Grant Gross

A former South Carolina school official has been indicted on mail and wire fraud charges in connection with a U.S. government program intended to bring the Internet to schools and libraries in poor areas, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced.

Governments need to pass more antispam laws, give law enforcement agencies more resources and work better across borders to combat unsolicited e-mail clogging up inboxes, an international economic group said Wednesday.

The US needs to pass new laws to help increase the numbers of residents subscribing to broadband, according to a report released this week by a new technology policy think tank.

The Chinese government has ordered all computers sold in the country to have legal software preloaded on them, in an effort to reduce piracy, according to a report Monday on the English-language Web site of Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency.

About 200 citizen lobbyists called for the US Congress to require that electronic voting machines include paper-trail records when the group descended on Washington, DC, this week.

Four people have been indicted and could face 30 years in prison for a variation on a popular scam in which e-mail senders claim they're trying to transfer money out of Nigeria, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced.

The popular Kazaa P-to-P (peer-to-peer) file-trading software and a supposed spyware-blocking application are among the first four programs identified as "badware" by the fledgling StopBadware.org group in a report.

After four mining accidents in January and early February killed 16 people in West Virginia, industry experts are studying whether information technology can help to prevent future fatalities. But there's little agreement about which technologies can do the most good. n