It seems like spammers have set a goal to their selves to invade and ruin every good aspect of the internet.

Spam has started with email, sending millions of email messages every day; spam mail is responsible for most of the email traffic in the world. But spam email is not the only form of spam.

Spamming instant messages networks is growing strong and increasing from day to day, but most instant messages software have the ability to block messages from people who are not in your buddy list.

Crackdowns on spammers has just begun with companies like America Online, EarthLink, Yahoo and Microsoft suing spammers trying to reduce the amount of spam, causing damages of millions of dollars in lost time, bandwidth and server expenses.
The increate in popularity of anti spam software, and anti spam systems integrated in the mail servers forced the spammers to find new ways to infect the internet with unwanted ads.

In the recent months another and new form of spam is getting more popular with spammers.

With the increase in popularity of Blogs, and content sites enabling comments and talk back sections, spammers found a new ground for polluting the internet. Zombie machines, infected with malware are posting spam messages to the comments sections on websites, usually containing links to or drugs, gambling or porn web sites.

Talk of iPod’s rumoured low-cost Flash-based iPod continues with the claim that Apple will put the machine into production next month in a bid to build stockpiles sufficient to satisfy post-Christmas demand.

According to an AppleInsider report citing “extremely reliable sources”, Apple wants to have at least 2m of the machines ready to sell before the ship date in order to avoid a re-run of the problems it had meeting demand for the iPod Mini.

That player, a 4GB hard drive-based unit, was announced in January 2004 at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. If the iPod Flash reports are correct, that show seems a likely venue for the new player’s unveiling.

The possibility of a Flash-based iPod surfaced in October this year, when Thomas Weisel analyst Jason Pfaum claimed, citing “numerous” Asian sources, that Apple will use MP3 chip maker SigmaTel’s controller chip in an upcoming music player scheduled for a pre-Christmas launch. SigmaTel already produces controllers chips for Rio and Creative Flash-based music players. Indeed, it signed a two-year deal with Rio round about the time of the Pfaum report.

While the iPod Mini was originally pitched against lower-priced, lower-capacity Flash players, it has essentially built a mid-range niche of its own, rather than hinder Flash-player sales, which continue to be strong, especially in the Far East. Apple may have been dismissive of the segment in the past, but if it’s not only to maintain its market dominance but increase it, a move into all parts of the digital music player market make sense, hence the iPod Flash.

It’s not hard to imagine a Mini-like device that uses the same screen and controller, but without the hard drive can be significantly thinner - like Creative’s MuVo Slim, say.

Source: The Register

Put away the red pen, because publishing software giant Adobe Systems plans to change the way businesses share comments on documents.

The software maker is set to announce on Monday new versions of Acrobat and Reader, the company’s main tools for creating and viewing files based on the PDF (Portable Document Format) standard. New features include expanded collaborative functions intended to improve the exchange of information between businesses and customers or partners.

Until now, folks who wanted to add comments to a PDF document had to have a version of Acrobat, Adobe’s collection of PDF authoring tools, said Pam Deziel, director of Acrobat product marketing for Adobe. The new version 7 of Acrobat Professional will allow document creators to switch on commenting functions, which can then be accessed by anyone using the new version of Adobe Reader, the company’s free application for viewing–and now interacting with–PDF files.

Source: News.com

After investing roughly $500-million and spending years of development time on its next-generation operating system, Sun Microsystems Inc. on Monday will announce an aggressive price for the software — free.

Sun, which has never completely rebounded from the tech collapse in 2001, hopes the no-cost of Solaris 10 will not only attract customers but also expand the number of developers who write programs that work on computers running the operating system.

The result, Sun believes, will be renewed demand for its servers and services. The company also will charge subscription fees for Solaris support and service programs that are typically sought by the businesses and organizations that Sun targets.

The price of earlier versions of Solaris typically ran between hundreds and thousands of dollars — depending on the system that was being run by the software, said Tom Goguen, Sun’s vice-president of operating platforms.

Sun also has promised make the underlying code of Solaris available under an open-source licence, though the details have not been released. With access to the code, Solaris users will be able to take advantage of its features when developing their own software and systems.

Source: Globaltechnology