America Online said it had filed lawsuits this week against three identity theft gangs, seeking combined damages of $18 million and using a new law against so-called "phishers." The online division of Time Warner said it had filed three civil suits in Alexandria’s U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, charging phishing gangs with tricking its members with fake Web sites of legitimate companies to fool them into giving up personal information. The suits were filed under Virginia’s new anti-phishing statute, the Federal Lanham Act, a trademark law, and the Federal Computer Fraud & Abuse Act, an anti-spam, or junk mail law.

AOL recently informed customers that beginning next month, AOL will charge dial-up subscribers $25.90 per month. The price won’t be that much of a shock, since it’s $2 more than those dial-up customers are paying now. More important, it’s equal to what high-speed DSL or cable subscribers pay to get AOL services such as email and customer support along with high-speed Internet access. The price jump shows just how important it is to the Internet giant to get more of its customers onto broadband. It has led to an obvious question for longtime AOL customers: Who wouldn’t move to broadband when it costs the same price?

By now, you’ve probably noticed the little RSS icons that appeared all over OutlookPower in the past week or so. In this article, we explain what it all means.

Read this OutlookPower article.

Peter Shinbach recently threw in the towel and shut down Bach Door, his online-communications blog. The public relations executive from Birmingham, Michigan, was fed up with so-called comment spam. Returning from a weeklong vacation, he found a slew of comments on his blog that had nothing to do with communications: They were posts from spammers promoting gambling sites and prescription drugs. Shinbach is one of many who are starting to fret more about spam on blogs, instant messages, and cell phones than about traditional unsolicited email–at least in part because old-style spam appears to be losing some momentum. In contrast, other forms of spam–prompted by the rise of new messaging media–are just gathering steam. Comment spam is one of the new forms. Another is the splog–short for spam blog, a blog that is created purely for marketing purposes.

On the Internet, the traffic cops are blind–they don’t look at the data they’re directing, and they don’t give preferential treatment. That’s something operators of the Internet highway, the major U.S. phone companies, want to change by effectively adding a toll lane: They want to be able to give priority treatment to those who pay to get through faster. Naturally, consumer advocates and the Web companies that would be paying the toll are calling it highway robbery. "Allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success," Vinton Cerf told a Senate committee recently. Cerf, who played a key role in building the Internet, is now the "Chief Internet Evangelist" at Google.

Microsoft Friday responded to a written report filed by the South Korea Fair Trade Commission that outlines the agency’s December 2005 decision to fine the company and order it to offer two different versions of Windows in South Korea. The FTC’s decision, made last December, is not supported by facts and if it is allowed to stand it will have "a negative effect on Korean consumers and Korean innovation," Microsoft said. Microsoft is appealing the FTC’s ruling, in which the agency fined Microsoft 33 billion won (US$32 million) and ordered the company to offer a version of Windows without Windows Media Player and Microsoft’s instant messaging software.

Internet auction site eBay should do more to tackle fraudsters targeting the site, a consumer magazine has said. Computing Which? called on the site to be more active in identifying its fraudulent users. It also wants the site to warn users about the danger of fraud and to crack down on the selling of medical accessories such as contact lenses. But the site’s UK community manager said eBay already had a "safety centre" to help protect its users.

Microsoft has registered a Web site for something called The Origami Project. From the rather cryptic video clip there, you can’t tell much about what Origami is or what it will do. Guesses about Origami’s origins have been all over the map. But what we’re hearing now is that Origami might be little more than a new code name for an ultra-portable device that Microsoft demonstrated last year at its Windows Hardware Engineering Conference. The original "Haiku" device was described as an ultra-portable mini-Tablet when the first prototypes made their public debut. The systems, as described Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, would weigh about a pound, feature a battery that could hold a charge for a full day, and integrate a camera, a phone and a music device in a single form factor.

Web site attacks are increasing in frequency and ferocity, hammering DVD sales and disrupting online payment services. Called "distributed denial of service attacks," they bombard sites with so much data that legitimate traffic can’t get through. They’ve been around for years. But they’re now more powerful, and they’re taking down more than just intended targets. In recent incidents, companies providing Web-hosting services for victims–as well as hundreds of their customers–have been caught in the cross-hairs, creating a wave of collateral damage.

IBM and Novell on Monday are expected to announce an open-source response to Microsoft’s forthcoming InfoCard identity management technology. The companies plan to contribute to an open-source initiative code-named Higgins Project. The project aims to help people manage their plethora of Internet logins and passwords by integrating identity, profile and relationship information used across authentication systems on the Net.