The Bay Area is the No. 1 U.S. metropolitan market in wireless Internet access points, knocking out 2003 leader Portland, Ore., according to a survey commissioned by Intel.

When Yahoo Inc. reports quarterly earnings this Wednesday, investors from Wall Street to Main Street will be eyeing the Internet company's advertising sales and earnings outlook for signs its stock is not overpriced.

Ad viewers are most likely to convert the first time they see an online ad, according to a study slated to be released Tuesday by AtlasDMT, the technology arm of Seattle-based aQuantive (Quote, Chart). The finding suggests frequency capping should be employed when a CPM advertiser's goal is to drive an immediate conversion.

E-mail spammers take heed: Europeans are finally winning legal tussles against digital peddlers of get-rich-quick schemes, sexual aids and pornography.

For the past few years, Minnesota Public Radio's customer service department has fielded e-mails and phone calls from angry listeners who can't get their Real media player to play the radio station's programs through the Internet.

Google and Yahoo, two of the most widely used Web search engines, have decided to stop running advertisements for online casinos, a shift that could thwart the growth of Internet gambling.

In a case defense attorneys called the first to test the limits of Internet free speech, a judge asked a court to drop her defamation lawsuit against someone who criticized her in an Internet chat room.

Backers of a new model hope to tap one of the last ad-free frontiers of the Internet -- the text of articles and message boards -- in what they bill as the ultimate contextual advertising play. Industry watchers question whether the new form of pop-up ads will be tolerated by online readers. But the IntelliTXT system, which rolls out today, is drawing the ire of journalists and others who say it not only blurs the line between advertising and editorial, it erases it.

It's called the "Spam and Bologna" contest. In an effort to expose e-mail scams, the state Consumer Protection Board is holding an international competition to find the most outrageous examples of these fraudulent notes on the Internet.

Google's newly announced free e-mail offering has strengthened its position against Yahoo! and MSN. Before it can continue to battle its competition in earnest, however, it's working to quell privacy concerns.