Grinch-like virus writers are spreading their version of holiday cheer by embedding a variant of the so-called "Zafi" e-mail worm inside electronic greetings.

The Federal Trade Commission officially entered the brawl over peer-to-peer software Wednesday as it hosted the first day of a two-day P2P workshop in which both sides accused each other of trying to deceive government regulators. Representatives of P2P software companies charged that content interests have tried to demonize P2P in an attempt to effectively kill it. Content providers, meanwhile, argued that they merely want to make P2P networks more responsible to consumers and more respectful of copyright holders.

Yahoo Inc. is set to offer an online service that lets users view live U.S. local traffic conditions on custom-created maps, the first site to do so nationally, the company said late on Wednesday.

A couple of days before Thanksgiving, mom-and-pop e-tailer Tina Koenig's phone kept ringing with calls from people verifying they'd won a laptop. The only problem: Koenig had no idea what they were talking about. Cybercriminals had used her online gift store in a "phishing" scam, which set up a fake version of the site to try to extract visitors' credit card information. An e-mail enticed victims to the fake site by telling them they had a prize. The lure was a free Hewlett-Packard laptop computer.

Hollywood movie studios launched new legal action Tuesday against operators of sites that help connect people to movies on three major peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the Motion Picture Association of America, the main lobbying arm of U.S. film studios, filed civil lawsuits against more than 100 operators of BitTorrent "tracker" servers that point to locations where digital files of movies, music and other content can be found.

Nintendo Co. will begin selling an adaptor for its DS and Game Boy Advance handheld game players to allow them to play music and video, the company said, matching a popular feature on Sony's portable game machine.

For a political ad, ''Bush Hates Veterans'' is about as ferocious as they come. ''My question to Mr. Bush is, Do you support the troops? You're the one who hates the troops,'' shouts an angry male voice, as pictures of maimed soldiers fill the screen. ''And you sent them off to die so your friends could get rich!'' You might wonder which TV network would air such a blunt ad, and the answer is none of them. ''Bush Hates Veterans'' is an online ad, viewable at BushFlash.com.

Random House CEO Peter Olson said publicly for the first time that the world's largest English-language publisher may take the big step of selling its books direct to consumers via the Internet.

Time Warner is expected to announce a settlement with the Justice Department in its investigation of advertising deals between America Online and smaller Internet companies that may have allowed America Online to exaggerate its growth, an official close to the case said yesterday. The announcement could come as early as today.

Google Inc. won a major legal victory Wednesday when a federal judge said the search engine could continue to sell ads triggered by searches using trademarked company names.