CAN-SPAM Act to curb saucy spam

FTC calls a spade and spade and calls porn spam SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT Under the CAN-SPAM Act, the FTC is to introduce further spam regulations from 19 May that stipulate that spam containing sexually oriented material must contain the tag SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT in the subject line and additionally use techniques that ensure the contents of such mail are not displayed on first opening the email. The idea is to stop unwitting recipients being exposed to sexually explicit images by imposing this mandatory labelling and 'brown paper wrapper' idea to hide the contents from all except those that actively follow up the email and click through to view it. Such email must also contain a valid postal address of the sender. ...more

BT to cut wholesale broadband prices

BT has announced that it plans to reduce its wholesale broadband prices in order to give Internet service providers a cost-effective alternative to local loop unbundling. Once 1.5 million lines have been unbundled across the country, which BT estimates will be in May 2007, service providers will see the rental charge for the most highly used wholesale broadband product - BT IPstream - reduced by nine per cent. ...more

Unsigned act makes history with chart entry

The UK band Koopa has made music chart history by being the first unsigned act to get a hit in the top 40, courtesy of digital downloads. The download-only single Blag Steal & Borrow registered on this Sunday's chart at number 31, netting the Colchester group even more online attention. With the recent change in rules governing the UK charts allowing download-only songs to be included, it had been expected that old favourites - from the likes of Snow Patrol and Gnarls Barkley would re-register in the charts, off the back of general music downloading. ...more

eEye scans networks for slack patchers

eEye Digital has announced it is to marry its network scanner with management technologies from BigFix to pinpoint slack patchers. COO Firas Raouf explained: 'Our focus initially was selling this software scanner to IT administrators and security consultants. But the problem that you have with things like Blaster, Code Red, Nimda and so on, you wonder why these worms have such an impact when a patch has been available months before. ...more

AMD launches new desktop chips in move to AM2 socket

AMD describes it as the 'ultimate processor for PC enthusiasts': the new Athlon 64 FX-62 dual-core processor. More importantly for the long term, it has also released the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ - again, a 64-bit, dual-core processor - which is compatible with AMD's new socket, the AM2 platform. This new socket architecture is designed to accommodate rising system bandwidth requirements and support the likes of AMD virtualisation technology and unbuffered DDR2 memory for the AMD64 architecture. ...more