Times have changed, and that old address is a black hole for spam. You never check it, and you don't want to. But your stupid ISP, your stubborn family members and high school buddies insist on sending you important things there.

Once you've got a domain, set up your mail preferences so that every e-mail sent to the domain gets accepted.

On your new domain hosting service, redirect your *@[yourdomain.com] to your Gmail account.

Use the "Vacation reply" in Gmail (activate it in Gmail's Settings tab) to announce to each sender your new address.

ISPs are using the number of emails as a criteria because emails use up almost no bandwidth -- so no matter what the cap is, the answer is "a lot."

Focusing on emails is like telling someone that a full tank of gas in their car will allow them to travel six hundred million millimeters. That's meaningless for someone who wants to know if they can actually get from San Francisco to Los Angeles on a single tank of gas.

Spears fell victim to the "Nigerian scam," which is familiar to almost anyone who has ever had an e-mail account.

All you need to do is send X-amount of dollars to pay some fees and all that cash will suddenly land in your checking account, putting you on Easy Street. By the way, please send the funds though an untraceable wire service.

They sent official-looking documents and certificates from the Bank of Nigeria and even from the United Nations. Her payment was "guaranteed."

When Spears began to doubt the scam, she got letters from the President of Nigeria, FBI Director Mueller, and President Bush. Terrorists could get the money if she did not help, Bush's letter said.

An undercover investigator who worked on the case said greed helped blind Spears to the reality of the situation, which he called the worst example of the scam he's ever seen.

A Web hosting firm reportedly responsible for hosting roughly 75 percent of the world's spam went offline Nov. 11 after its primary Internet providers cut the company off.

Security researchers have accused McColo of hosting the command-and-control servers for a number of well-known botnets, including Rustock and Srizbi. In a report on McColo featured on hostexploit.com, researchers predicted if McColo were depeered, worldwide spam output would likely be cut in half.

Underground nuclear power plants no bigger than a hot tub may soon provide electricity for communities around the world. Measuring about 1.5 meters across, the mini reactors can each power about 20,000 homes.

"You would need nation-state resources in order to enrich our uranium," Deal said. "Temperature-wise it's too hot to handle. It would be like stealing a barbecue with your bare hands."

The reactors need to be refueled about every seven to ten years. After five years of generating power, Hyperion says that the module produces a total waste of about the size of a softball, which could be a candidate for fuel recycling.

Code-named Amber Road, the rack-mounted 7000 line comes in 2TB, 44TB and 288TB options. All use the open-source ZFS file system and the DTrace system analysis tool and can be up and running in about 5 minutes, Sun claims.

All of the new unified storage systems include comprehensive data services at no extra cost, Fowler said. These include snapshots/cloning, restores, mirroring, optional RAID-5, optional RAID-6, replication, active-active clustering, compression, thin provisioning, CIFS (Common Internet File System), NFS (Network File System), iSCSI, HTTP/FTP and WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning).

Several reports came in from China, indicating that popular BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay had been hijacked.

People in the Beijing area who attempted to access the sites were promptly redirecting to Baidu, China's Google.

According to some sources, there was never an attempt to censor the BitTorrent sites, claiming that a DNS error cause the problems. This doesn't seem very plausible though, as the diversions almost exclusively involved P2P related sites, which are hosted right across the globe.

US President-elect Barack Obama has been asked about the type of pet dog his family would be bringing to the White House.

Speaking at his first news conference since securing the presidency, he said the choice of dog was 'a major issue' which had generated huge interest.

Under Government plans to monitor internet traffic, raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database.

It is further evidence of the Government's desire to have the capability to vet every telephone call, email and internet visit made in the UK, which has already provoked an outcry.

They were told that the security and intelligence agencies wanted to use the stored data to help fight serious crime and terrorism.

I've recently had two CD-Rs reported to me as faulty which are just 3 years old. This is worrying - I suspect the failure rate for this batch could be 10%.

I'd like to measure decay over time in my environment with my media and my other variables; and I expect others would too.