We're not any less annoyed by spam. We're just more accepting of it. So says a study released Sunday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Fifty-three percent of adult e-mail users in the United States now say they trust e-mail less because of spam, down from 62 percent a year ago and about the same as a June 2003 Pew survey.

As Yahoo Inc. editors plan updates this week to their popular online news service, a computer program at Google Inc. tirelessly scours the Web for items to display on the company's competing news site.

Microsoft Corp., the world's biggest software maker, has agreed to pay Gateway Inc. $150 million over four years to settle a legal dispute and the companies will work together on the marketing and development of Gateway personal computing products.

The city of Philadelphia will become the largest U.S. Internet "hot spot" next year under a plan to offer wireless access at about half the cost charged by commercial operators, city officials said on Thursday.

Earlier this week, Wicked Pictures, a leading XXX production house, inked a licensing deal with Brickhouse Mobile, one of the companies leading the charge to bring porn to cell phones. The two firms hope the pact will result in adult fare for mobile customers around the world.

America Online Inc. on Thursday said it partnered with DoubleClick Inc. to begin using the company's online ad-management software across AOL's Web sites. New York-based DoubleClick's software will be used by AOL Media Networks to organize and target advertisements to specific users on AOL's Web properties, which include AOL.com, AOL Instant Messenger, Mapquest, Moviefone and CNN.com.

In the wake of market research indicating that women are avid online gamers, women's magazine publisher Meredith corp. has launched gaming sections on three of its most widely read Web sites.

Online news aggregators like Google News are a blessing and a curse for the newspaper industry. On one hand, news aggregators can deliver big traffic when they link to a site. On the other, consumers are turning to Google and Yahoo for their news, rather than to the individual newspapers the aggregators link to.

Strange bedfellows met this week in San Francisco as cable companies and tech gurus put their suits and pocket protectors together in a concerted effort to make boatloads of money. The event was the National Cable Show, the cable industry's annual convention. At stake is the melding of broadband pipes and digital television into a new series of products that leverage the strength of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

In a study on e-mail deliverability released this week that produced surprising results, ISP spamcop.net delivered the highest percentage of opt-in business e-mails while Google's Gmail was near the bottom of the list.