Grant Gross

A pumped up version of the first of more than a half dozen antispam bills introduced in the U.S. Congress this year was approved Thursday by a Senate committee and sent to the full Senate for a vote.

Charging spammers with racketeering crimes and rewarding spam victims with a financial bounty are among the more creative solutions proposed by members of Congress to the problem of unsolicited e-mail.

EBay Inc. plans to ask a judge to overturn a US$35 million jury award won by a Virginia man who claimed eBay and its subsidiary Half.com infringed on his patents related to online auctions.

A U.S. House subcommittee has approved a bill that would permanently extend a moratorium on some Internet taxes, including Internet access taxes, despite Democrats' concerns over the impact on Mom-and-Pop businesses and whether the bill ensures a tax ban on DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) access.

U.S. senators and others, including a self-professed spammer, offered several ideas for attacking spam with legislation, among them a small charge for sending e-mail and an international spam treaty, during a Senate hearing Wednesday.

Assurances of limited scope from the leaders of two proposed U.S. government data-gathering projects weren't good enough for privacy advocates, who on Tuesday urged Congress to police just what personal information the government should analyze.

Internet users want to keep their personal information private, but they want privacy tools to be cheap, easy to use and nearly invisible.

ActiveState Corp., a company focusing on a variety of open source-based enterprise software, has launched an antispam task force that it hopes will generate interest for its antispam product and ideas for other projects in the open-source community.