More of Europe's music fans will be able to use their mobile phone like a digital music player as Germany's T-Mobile attempts to cash in on the song download craze.

The Senate passed two pieces of legislation designed to help crack down on individuals who trade pirated music and other material over the Internet. But another Senate proposal is causing a growing uproar among technology companies, which are afraid it could stifle innovation and make devices such as Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod a possible target of entertainment-industry lawsuits.

In the 2002 movie "Minority Report," the character played by Tom Cruise, John Anderton, darted through a city in which electronic billboard advertisements spoke to him by name. The next wave of Internet advertising could make John Andertons of us all.

Yahoo! subsidiary Overture is expected to release its answer to Google's local targeting for paid search ads today, a product called Local Match. Local Match is aimed at capturing part of the $2.5 billion the Kelsey Group predicts local paid search will generate in domestically by 2008. Overture's competitors for those dollars include Google and Internet yellow pages players like Verizon.

High-profile Internet dissident Du Baobin was found guilty of subversion, but in a rare sign of tolerance from the government his three-year sentence was commuted to four years probation, his lawyer said.

A California man was arraigned on Thursday on federal extortion and wire fraud charges arising from a software program he claimed could allow spammers to defraud Web search company Google Inc. of millions of dollars, federal prosecutors said.

Want to get rid of that comfy but, let's face it, worn blue couch? Got more books than you have shelves, more dishes than you have kitchen cabinets? Sounds like time for a garage sale.

A U.S. congressional committee on Thursday approved a bill designed to crack down on deceptive "spyware" that hides in users' computers and secretly monitors their activities.

Spammers can cross the e-mail address acerenmar@aol.com off their lists, because Mount Airy resident Roland A. Mariano canceled his subscription to America Online yesterday. The news that a 24-year-old America Online software engineer was arrested on charges that he hacked into the Internet provider's computers and took a list of 92 million AOL-mail addresses so they could be sold to bulk e-mailers sent Mariano over the edge.

Government and industry experts warned late Thursday of a mysterious, large- scale Internet attack against thousands of popular Web sites. The virus-like infection tries to implant hacker software onto the computers of all Web site visitors.