mix of Viagra and porn offers.

As rumours about Savvis and the spammers grew on the internet, executives discussed different ways of keeping the customers and whether they could hide them by changing their names or their computer IP addresses.

Mr Terranson went to Steve Linford, who runs the Spamhaus block list from a small house boat on the River Thames near London.

In three long conversations with Savvis executives last Friday, Mr Linford persuaded them to ditch its spamming clients after threatening to block all Savvis e-mails, making it very difficult for them to communicate with the outside world.

Mr McCormick promised that within the next 10 days all spammers will be taken off their network.

Spammers have adopted a new standard for email authentication much faster than legitimate emailers, according to a study from security appliance firm CipherTrust published this week

More spam than legitimate email is currently sent using Sender Policy Framework, a recently introduced email authentication protocol. According to CipherTrust's research, 34 per cent more spam is passing SPF checks than legitimate email because spammers are actively registering their SPF records.

As long as spammers comply with the protocol by not spoofing the sender address, their messages will not be stopped by SPF, which CipherTrust has supported since February 2004. CipherTrust's research among users of its own IronMail message security appliance this summer found that a spam message is three times more likely to pass an SPF check than it is to fail it.

Microsoft's Sender ID solution to spam looks intriguing, and until recently, it seemed destined to become an Internet standard. In brief, Sender ID is designed to ensure that e-mail originates from the Internet domain it claims to come from.

Indeed, if the framework is looking less appealing right now, it's only because some say that Microsoft's licensing terms are incompatible with Open Source. Today the Apache Software Foundation has rejected Sender ID, arguing that while the license is royalty free, it is incompatible with Open Source, and thus the foundational properties of the Internet.

The current Microsoft Royalty-Free Sender ID Patent License Agreement terms are a barrier to any ASF project which wants to implement Sender ID. We believe the current license is generally incompatible with open source, contrary to the practice of open Internet standards, and specifically incompatible with the Apache License 2.0. Therefore, we will not implement or deploy Sender ID under the current license terms.

Additionally, Microsoft claims to have patents relating to Sender ID, but those patents have not been disclosed—something which makes many people rather nervous.