The FTC has just issued its final report on how it will define Spam with regards to the federal CAN-SPAM act. According to the FTC, bulk e-mail is commercial if it includes advertising and promotion or if the subject line or beginning of the message would be reasonably considered to be advertising or promotion. This is very similar to the proposed rules that were announced back in August. The modified rules also deal with the issues of transactional messages (an e-mail regarding an order that also includes advertising) and relationship-based e-mail (messages about product updates, etc).

Edward Felten of the very fine Freedom to Tinker has written a 15 line P2P program in Python. From the post on Freedom to Tinker, "I wrote TinyP2P to illustrate the difficulty of regulating peer-to-peer applications. Peer-to-peer apps can be very simple, and any moderately skilled programmer can write one, so attempts to ban their creation would be fruitless." Matthew Scala, a reader of Freedom to Tinker, has responded with the 9 line MoleSter, written in Perl.

A new kind of copy-protected music CD will likely hit U.S. shelves early next year, as record label SonyBMG experiments with a technology created by British developer First 4 Internet, according to sources familiar with the companies.

Gilliat-Smith said his company has been waiting to improve its technology. Better-known companies Macrovision and Sunncomm have seen sporadic--and sometimes controversial--use of their products on CDs released around the world.

For several years, the major record labels have sought a way to protect CDs against unrestricted copying and "ripping," or transforming songs into files such as MP3s that can be swapped widely online. Early experiments proved unpopular, prompting reports that the discs could not play in certain kind of stereos, or might even damage computers.

The U.S. Attorney in St. Louis was demanding that the Chicago tabloid turn over its accounting records, e-mails, and phone logs related to ads from online gambling outfits -- ads that sports papers like PFW had run for nearly a decade.

In September, 2003, Arkush caved: He pulled the ads, took a $2 million revenue hit, and laid off 22% of his staff. "It has been a pretty miserable year," he says. "We're not breaking any laws, but who wants to battle the Justice Dept.?"

The Justice campaign has sent a chill through several industries despite the fact that there is no explicit federal law against online gaming -- something lawmakers want to remedy.

"Our revenues are greater than Yahoo!'s (YHOO ). Our profits are greater than Amazon's. It's ridiculous," says Alex Czajkowski, marketing director for Sporting Bet PLC in London, which processed $2.5 billion in wagers last fiscal year for a $39.5 million operating profit.

On Nov. 10, Antigua won a World Trade Organization ruling that the U.S. violates international trade rules by, among other things, allowing credit cards to be used for domestic gambling but not online wagering.

Microsoft has been knocked back in its increasingly bizarre domain name grab by Spanish company Mocosoft.

Domain arbitrator WIPO, meeting in Spain, has decided that Microsoft is not entitled to the domain "mocosoft.com" despite the fact that some of the same letters appear in both companies' names. The site hosts a long list of downloadable applications.

The decision comes on the back off a year-long crusade by Microsoft to take ownership of all and any domains that even sound like its own name. Most famously, Microsoft lawyers descended on 17-year-old student Mike Rowe in January insisting he hand over his domain "mikerowesoft.com". The claim was clearly ludicrous but following heavy press interest, Microsoft went into PR mode and Mike Rowe was dazzled into handing over the domain by a plethora of gifts.

More details have emerged on the arrest of a German lawyer and three businessmen who masterminded an international warez network and grossed €1m.

A spokesman for German anti-piracy organisatin GVU told Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel on Friday (17 Sept) that the crackdown may have been the biggest blow ever against internet pirates anywhere in the world.

Syndikus represents Firstway Medien GmbH, a German firm which released a hobbled version of the open source file sharing program eMule. The hacked eMule was disabled, and could only be activated once you paid for the product. Worse, the program couldn't be removed from Windows without corrupting the internet connection.

Even more remarkable is the reputation of Syndikus's partner Günther Freiherr von Gravenreuth (real name: Günter Werner Dörr) who, according to his own biography, advised the European Institute for Computer Anti-Virus Research and German Association for Entertainment Software. von Gravenreuth was behind the much publicised Tanja campaign against software piracy.

The spam chain is complex. Basically, though, most people responsible for sending spam are based in the US, though a growing number are now organized criminals in Eastern Europe and Russia. China is the location of choice for the servers that host the spammers' websites and for buying and selling lists of spam zombies, or personal computers (PCs) deliberately infected with spam-enabling viruses.

Each spam message invariably contains a link to a site where the tiny minority that respond (perhaps 0.1% of the total) can complete their transactions. Most of these sites - some 68% of them, according to a report released by anti-spam firm Commtouch in October - are to be found on servers based in China. In addition, according to Steve Linford, president of Spamhaus, a London-based spam-blocking service, China also dominates the market for buying and selling lists of zombie PCs, which are peddled by virus writers on Internet forums also found on Chinese servers.

Why China? Quite simply, because it is the only major market where spammers can do just about anything they want. Spamming remains legal, and persuading police to act against those providing them services has proved next to impossible. As Linford says: "They choose China because of the website hosting. For proxies you can use Brazil, Argentina, Russia. But the Internet service providers in [these places] will kill their websites straight away. This is the crux of the problem."

"In this current article about OpenOffice.org (also covered at Linux Today), I try to make a point about OpenOffice's commitment to open document formats and interchange as the strongest selling point - never mind cost. The OOo developers are putting a lot of effort into their XML format; will this pay off, and will users notice the significance of OpenDocument/OASIS document formats?" This can't be said enough: file formats are what determine whether and how easily data is portable, or whether the user is just stuck.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday said it would hear a controversial case on whether file-sharing software companies could be held legally responsible for copyright infringement on their networks.

The court's decision could also be a sobering sign for technology companies well outside the world of file-swapping. At the core of the case is an interpretation of a 20-year-old decision that made VCRs legal despite their ability to copy TV shows and movies, which ultimately helped pave the way for a host of technologies ranging from CD burners to Apple Computer's iPod.

"There's a lot more at stake here for the technology industry than for the copyright industry," said Fred von Lohmann, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney who has represented StreamCast Networks on the issue. "This case will not be determinant of the future of peer to peer around the world, but it will be determinant of the future of a whole host of future digital products."

Computer users across the world continue to ignore security warnings about spam e-mails and are being lured into buying goods, a report suggests.

More than a quarter have bought software through spam e-mails and 24% have bought clothes or jewellery.

The research, which covered 6,000 people in six countries and their attitudes towards junk e-mails, revealed that Brazilians were the most likely to read spam.

A third of them read unsolicited junk e-mail and 66% buy goods or services after receiving spam.

This was despite 38% of people in all countries being worried about their net security because of the amount of spam they get.