France is hoping to shut down spammers more quickly through a system that makes it easier for users to notify ISPs (Internet service providers) when unsolicited e-mails are coming from their network.

The French government funded the development of an open-source toolbar for Microsoft Corp.’s Outlook and Mozilla Corp.’s Thunderbird e-mail programs that people can use to report suspected spam, said John Graham-Cumming, an Englishman who built the software for the project, called Signal Spam.

“From the French perspective, spam is like any other criminal activity that is affecting the French people,” Graham-Cumming said.

Most users today simply delete spam email from their inboxes, in part because they don’t have a simple tool for reporting spam to their ISP. The SignalSpam project aims to provide them with such a tool.

When users receive spam messages, the toolbar provides an easy way for them to forward the message to a central database. The messages are then sent to the ISP whose network they originated from, and the ISP decides whether to shut down the account of the sender, Graham-Cumming said.

Sun Microsystems has issued patches for several vulnerabilities in its Java Runtime Environment that leave users on Windows, Linux and Solaris wide open.

By our count, there are 11 separate vulnerabilities plaguing versions 6, 5, 1.4 and 1.3 of the JRE, Sun said on its security blog.

Miscreants could use the “highly critical” bugs to read or alter sensitive information stored on a vulnerable machine, bypass security restrictions and compromise systems, according to an alert from Secunia.

The new iPod Nano is hot. But one Douglasville man said his old Nano got even hotter — hot enough to burst into flames.

“So I look down and I see flames coming up to my chest,” said Danny Williams.

Williams said the burn hole from the pocket of his pants marks the spot of his 15 seconds of flame. He said he had an iPod Nano and an glossy piece of paper in his pocket. He believes the paper shielded him from being burned.

“I’m still kind of freaked out that after only a year and a half my iPod caught fire in my pocket,” said Williams.

The iPod uses a lithium ion battery — the same type of battery under recall for setting laptops on fire.

The introduction of a new form of encryption control for Blu-ray discs last week has been accompanied by playback snags and worse, on a number of players.

Rise of the Silver Surfer and The Day After Tomorrow are the first two Blu-ray releases to feature BD , a virtual-machine technology which allows content providers to bundle code on Blu-ray discs to check if a player’s hardware has been hacked. Unfortunately the discs won’t play on two Blu-ray players from different manufacturers - Samsung’s BDP-1200 and LG’s BH100 - with loading times on other players (including the PlayStation 3) taking as long as two minutes, the High-Def Digest reports.

Other problems including error messages and playback stutter have been reported on Samsung’s BDP-1000 Blu-ray player.