Reuters, December 6, 2004 Online consumers in the United States spent $8.8 billion, excluding travel purchases, in November, a 19 percent jump over the $7.4 billion spent online a year earlier, a report released on Monday said.

As a teenager, Shawn Fanning brought free music to the masses, creating the Napster file-swapping program and unleashing a technological genie that granted the wishes of fans seeking virtually any song at any time - gratis. Now, the recording industry is turning to the college dropout turned cult hero, with dreams of putting the genie back in its bottle.

The battle over digital copyrights and illegal file sharing is often portrayed as a struggle between Internet scofflaws and greedy corporations. Online music junkies with no sense of the marketplace, the argument goes, want to download, copy and share copyrighted materials without restriction. The recording industry, on the other hand, wants to squeeze dollars - by lawsuit and legislation, if necessary - from its property.

The number of phishing attacks launched each month has increased nearly 10-fold this year, tech security company MessageLabs said Monday.

Not all web surfers think spyware is a problem. Some say the snoopy software is a fair trade-off for free applications, even with the intrusion into their computers and lives. "Typically the assumption has been that spyware sneaks onto computers, or users are unaware of what they have agreed to install," said Gregg Mastoras, a senior security analyst at antivirus vendor Sophos. "But some people actually do knowingly install adware because they want to use a particular application that comes bundled with it. Some just aren't particularly concerned by adware's presence on their computers."

What do a flight attendant in Texas, a FedEx Kinko's employee in Washington and a web designer in Utah have in common? They were all fired for posting content on their blogs that their companies disapproved of. The rise of blogging over the past few years has, inevitably, given way to another phenomenon, as companies are forced to confront employees' easy access to ranting and raving about work in public online forums like Blogger and LiveJournal.

The battle for U.S. Latino mobile phone consumers will heat up in 2005 as two marketers have recently picked their first U.S. Hispanic ad agencies and another has switched Hispanic shops.

Procter & Gamble, the country's largest advertiser and an eager pursuer of new marketing methods, has begun an experimental promotion for its Secret Sparkle deodorant using music stars' personal profiles on a social networking Web site.

Setting aside Sharman Networks' objections, an Australian judge accepted on Friday an affidavit with potentially damaging assertions about Kazaa's handling of copyrighted material.

Microsoft is taking legal action against people it claims are responsible for spam e-mail campaigns, particularly those who send out unsolicited and sexually explicit e-mail.