Controversial ad-supported software player Claria, formerly known as Gator, filed for an initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this week. The company is hoping to raise $150 million.

E-mail, known as the Internet's "killer app," is getting killed. While progress has been made through wider use of anti-spam filters and new laws meant to crack down on spammers, most of the evidence shows the deluge is spreading, with more than half of all e-mail traffic spam.

America Online said its members have submitted more than one million AOL screen names in the Internet company's unorthodox drawing for a spammer's seized sports car.

A new marketing research firm slated to launch Monday gleans user preferences from its product recommendation site, then helps manufacturers design products using the aggregated information. The idea has already helped the firm, called Market Insight, score a handful of top-tier clients, including General Motors.

Already, its name is part of the Internet vocabulary -- "googling" means to find just about any person, place, or obscure thing on the Net. But for the past 15 months, Google Inc. has been a giant under attack. Yahoo! Inc., which dumped Google as its primary search provider in February, has shelled out $2.5 billion for a trio of acquisitions to go after Google's core Internet search business. And after years of watching from the sidelines, Microsoft Corp. jerked awake to build a new search engine that it has claimed will one day catch the upstart competitor.

Phone calls now flit over Wi-Fi networks at little or no cost to the callers. It is the story of the telecom industry--hundreds of billions of dollars are evaporating into the ether.

RealNetworks has issued a patch for a security flaw in one of its plug-ins that could let an attacker gain control of computers running any of several versions of the company's popular media player software.

Thanks to Apple Computer's rising star in the world of digital music, Mac OS X has become a target for malware authors. A Trojan horse, called MP3Concept or MP3Virus.gen, has been discovered that masquerades as an MP3 file. It hides in ID tags of the file and becomes activated when unwary users click on it, expecting to play a digital song.

FindWhat.com will introduce a pay-per-call advertising platform for search listings to bring paid search to the millions of small businesses without Web sites, the company said yesterday. FindWhat also plans to offer local advertisers a landing page for searchers to click through to get basic business information such as hours of operation. Yahoo's Overture Services is devising a similar service for its soon-to-be-released local search service.

America Online's walled garden may not be so closed off in the near future. The Time Warner unit is slowly implementing new HTML-based Web-publishing technology that will allow it to offer more programming and content on the Web. That means that AOL's Web properties, including the Web sites of AOL, Netscape and Moviefone, as well as its Digital City guides, could begin offering more types of programming to nonmembers.