What's Chip Morris to do? On one level, the money manager at Integral Capital Partners looks at Claria Corp., the No. 1 company in pop-up advertising, and instinctively wants a stake in its planned initial public offering. After all, Claria made $34.9 million on 2003 revenues of $90 million. But then, if critics have their way, Claria's practices will soon be illegal. "It might make a quick shot to zero, or it might go up 10 or 20 times if pop-ups don't go away," Morris says.

Buying prescription drugs over the Internet puts consumers at risk of taking counterfeits or using medications improperly, although it is less risky if they purchase from U.S. or Canadian sites, government researchers said Thursday.

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

Some Yahoo! Inc. Web sites and services stumbled for the second time in less than a week Thursday as the Internet giant worked to resolve a hardware problem.

If markets are a conversation, then companies need to pay close attention to what's being said about their products in the blogosphere's marketplace of ideas, Weblogging and tech executives said at the Internet Planet conference here Wednesday.

If your name's not down, you're not coming in... Making mass emailers identifiable is the first step toward curing the epidemic of spam, said Vint Cerf, one of the architects of the internet.

America Online will begin limiting pop-under advertisements linked to its AOL Instant Messenger service on Thursday, in order to target at-home rather than at-work audiences, according to a company representative.

Roxio Inc.'s Napster said on Wednesday it is offering free digital music players with a one-year subscription in the latest bid by an online music service to lure consumers with promotional offers.

"Free" clicks given to LookSmart customers as part of a legal settlement ran out this week, the search firm said. The clicks were distributed to LookListings customers over a 20-month period as part of the settlement of a class action suit filed on behalf of LookSmart's customers after the company switched to a pay-per-click model.

The attack that blacked out Google, Yahoo and other major Web sites earlier this week involved the use of a "bot net"--a large network of zombified home PCs--Internet infrastructure provider Akamai Technologies said Wednesday.