The elves have informed us that there’s some kinda big shindig going on throughout much of the world. We, being the glorious geeks that we are, usually find this stuff out because someone tells us what we got someone else for a gift. This holiday is not all that much different. We do wish all our readers, advertisers, constituents, and the weird guy who keeps sending us (…well, him…not so much) a very happy holiday and a great new year.

News Editor Heather’s traveling this holiday season, so news coverage will be spotty until the new year. ‘Course, there’s not exactly a ton of news between now and then anyway, so if you’ve got something big to announce, save it up and we’ll write about it in a couple of weeks.

We will be publishing full issues on December 28 (yeah, lucky us!), so stay tuned to your email. We’ve got some great stuff heading your way, giving you food for thought during this great holiday break.

Finally, we wish everyone, world-over, peace, love, joy, toys, gadgets, and cheese. Big, honkin’ blocks of cheese. Joy to the cheese.

Help Net Security says that there’s been an increase in email borne viruses – the ratio of virus infected emails to clean emails increased 84 percent to 1:33 against 1:212 a year ago.

eWeek reports that a variant of the Sober mass-mailing worm is causing leading security vendors increase their threat levels. Sober.C, once activated, emails itself to a user’s Microsoft Outlook address book and sends outgoing messages through its own SMTP engine.

Microsoft has quietly provided its first anti-spam filter update for Outlook 2003, the company’s newest email client. TechWeb reports that the update is the first of a regular refresh of the anti-spam capabilities of Outlook.

Here’s an article in InformIT that’ll show you how to learn to manage information in Outlook 2003 so that email becomes a time saver instead of a time waster.

eChannelLine reports that with the release of Network Associates Inc.’s new versions of McAfee GroupShield 6.0 and McAfee SpamKiller 2.1 for Microsoft Exchange as well as its McAfee SpamKiller 2.0 and McAfee GroupShield 5.3 for Lotus Domino, the company said it was taking advanced content management to a new level.

TechWeb reports that another phishing expedition appeared on the Internet Thursday, this one dubbed W32/Cayam and targeting eBay users. The worm propagates by lifting addresses out of the target PC’s copy of Microsoft Outlook and emailing copies of itself to others, and can also spread via the peer-to-peer Kazaa and eMule networks.

UniPress Software announced a strong increase in customer adoption of its FootPrints Dynamic Address Book Link to improve their help desk and support center operations. An add-on module to FootPrints service desk software, this tool provides a solution to access up-to-the-minute customer contact records stored in existing LDAP-based address books, such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Active Directory, Lotus Notes, Sun ONE, and Novell GroupWise, and Novell NDS eDirectory.

A Canadian company, 01 Communique Laboratory Inc., has some software for the PC called I’m InTouch. And when it’s installed on your office PC, you can access it from anywhere in the world where you can fire up a Web browser.This review by the AP says that when in use, all the applications, from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Office and some homebrew software were there and worked exactly as though the writerr was at AP headquarters.

Microsoft announced that, as a result of a six-month investigation and collaboration with New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, the company has filed parallel lawsuits against a New York-based spamming ring allegedly responsible for sending billions of illegal and deceptive email messages. The legal action taken is only one part of Microsoft’s approach to combating spam. Microsoft also has implemented several effective anti-spam technology features into its products. The company recently announced that its spam-filtering SmartScreen Technology will be deployed across Microsoft’s email platforms.