The most explosive documents in the ongoing Kazaa court case have emerged today, including logs of discussions between parent company Sharman and the Estonian developer of the Kazaa Media Desktop.

APC Magazine journalist Garth Montgomery, who has covered every day of the trial in the Australian Federal Court, says: "In a nutshell, this has got to rate as the most explosive document revealed. It makes it damn near impossible to maintain the separation theory that Sharman and Altnet rely on in terms of business independence and technical infrastructure. The control they exercise over the system is complete."

Gertrude Walton of Fayette County hated computers, her daughter said.

More than a month after Walton was buried in Beckley, a group of record companies named her as the only defendant in a federal lawsuit. They claimed Walton made more than 700 pop, rock and rap songs available for free on the Internet under the screen name "smittenedkitten."

On Thursday, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America acknowledged that Walton was probably not the smittenedkitten it is searching for.

"Our evidence gathering and our subsequent legal actions all were initiated weeks and even months ago," said RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy. "We will now, of course, obviously dismiss this case."

The case demonstrates the imperfections of the record industry's two-year old effort to hunt down and sue people who put hundreds, even thousands, of copyrighted songs onto file-sharing networks on the Internet.

After years developing anti-spam technology and drafting legislation to outlaw spammers, the delegates at MIT's annual Spam Conference in Boston were overjoyed to see the culprit nailed.

Jeremy Jaynes was found guilty last November by a state court in Leesburg, Virginia, of sending more than 10 million unsolicited emails a day. He was hawking pornography, work-at-home schemes and stock-picking software. The spams are estimated to have earned him around $750,000 a month. He is now on $1 million bail, forbidden from using the internet and will be sentenced this month. The jury has recommended he gets a nine-year jail term.

Jaynes's operation was run from a chaotic office in Raleigh, North Carolina. Cabling to 16 high-speed internet links snaked everywhere and there were CDs packed with spammed email addresses and servers holding spam emails. Even as the police arrived, spamming was in progress.

Project Honeypot, the brainchild of Chicago lawyer Matthew Prince, is taking advantage of a clause in the CAN-SPAM act that makes harvesting email addresses for spamming purposes illegal.

A schoolteacher in France has been fined 10,200 euros (£7,033) for illegally swapping hundreds of music albums on the internet.

Officials said he was one of the worst offenders for sharing music online, making available up to 10,000 songs.

He also had his computer confiscated and was ordered to take out newspaper advertisements announcing the verdict and punishment.

The court case came as 70 musicians, academics and politicians signed a petition calling for a halt to legal action against people who download music for their own use.

"Like at least eight million other French people, we have also downloaded music online and are thus part of a growing number of 'criminals'. We ask that these absurd lawsuits stop," the petition published in the Nouvel Observateur states.

According to the SpamHaus Project--a U.K.-based antispam compiler of blacklists that block 8 billion messages a day--a new piece of malicious software has been created that takes over a PC. This "zombie" computer is then used to send spam via the mail server of that PC's Internet service provider. This means the junk mail appears to come from the ISP, making it very hard for an antispam blacklist to block it.

ISPs in the United States may have already been hit. "We've seen a surge in spam coming from major ISPs. Now all of the ISPs are having large amounts of spam going out from their mail servers," Linford said.

Linford predicts that ISPs will see a growth in the volume of bulk mail they send and receive over the next two months, with spam levels rising from 75 percent of all e-mail to around 95 percent within a year.

Scientists have made them walk and talk. There are even robots that can run. But a South Korean professor is poised to take their development several steps further, and give cybersex new meaning.

Kim Jong-Hwan, the director of the ITRC-Intelligent Robot Research Centre, has developed a series of artificial chromosomes that, he says, will allow robots to feel lusty, and could eventually lead to them reproducing. He says the software, which will be installed in a robot within the next three months, will give the machines the ability to feel, reason and desire.

Kim said: "Robots will have their own personalities and emotion and - as films like I Robot warn - that could be very dangerous for humanity. If we can provide a robot with good - soft - chromosomes, they may not be such a threat."

Connecticut emergency management officials have apologized for an erroneous message sent to state broadcasters today saying an evacuation of the state had been ordered.

State emergency management officials believe someone pressed the wrong button.

Instead of running a test of the emergency alert system, midday television viewers and radio listeners were told that the state was being evacuated.

"There is absolutely no evacuation or state emergency," said Kerry Flaherty, of the Office of Emergency Management. "It was an erroneous message."

The department was investigating how the alert was sent.

According to New York Times, spam has actually gone up [Free registration required. You gave real info, right?] since the CAN-SPAM act went into effect. There is a graphic in the article that illustrates this increase. Before the CAN-SPAM act was passed, spam was about 60% of all e-mail traffic. Now it's 80%. In a we-told-you-so quote, Steve Linford, the founder of the Spamhaus Project, says CAN-SPAM legalized spam by giving bulk advertisers permission to send junk e-mail as long as they followed certain rules. Slashdot covered this story last year. For companies that offer offshore "bulk advertising" servers, business is booming. A survey from Stanford University estimates the global cost of spam in terms of lost productivity to be at 50 billion $ and 17 billion $ in the US alone. CAN-SPAM does give prosecutors some leverage to go after the merchants - but it must be proved that they knew, or should have known, that their wares were being fed into the illegal spam chain.

On behalf of several major firms in the music industry (BMG, edel, EMI, Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Music), the Waldorf law firm of Munich sent Heise Zeitschriften Verlag a dissuasion this Friday.

According to the music industry, simply providing a link to the start page of the web site of a copying software manufacturer constitutes a violation of this law. Furthermore, Heise Verlag is accused of having provided "instructions on how to get around anti-piracy measures" in the above news item.

As Dr. Thorsten Braun, legal adviser at the German Association of the Phonographic Industry, put it, "Freedom of the press is not a carte blanche: instructions and tips on how to perform illegal acts are inadmissible and have nothing to do with serious reporting."

"The article contains neither instructions, nor advertising. On the contrary, it is expressly stated that the use of this software is illegal in Germany. Providing a link to a manufacturer's web site goes without saying in online reporting and is completely irrelevant anyway in light of the fact that our readers are familiar with and know-how to use Internet search engines," explains Christian Persson, editor-in-chief at heise online.

Norwegian student Frank Allan Bruvik has been fined $15,900 for providing links from his website, Napster.no, to MP3 files hosted elsewhere, the Associated Press reports.

The Court found that he had violated copyright law by helping netizens to locate forbidden files. In other words, by linking, Bruvik was assisting in an illegal act.

An appeals court earlier had found that he did not violate copyrights because he did not host, or "publish", the files, but merely made reference to sites where the files were already accessible. Those who had actually published the files are the ones liable:

"The Court of Appeals finds that copyright infringement violating the rights of the copyright holders were committed when the works were made accessible for the public by those who uploaded the files to an open network of computers."

The High Court reversed the appellate decision, and left the case as it was decided by the original district court.