In Silicon Valley, hackers, engineers, venture capitalists and sales executives love to use Google. Just do not ask them to bet on it.

Google has delayed its public stock offering by at least a few days because of snags in preparing institutional investors for the unusual auction the company plans for its shares, several people involved in the offering said late yesterday.

While users are turning away from free peer-to-peer services like Kazaa under threats of industry lawsuits, worries about spyware, and dissatisfaction with the poor quality of tracks, new music site MPee3.com is offering another angle for thrifty fans of digital music.

The Federal Communications Commission, the U.S. federal communications regulator, has voted to certify technology allowing TiVo digital video recorder subscribers to send copies of digital-broadcast shows over the Internet to a specified set of devices.

The numbers don't lie: CAN-SPAM is a bust. Compliance with CAN-SPAM has fallen to a new low, according to recent data collected by MX Logic.

Responding to a request by law enforcement officials, the Federal Communications Commission tentatively concluded Wednesday that new Internet- based telephone services should be subject to some of the same laws that enable the government to monitor conversations of terrorists and criminal suspects with relative ease.

Google Inc. may have illegally issued more than 23 million shares of its stock to hundreds of employees and consultants, injecting an unexpected legal risk into the online search engine leader's highly anticipated IPO.

America Online Inc. said yesterday it has bought a small Silicon Valley e- mail company in a move that could boost the use of an anti-spam technology that many experts regard as the most effective in blocking unwanted messages.

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday moved to prevent cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) from becoming the next major frontier for e-mail spam.

US online retail sales are on a strong growth track, and will likely hit 316 billion dollars by 2010, a technology research firm said.