More than a quarter of about 180 hardcore spammers tracked by watchdog group Spamhaus are based in Florida, and most of those are in the tri-county area. The city with the most spammers in the world is Boca Raton.

South Florida is so notorious that some experts attributed a short-term decline in global spam after last year's hurricanes to the assumption that the storms disrupted spammers' operations.

And the FBI's North Miami office receives so many fraud complaints that only major cases get the bureau's attention. "If you come in with a $1 million case, we'll put you in line with all the others," said LeVord Burns, supervisory special agent.

Because spammers often route their e-mails through hosts overseas, spam is difficult to trace. So to solve cases, investigators usually follow the money trail.

Though many spammers operate legally, law enforcement officials are concerned that some South Florida spammers will use e-mail to rip people off, given the area's history as a scam capital.

Okay, the world title for fastest text messaging is still raging in the streets. The victor in the most recent contest was a bit of a dark horse - 93-year-old telegraph operator Gordon Hill delivered a resounding ass-whoopin' to his rival, 13-year-old Brittany Devlin, using Morse Code. Of course, Mr. Hill does have nigh on 80 years of practice under his belt, which was enough to help him triumph even despite Brittany's liberal use of texting slang (Mr. Hill transmitted the chosen phrase verbatim). The showdown was sponsored by the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, and the rivals had to transmit the following message: "Hey, girlfriend, you can text all your best pals to tell them where you are going and what you are wearing." Damn straight! Screw the T9, Engadget's switching over to Morse from now on.

Officials in California have notionally approved a bill to ban the sale of violent video games to kids.

Retailers selling or renting games deemed violent to under seventeens could be fined $1000 under the proposed legislation.

Proponent of the bill, Leland Yee a child psychologist, said youngsters shouldn’t be allowed to "go to stores and buy video games that teach them to do the very things we put people in jail for."

The bill didn’t get past a committee stage earlier this week, but was rubber stamped by the arts committee at a second attempt. It will now be considered by the full Assembly before ending up with the State Senate.

The US movie industry has made good its promise to name Brits Kevin Reid and Ian Hawthorne in its legal action against the users of their bds-palace.co.uk website, which links to BitTorrent-hosted content.

Last month, Reid formally received a summons to appear before the US District Court of New Jersey, where MPAA members Paramount, Warner, Universal and 20th Century Fox are attempting to identify and therefore sue individuals they alleged shared their film and TV content without authorisation.

US law does not reach as far as the UK, and even if the US Court views Reid and Hawthorne's refusal to answer the summons in a harsh light, there's little it can do about it. Should the two Brits visit New Jersey, they might possibly run into trouble, but they may well be free to visit other states of the Union safe from harassment from Motion Picture Ass. of America-member lawyers.

Reid claims Oppenheim "made it quite clear that he felt that if our Prime Minister could be persuaded to back his country in the Gulf War, then there was no doubting that American law would prevail in the UK". Fortunately, our courts tend to be a little less in awe of our transatlantic cousins than our glorious leader does.

Still, Hollywood's lawyers must come to the UK, either to persuade an English High Court judge that any ruling on the evidence made in the US should apply here too, or to challenge Reid and Hawthorne under UK copyright law, which in some respects is less liberal than its US equivalent.

Now here's a nice wrinkle of the laws governing this place that Tony Blair wanted to be "the best place for ecommerce anywhere in the world". If you send commercial data by email or over the Web, it's liable for VAT (17.5 per cent value-added tax, imposed in the UK on services) on the value of the data. Which of course with commercial data can be quite high.

But if you print that same data out and send it on paper, by post or fax, it is not liable for VAT.

This peculiar aspect of the UK's arcane tax laws was pointed out to us by Paul Redfern, who has a business offering data analysis services, crunching numbers for social survey data.

The reason? Apparently it's down to an EEC Directive of 1977, subsequently amended (many times), which aims to harmonise VAT on communications, including electronic communications. What the VAT is actually levied on depends on the means of communication, Dr Redfern was told. "If I post or fax data to you, the VAT is either included in the price of the postage stamp or the cost of the phone call. If I email the data, however, the VAT is levied on the value of the data I send you, not on the cost of communicating it."

"Microsoft is working with Ford Motor Co towards car that can't crash. The future of cars according to Gates will involve high-definition screens, speech recognition technology, cameras, digital calendars and navigation equipment with directions and road conditions." From the article: "Also on Friday, Microsoft unveiled its Performance Peak Initiative -- a line of computer systems to help the auto industry better coordinate supply chains, streamline design, production and sales and fill vehicles with computer gadgets."

The RIAA's questionable math has been discussed at length in the past -- where they love to trot out the claim that each shared song is worth somewhere between $750 and $30,000 in "losses." While the number is completely bogus for a variety of reasons, it is the number that the industry uses when suing the thousands of people they've sued. Now, Declan McCullough points out an analysis suggesting that these high dollar claims are unconstitutional by being so excessive. Because of this, the writer argues, the RIAA should not be allowed to sue for such a high amount. This would mean that more accused file sharers would likely be willing to challenge the lawsuits in court, rather than settling for a few grand just to get out from under the possibility of owing millions. In other words, some of these cases might actually get argued on the merits -- something the RIAA doesn't seem all that enthusiastic about, despite being the one bringing all of the lawsuits.

While the eXeem project to decentralize Bittorrent remains in open beta, the Azureus Java Bittorrent project has recently released a major update that, among other things offers 'a distributed, decentralised database that can be used to track decentralised torrents. This permits both "trackerless" torrents and the maintenance of swarms where the tracker has become unavailable or where the torrent was removed from the tracker.' It doesn't contain the search functionality of eXeem, but it's also not a beta product and is licensed under the GPL. Could this and compatible clients be the replacement to SuprNova and Lokitorrents, or does the lack of search negate its effectiveness?

A Spanish designer has come up with what could be the perfect solution for the woman who feels frustrated that she has to do all the house chores.

It is a washing machine called "Your Turn", which will not let the same person use it twice in a row.

When the sensor is then plugged into the washing machine, the software will only allow the wash programme to start if a different finger is placed on it each time.

The one thing it will not do though is something that most guys are notoriously bad at - separating the whites from the coloureds.

In March, U.S. troops in Iraq shot to death Nicola Calipari, the Italian intelligence agent that rescued the kidnapped journalist Giuliana Sgrena. U.S. commission on the incident produced a report which public version was censored for more than one third. Now Italian press is reporting that all confidential information in the report is available to the public, just by copying "hidden" text from the PDF and pasting it in a word processor (Italian). The uncensored report can now be directly downloaded (evil .DOC format, sorry)