The U.S. House of Representatives voted late Tuesday to restrict some of the most deceptive forms of spyware. By a 399-1 vote, House members approved legislation prohibiting "taking control" of a computer, surreptitiously modifying a Web browser's home page, or disabling antivirus software without proper authorization.

America Online will begin a new ad campaign tomorrow with a new logo and a refocused brand promise, posed as a question to consumers: "Want a better Internet?"

Help me out, would you? I want to find out how many people visited Wired News last month. If you did, please phone the two ratings agencies charged with figuring out who's hot and who's not in cyberspace. Just tell them I sent you. "What?" you say. "That's no way to measure a site's traffic." Of course, you're right. But it might not be any less accurate than the numbers that Nielsen/NetRatings and comScore Media Metrix come up with each month.

Google Inc. on Wednesday quietly launched a new search technology to help publishers sell books online, a fast-growing market dominated by Internet retailer Amazon.com.

EarthLink has a new voice. The Internet access provider launched a service Tuesday that lets customers make phone calls from their personal computers. The service -- called voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP -- could help its high-speed customers shave hundreds of dollars a month from their phone bills.

Yahoo has enhanced its My Yahoo service with personalization features including search history, the ability to save pages to a "personal web" and block URLs from appearing in search results.

Blog network Gawker Media has geared up to grab the interest of young men and the advertisers who want to reach them. To do so, the company has launched three new blogs -- Jalopnik, Kotaku and Screenhead.

The presidential campaigns and the major political parties have mostly ignored online advertising as a way to reach voters in the 2004 election -- until now. After Thursday night's debate between Sen. John Kerry and President George W. Bush, the Democratic National Committee bought roughly $400,000 worth of ads on 50 sites, including USA Today, The Washington Post, MSNBC, The New York Times, Salon.com, Weather.com, ESPN.com and Movieline.com, according to a report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project released Monday. The DNC also bought ads on local news sites. In a few days, it almost doubled its entire …

Sometimes it pays to befriend an enemy. Longtime foes palmOne Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Tuesday announced a licensing deal that will allow the next generation of palmOne's Treo smart phones to work directly with Microsoft's Exchange e-mail system.

The presidential ad war online is beginning to look more like a skirmish. A new survey of online advertising by President Bush's and Democratic challenger John F. Kerry's campaigns found that both candidates have spent relatively little on relatively benign ads.