Imagine a world where the government paid all the bills for the postal service, and the cost of mailing a letter was zero.

Organized crime gangs are shaking down Internet betting sites on the eve of American football's Super Bowl, threatening to unleash a crippling data attack unless they pay a "protection" fee, police and site operators said.

A variant of the MyDoom worm has emerged as the most devastating virus since last summer, and is likely to target Microsoft Corp.'s Web site, security experts said on Wednesday.

As 2003 drew to a close, AOL substantially increased its marketing and told Wall Street analysts of its intent to do so. Ultimately, senior officials added $49 million, or about 10 percent, to the marketing budget in the fourth quarter, opting to ship more than 125 million AOL software disks -- about 25 million more than the firm mailed and distributed free through retailers in the same period of the prior year, according to internal documents and company officials.

Speaking at a late-night session of the World Economic Forum, Mr. Gates, the chairman of the Microsoft Corporation, said the company was working on three ways to enable e-mail users to keep spam out of their computers.

Is spam on the lam in the US, or are unsolicited bulk emailers simply smirking at what is being called "groundbreaking" federal legislation?

Identity theft and fraud cost Americans at least $437 million last year as scam artists made themselves at home on the Internet, according to federal statistics released on Thursday.

What's in a name? A great deal, apparently, because a number of companies in the interactive advertising space have changed their names in the last few months. Gator became Claria, Dealtime and Epinions changed to Shopping.com, and Ah-ha.com switched to Enhance Interactive.

A new computer virus capable of harvesting millions of e-mail addresses from infected PCs was rapidly spreading across the Internet Monday, security experts said.

The boom in Internet pop-up advertisement may be about to, well, pop. The potential reach of these ads is starting to be sharply curtailed as major companies, like Time Warner's AOL unit, Yahoo and Google, distribute software that blocks pop-up ads from opening.