Most of the desktop computers in the UK's Department for Work and Pensions were paralyzed for four days on Monday, when a failed upgrade took them offline. The outage, covering 75 percent to 80 percent of the DWP's 80,000 PCs, is one of the largest in the UK government's not entirely impressive IT history.

According to one, a limited network upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP was taking place, but instead of this taking place on only a small number of the target machines, all the clients connected to the network received a partial, but fatal, "upgrade."

Unfortunately the request was made to apply it live and it was rolled out across the estate, which hit around 80 percent of the Win2K desktops. This patch caused the desktops to BSOD and made recovery rather tricky as they couldn't boot to pick any further patches or recalls.

Peer-to-peer program Kazaa is the No. 1 spyware threat on the Internet, according to Computer Associates International.

Through its PestPatrol research, CA found that Kazaa posed a greater threat than other programs in its top five spyware list because of its widespread popularity. Kazaa claims that its software has been downloaded 214 million times.

CA gave Kazaa a high "clot factor," its measure of how much a program slows a machine by adding unnecessary registry entries and directories. However, classifying a popular application like Kazaa as spyware is a delicate matter, and CA admits this creates difficulties in attaching labels.

Lycos Europe has started to distribute a special screensaver in a controversial bid to battle spam. The program - titled Make Love Not Spam, and available for Windows and the Mac OS - sends a request to view a spam source site. When a large number of screensavers send their requests at the same time the spam web page becomes overloaded and slow.

The servers targeted by the screensaver have been manually selected from various sources, including Spamcop, and verified to be spam advertising sites, Lycos claims. Several tests are performed to make sure that no server stops working. Flooding a server with requests so that the server is unable to respond to the volume of requests made - a process known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack - is considered to be illegal.

Valve software has disabled the Steam accounts of 20,000 people it has said were attempting to use pirated copies of Half-Life 2.

In a statement released to Shacknews, Valve said that reasons for closing the accounts included credit card fraud, theft of other people's accounts and using cracked versions of Valve games.

It also denied reports that it had deliberately leaked out 'warez' copies of the game to entrap users.

Those who bought the game at retail are required to have the disc in the drive to play, a problem which doesn't plague Steam buyers. Attempts to circumnavigate this issue, however, will lead to account banning as a form of piracy, and has caused something of an outcry among hardcore gamers who are used to the 'buy it and crack it' mentality. They claim that legitimate users are being targetted as pirates without basis.

The CIA is quietly funding federal research into surveillance of Internet chat rooms as part of an effort to identify possible terrorists, CNET News.com has learned.

Their proposal, also disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, received $157,673 from the CIA and NSF. It says: "We propose a system to be deployed in the background of any chat room as a silent listener for eavesdropping...The proposed system could aid the intelligence community to discover hidden communities and communication patterns in chat rooms without human intervention."

The Yener and Krishnamoorthy proposal says their research will begin Jan. 1, 2005 but does not say which IRC servers will be monitored.

"I don't know about chat-room surveillance, but doing research on issues related to terrorism is certainly legitimate," Teich said. "Whether the CIA ought to be funding research in universities in a clandestine manner is a different issue."

West Palm Beach — As commuters may recall, West Palm Beach Mayor Lois Frankel took advantage of a roadside sign along the North Dixie Highway reconstruction project to express empathy with traffic-bound drivers this month. "I Am Mad Too! - Lois," her message flashed.

Now, someone has responded anonymously to the mayor's frustration. Tuesday morning, the electronic board displayed an obscene message.

Whoever left the message then locked the metal box housing the sign's keyboard, so that road workers were unable to change the words and had to shut the sign off altogether, which they did shortly after 9 a.m. Someone from the sign leasing company arrived with the key later in the day.

The mayor, for her part, took it in stride. "Happy Thanksgiving," she said. "It's a silly response. I understand the frustration, but this is a very special week for us to give joy for all the blessings that we have."

Last week, members of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed 11 lawsuits against hundreds of people they accused of using file-sharing networks to share infringing copies of movies. However, the Federal Judge ruled the 'bulldozer' approach improper, ordering that the case should be put on hold for all but one of the defendants.

The MPAA sued groups of "Does" (John Doe) identified by numerical IP address and requested the discovery of names from the users' Internet Service Providers (ISPs). However, Judge William Alsup ruled that because claims against the 12 defendants were unrelated, suing them together into one big case was improper. "Such joinder may be an attempt to circumvent the filing fees by grouping defendants into arbitrarily-joined actions but it could nonetheless appear improper under Rule 20," the order states.

The Behemothic software company called Microsoft has lawyers who appear to have just made a huge cock-up when they came to sue a software outfit for using the word 'excel'.

It turns out that someone forgot to trademark the name and Microsoft didn't own it either. Apparently the legal eagles sent around a cease and desist letter to Savvysoft, which makes Excel portable to Linux under the name TurboExcel.

They also might not actually get the trademark as there is already an Excel Software which went into business just before the Vole's spreadsheet hit the shops.

Excel Software told NewsFactor hacks that it received a cease-and-desist letter about 15 years ago. But it replied by informing Microsoft it had the name first, and it has never heard from the lair of the Vole since.

Shared Media Licensing, based in Seattle, offers Weed, a software program that allows interested music fans to download a song and play it three times for free. They are prompted to pay for the "Weed file" the fourth time. Songs cost about a dollar and can be burned to an unlimited number of CDs, passed around on file-sharing networks and posted to web pages.

Each time the song is downloaded by a new listener, the Weed file resets itself so the same rules apply: three free plays, then pay. The music can also be transferred to Windows portable media devices.

One analyst said the Weed service is an admirable idea and is important for the growth of digital music. The challenge is building the traffic for Weed services.

Mary Anne Layden, co-director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Therapy, called porn the "most concerning thing to psychological health that I know of existing today."

Pornography addicts have a more difficult time recovering from their addiction than cocaine addicts, since coke users can get the drug out of their system, but pornographic images stay in the brain forever, Layden said.

"Pornography really does, unlike other addictions, biologically cause direct release of the most perfect addictive substance," Satinover said. "That is, it causes masturbation, which causes release of the naturally occurring opioids. It does what heroin can't do, in effect."

It is unclear what the consequences of Thursday's hearing will be since it was not connected to any pending or proposed legislation.