The US has a hardcore group of people who simply aren't interested in using the Internet. Around a third of US adults have rejected the Net, causing researchers to split them into two distinct groups.

"Resistors" - which make up 16 per cent of this hardcore group - have access to the Net either at home or work but chose not to use it. The second group - which makes up around 20 per cent of the US population - is described as "Unconnected," and doesn't have access to hand anywhere.

Emails and invitations sent to Hotmail from Gmail accounts do not bounce, but nor do they arrive in the recipient's Inbox - they vanish mysteriously into the aether. Joel Johnson writes in his Gizmodo weblog that invitations he sent to a Hotmail address bounced (this even received coverage from ZDNet). Search Engine Roundtable writes that several ISPs are blocking Gmail. It's already well-documented that Yahoo moves Gmail invites into the Bulk Mail folder. I've personally confirmed the Hotmail and Yahoo blocking.

An unwanted email received yesterday illustrated some of the basic problems with an opt-in legislation in one country and an opt-out legislation in another.

"If there is a valid email address out there then this is legal for Quest Systems to send email to this until this specific email address does opt-out from getting future newsletters from Quest Systems."

"For any that get hostile towards or flame or send any shape or form of a threat to Quest Systems it will be that these will be proactively reported to the FBI." [He must be clairvoyant if he reports proactively.]

And therein lies the rub. When one country adopts one type of legislation but others another, and when folk like Mr Kurtz assume that because we have no country identifier in our email address we must be based in the USA, the fundamental problem of conflicting anti-spam legislation becomes very obvious.

The Washington Post is reporting that Comcast, the nation's largest broadband ISP, has started blocking port 25 to reduce Spam. Jeanne Russo said Comcast is not blocking port 25 for all its users because it does not want to remove the option for legitimate customers who process their own e-mail. So the company is monitoring traffic and picking out machines that look suspicious. By blocking port 25, they say they cut Spam by 20% last week." ZDnet has another article, with a nice statistic: Comcast generates 800 million email messages/day, but only about 100 million of those are sent through Comcast's SMTP servers.

An adware purveyor has apparently used two previously unknown security flaws in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser to install a toolbar on victims' computers that triggers pop-up ads, researchers said this week.

Microsoft learned of the issue when a security researcher posted an analysis of the problem to the Full Disclosure security mailing list Monday. The software giant has already contacted the FBI and is in the "early stages" of building the case, Toulouse said. The company is considering creating a patch quickly and releasing it as soon as possible, rather than waiting for its usual monthly update.

The flaws are apparently being used to install the I-Lookup search bar, an adware toolbar that is added to IE's other toolbars. The adware changes the Internet Explorer home page, connects to one of six advertising sites and frequently displays pop-ups--mainly pornographic ads, according to an adware advisory on antivirus company Symantec's Web site.

According to news.com, Google's tool bar, which was confidently touted as a firewall against pop-ups has been tunnelled under by the ad companies.

Blocking software usually detects an HTML command known as "openwin" for opening a new window. However, a new breed of pop-ups avoid that command. Some advertisers are sending pop-ups through a "user initiated command" triggered when people "mouse over" an object on the page.

Another technique uses JavaScript commands, and gets around pop-up blockers that don't block user initiated commands like Google and Yahoo.

According to researcher Nielsen NetRatings, pop-ups have only become more prevalent after software appeared to kill them. Their number has increased nearly six times since 2002. A number of big publishers use pop up ads.

Back when President Bush made spam legal, we predicted the floodgates would open and actually increase spam. Now we've got some numbers to back up that prediction. According to anti-spam vendors, spam is on the rise and increasingly complies with the Can-Spam Act now; almost 10% of spam is legal up from 1% in January. And given that 7% of email users actually buy products from unsolicited email (ugh!), spam doesn't seem to be decreasing at all. So there don't appear to be any easy solutions to the spam problem, but if we're going to pass silly laws, maybe we need to pass a law against buying products promoted by spam.

The US patent office has outdone itself this week, awarding dating company eHarmony a patent covering online matchmaking.

In patentese, US patent no. 6,735,568 describes a computer implemented method for "identifying people who are likely to have a successful relationship".

Critics complain that reducing all of human relationships to an empirical test takes away the mystery. However, researchers at eHarmony maintain that a psychological profile is a good predictor of marital success. "Opposites might attract, but in our research they don't stay together," said Dr. Galen Buckwalter, vice president of research at eHarmony.

Online spammer forums like the Pro Bulk Club the Bulk Club and bulkmails.org have been gatecrashed by activists from organisations like Spamhaus. Steve Linford of Spamhaus said spammers know this already but they don't know who amongst their number is working for the other side.

Instead of using open mail relays or unscrupulous hosts (so-called 'bullet-proof' hosting - in reality ISPs in the third world who pull the plug on spammers when enough complaints are received by their upstream provider), spammers are using compromised machines to get their junk mail out. Viruses such as My-Doom and Bagle surrender the control of infected machines to hackers. This expanding network of infected, zombie machines can be used either for spam distribution or as platforms for DDoS attacks, such as those that many online bookies have suffered in recent months.

The appearance of a new version of the infamous Sasser worm shortly after the arrest of its admitted author has fuelled speculation that its creator worked with other virus writers.

Sasser-E was first spotted three hours and 45 minutes after the arrest of Sven Jaschan, 18, from Rotenburg in northern Germany at 2pm on Friday afternoon (local time). Either earlier sightings of the fast-spreading worm were missed or Sasser-E was released by someone other than Jaschan, who was released from police custody after the new version of the worm arrived onto the scene.

Sasser-E uses the same Windows vulnerability as previous versions to spread across vulnerable Windows 2000 and XP machines, causing them to become unstable and shutdown. Unlike previous version, Sasser-E gives a warning from the "SkyNet Team" about the vulnerability it exploits. Unlike the first four Sassers but like many NetSky variants, Sasser-E tries to remove the Bagle worm.