The Senate on Thursday night approved a seven-year extension of a moratorium on state and local taxes on Internet access.

The Senate voice vote came a little over a week after the House passed a bill calling for a four-year moratorium. The tax ban, first approved in 1998, is set to expire Nov. 1.

Attempts in both the House and Senate to make the ban permanent in recent weeks were unsuccessful despite strong support for the idea.

More than 90% of people responding to a survey are in favor of regulating harmful Internet websites, while only 4.5 percent are against it, amid the occurrence of a series of crimes and suicides triggered by such websites, the Cabinet Office said Thursday in a report. In Japan, a website regulation law for restricting dating service websites came into effect in 2003, but other harmful websites remain virtually uncontrolled due to freedom of expression.

Personal computing is currently in a state of transition. While traditionally users have interacted mostly with desktop applications, more and more of them are using web applications. But the latter often fit awkwardly into the document-centric interface of web browsers. And they are surrounded with controls–like back and forward buttons and a location bar–that have nothing to do with interacting with the application itself.

Mozilla Labs is launching a series of experiments to bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop apps and to explore new usability models as the line between traditional desktop and new web applications continues to blur.

Websense, Inc. announced that its security research team has discovered suspicious online scams designed by criminals to steal money from those donating to the California fire effort. Websense also urged consumers to take steps to ensure that donations are reaching the intended recipients, and to notify officials of suspicious Web sites.

“Unfortunately, as we saw with Katrina and several other recent emergencies, there are criminals who attempt to divert monies intended for the victims by creating bogus online donation Web sites and advertising them on high-traffic Web sites,” said Dan Hubbard, vice president of security research, Websense. “These criminals are trying to take advantage of the amazing outpouring of support locally, state-wide and internationally. Websense is aggressively monitoring domain registrations, email honeypots, and scanning the Web looking for these suspicious sites.”

Four people have been sentenced to jail time and tens of millions of dollars in fines for buying discounted Microsoft software and then illegally reselling it at a profit.

Mirza Ali, 60, and Sameena Ali, 53, the husband-and-wife owners of Samtech Research, were sentenced Wednesday to five years in prison and ordered to pay more than $25 million in fines to Microsoft for their role in a software reselling scheme run between 1997 and 2001.

The Alis and their associates purchased more than $29 million worth of software at Microsoft’s academic-discount rates and then resold it to nonacademic entities, making more than $5 million in profits. The two were convicted on Nov. 28, 2006, and had been awaiting sentencing.