A new variant of the Sober spam worm is being blamed for the deluge of German spam messages carrying right-wing or neo-Nazi messages flooding in-boxes around the world this week. Once the attachment is opened, the worm uses its own e-mail engine to send itself to addresses harvested from the infected computer.

In a modern twist on the hot rodders of old, Firefox users are pimping the web, one browser at a time. They've added a delete button and permanent search folders to Gmail, made their browsers show only print pages of online news stories, reconfigured all the content on a popular music website and removed Reuters stories on the Michael Jackson story from online newsreader Bloglines.

Napster Inc. does not plan to cut the price of its online music subscription service despite new competition from Yahoo Inc., Chief Executive Chris Gorog said on Monday.

When David Yang recently looked for a new apartment in Chicago, he took an aerial tour of the city. As a 22-year-old on a limited budget, Yang couldn't afford to hire a helicopter for his visual inspection of Chicago. Instead, he turned to HousingMaps, a hack that combines craigslist real estate listings with city maps from Google Maps. It lets users pinpoint locations, along with one-click access to photos and descriptions, of dozens of available apartments in more than 20 North American cities.

San Francisco radio station 1550 KYCY-AM began airing programming on Monday created exclusively by listeners with podcast technology, as new and old media start to collide.

Bloggers are often touted as influential instigators, feeding buzz-worthy topics to the mainstream media they so disdain, and even guiding discussion in other communication channels. Not so, says a new study analyzing the impact of political blogs on the national conversation leading up to the 2004 presidential election. Indeed, Buzz, Blogs, and Beyond: The Internet and the National Discourse in the Fall of 2004 concludes that, while a force to be reckoned with, blogs are merely cogs in the meme machine.

Microsoft Corp., the world's largest maker of software, on Sunday released the finalized version of its desktop search tool, taking aim at Google Inc. and other rivals in the increasingly competitive search market. The MSN Search Toolbar, which was introduced on a trial basis five months ago, provides a way to search for e-mail, documents and other data stored on hard drives much more quickly and efficiently than the "Find" function found in Windows.

The amount of digital music, video and other entertainment content available on the Internet is at an all-time high, but finding something compelling is getting harder than ever. As a result, the demand for more sophisticated Internet search tools that can match text-based queries with visual- or audio-based content like movies or music is on the rise.

The Federal Trade Commission began seeking comment yesterday on proposed changes to the rules enacted under the CAN-SPAM anti-spam legislation, including one that would require e-mailers to comply more quickly with opt-out requests.

A minor and his parents have filed a $10 million lawsuit against Yahoo Inc. and a man who once operated a Yahoo Groups site where members traded child pornography. The lawsuit, filed on May 9 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, charged that Yahoo breached its duties by allowing co-defendant Mark Bates and others to share child pornography on a site, called Candyman, that Bates created and moderated via the Yahoo Groups service.