Microsoft employee Raymond Chen has compiled unique evidence of the explosion of spam: he's saved every spam message and virus-laden e-mail he's received at work since 1997.

Not willing to stop there, Chen graphed the spams and viruses to create a cool visual representation of one man's malicious traffic.

Actually, the graph is an interesting view, for it visually demonstrates the explosion of spam in 2002, its continued rage in 2003, and finally, in 2004, a bit of a fall-off as enterprise filters and defenses come into play.

"You can see that in late 2003, the blue dot density [which shows spam received] diminished considerably. That's when mail administrators found a filter whose false-positive rate was low enough to be acceptable," Chen wrote.

As soon as you install SP2 on a Windows XP PC with a certain configuration, your file and printer sharing data are visible worldwide, despite an activated Firewall. This also applies to all other services. The PC only has to provide sharing for an internal local network and connect to the Internet via dial-up or ISDN.

Due to the bug carried over from SP1 as well as a new bug, the firewall configuration with SP2 has a catastrophic effect. The SP2 installation simply uses the previous configuration of the firewall: If it was active for the dial-up connection, now it also has been activated for the network adapter.

At the same time, an exception is determined for file and printer sharing: For the internal network card - and astonishingly also for all adapters.

With the first use of the dial-up connection after installing SP2, all of your shared data are available on the Internet. Now, other users can start guessing your passwords for administrator and guest and you basically are no more secure than the first Windows 95 users with an Internet connection - thanks to Service Pack 2.

The recent launch of two services -- a brand new, fully three-dimensional chat-room product known as IMVU, and AOL Instant Messenger's new 3-D SuperBuddy icons -- is putting the spotlight on a major shift by the leading IM providers toward making graphical avatars a fundamental personalization feature.

According to a study by comScore MediaMetrix, more than 250 million people use instant messaging regularly. And IDC estimates that more than 7 billion instant messages are sent every day. According to AOL senior director of corporate communications Krista Thomas, AIM's users are known to spend six hours a day on average with their IM client open.

"Avatar-based IM is a curiosity right now," said Jeff Hester, who runs the instant-messaging watchdog site, BigBlueBall.com. "It's cute, but I don't think many people have embraced it as something they couldn't live without. It feels a little like a solution in search of a problem."

Scammers have caught on to the allure of Gmail and are using the Google e-mail service for a "phishing" scam to harvest e-mail addresses and passwords.

The "Gmail Team" asks users to give away their Gmail addresses and passwords to get the invites.

For those account holders genuinely given Gmail invites to hand out by Google, a click is all it takes to get a friend onboard. A message saying "You have 6 Gmail invitations. Invite a friend to join Gmail!" appears in the user's status bar, for example.

Why the scammers are after the usernames and passwords is, as yet, unclear. One possibility is to use the accounts to send spam. Another is the potential to search though the e-mail messages for any financial details left lying around in e-mails. With up to a gigabyte of storage per account, that's a lot of e-mail to trawl though.

Thousands of people have signed up to call their congressional representatives Tuesday to protest the Induce Act, a controversial copyright bill that many fear would undermine the legal protections that allow consumers to make personal copies of music or movies they've bought.

The Induce Act, officially known as the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (SB2560), was introduced in June by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont). It would hold technology companies liable for making products that encourage customers to infringe copyright.

Television, movie and music companies have given $168,928 in campaign donations to Hatch since 1999, according to Opensecrets.org, a website run by the Center for Responsive Politics, an organization that tracks campaign donations. Leahy received $232,050 in the same period. The internet, computer and telecommunications industries donated less money to each.

Transitive Corp. of Los Gatos, California, claims its QuickTransit software allows applications to run "transparently" on multiple hardware platforms, including Macs, PCs, and numerous servers and mainframes.

The company claimed QuickTransit eliminates the need to port software from one platform to another. Software applications written for one platform will run on almost any other, without any modifications to the underlying program.

In demonstrations to press and analysts, the company has shown a graphically demanding game -- a Linux version of Quake III -- running on an Apple PowerBook.

QuickTransit fully supports accelerated 3-D graphics and about 80 percent computational performance on the main processor. It requires no user intervention: It kicks in automatically when a non-native application is launched.

Weidel said in most cases, QuickTransit allows translated applications to run faster on new hardware than it did on the original platform, thanks to the speed of today's machines compared with those made a decade ago.

PayPal, the online payments arm of eBay Inc. (EBAY.O: Quote, Profile, Research), on Friday said it will soon fine people up to $500 for uses related to gambling, adult content or services, and buying or selling prescription drugs from noncertified sellers.

The new policy, which takes effect Sept. 24 and applies to both buyers and sellers, marks the first time PayPal has imposed fines for violations of its use policy, spokeswoman Amanda Pires said.

PayPal processes transactions on the Net and at one time had received almost 10 percent of its revenue from online gambling. But it halted the practice under regulatory pressure after its acquisition by eBay in 2002 and now prohibits the processing of gambling and adult transactions. Now it has decided to enforce that policy with fines.

The British Library is putting online 93 high-resolution digitised copies of 21 of Shakespeare's plays.

The texts date from Shakespeare's lifetime and are pamphlet editions of plays prepared to be sold after performances had finished.

"The quartos were cheaply produced and would have been available for as little as sixpence," said Moira Goff, head of British Collections 1501-1800 at the British Library.

"Given that Shakespeare left no manuscripts behind, the quartos are as close as we are able to get to what he actually wrote," said Ms Goff.

The 21 plays featured on the website include many of Shakespeare's best known works including King Lear, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Love's Labours Lost, Romeo and Juliet and Othello.

The makers of the most secure operating system in the world, Microsoft is calling on hackers to try and take down its SP2 version of XP.

The fighting talk came from Vole's UK head Alistair Baker has told hackers that if they could get through a Windows XP system with SP2 running he would be impressed.

He said his company's Windows XP operating system update was the "first big line we have drawn in the sand" to combat security breaches and spam. Now while we are impressed with Alistair's commitment to his product, we do think he is asking for trouble.

Altnet, a company that sells music and other digital goods through file-swapping services, sued the Recording Industry Association of America on Wednesday for alleged patent infringement.

In the summer of 2003, it announced that it had purchased patent rights to the process of identifying files on a peer-to-peer network using a "hash," or digital fingerprint based on the contents of the file.

Altnet's lawsuit says that antipiracy companies Overpeer and MediaDefender are still on the hook, however. Overpeer is a "spoofing" company that posts millions of false or corrupted files on networks such as Kazaa, trying to make real files harder to find. Media Defender uses "interdiction" techniques, which essentially clog networks with requests that block real download efforts.

In its complaint, Altnet said that RIAA executives had been notified several times in 2003 about the patent, but that the trade group has continued to support Overpeer and to conduct its own enforcement efforts on the Kazaa network without permission.