What most of us hate most about e-mail is spam, but pop-up ads are a close second. U-Haul went to court to complain that a moving company displayed pop-up ads when customers went to its U-Haul site and tried to get them removed as a violation of their copyright. However, a judge ruled against them. He says that when we surf the internet, we’re “consenting” to seeing pop-up ads. That’s news to us.
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One of the underground heroes of the Iraq war was the anonymous blogger who posted daily messages about what it felt like to live through the war. After the downfall of Saddam, Salam Pax came out of hiding, and now writes for the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. His latest blog tells what it’s really like in Baghdad today.
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An Internet worm detected Monday is spreading around the world like wildfire. The worm has has been spreading rapidly across the Internet, according to the CERT Coordination Center, a government funded security watchdog group at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

The worm instructs infected computers to assault the Microsoft Update servers continuously after 12:01 a.m., August 16. Such an attack, launched by thousands of computers with high-speed connections, would prevent users from being able to reach the service, experts said. The worm is instructed to continue doing this until December 31, 2003, after which it will attack the update site on the 16th of every month.
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Watch out: The Department of Homeland Security and private technology experts are warning us that hackers plan to attack thousands of websites on Sunday in a coordinated “contest” that could disrupt traffic on the internet. Their goal is to vandalize 6,000 websites in six hours. The government has already detected surveillance probes by hackers looking for weaknesses in corporate and government networks.

Peter Allor of Internet Security Systems says, “We emphasize that all website administrators should ensure that their sites are not vulnerable.”

A contest to destroy what others have worked hard to create? This is something that could only happen in our final hour?according to British Astronomer Royal Martin Rees. Hear him on Dreamland, starting Saturday.read more