An anonymous reader writes "Adam Vitale, aka Batch1 aka Baxter, 25, of Boynton Beach, FL, and his partner Todd Moeller, aka M3rk, of New Jersey, are accused of sending nearly 50,000 pieces of spam e-mail to more than 1.2 million AOL subscribers. US Secret Service agents used a confidential informant to hire Moeller and Vitale to deliver spam, which advertised a computer security product."

theodp writes "Newsweek reports that a grim trade in stolen human tissue isn't just the stuff of Robin Cook novels. Demand for the tissue, which is used in such procedures as joint and heart-valve replacements, back surgery, dental implants and skin grafts, has driven the price for a single harvested body up to $7,000. Many unsuspecting recipients are now rushing to doctors to be tested for tainted tissue."

United Bimmer writes "America Online has announced that it's going to raise the price on dialup users in an attempt to encourage them to upgrade to broadband. The new rates will near $26 a month, already drastically higher than the market norm for dialup access. This will bring the dialup prices to almost the exact same per month as broadband depending on your plan. However through this, they do still offer an unadvertised lower price for those who can't get or don't want broadband can request lower-priced plans, including an unadvertised offering of about $18 with a one-year commitment."

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Major League Gaming, aspiring to become the official league of professional videogaming, raised $10 million in funding from Ritchie Capital, and named Matthew Bromberg, the former general manager of Time Warner's Moviefone and AOL Games properties, as president and chief operating officer, the Wall Street Journal reports. 'The championship match for MLG's second season will be held this weekend in New York, where individuals and teams of gamers will battle against others in fighting and shooter games like Microsoft Corp.'s Halo 2 for a total of $100,000 in prizes. ... The company says it is in discussions with various cable networks about deals to have its competitions carried on television. "We want this to be covered as a circuit," said Mr. Bromberg.'"

theodp writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Amazon is in advanced talks with the four global music companies about a digital-music service that could be launched as soon as this summer. It would feature Amazon-branded portable music players, designed and built for the retailer, and a subscription service that would deeply discount and preload those devices with songs."

An anonymous reader writes "Mark Shuttleworth (retired cosmonaut and Ubuntu daddy) has written an informative blog entry about the problems associated with open source development. He found that paying geeks to code without assigning them managers lead to "shiny geek toys", rather than the product he was actually paying for. Shuttleworth says that left-field thinking is required when it comes to managing open source teams. See also Andrew Orlowski's analysis of why AOL eventually killed the Netscape project from a few years ago, where he describes Mozilla developers as "wandering off into Lotus-eating land"."

theodp writes "Google worries go mainstream this week in TIME's cover story, Can We Trust Google With Our Secrets? Touted as an 'inside look' at how success has changed Larry and Sergey's dream machine, the piece offers some interesting tidbits but in the end is pretty much a softball effort that even toes the mum's-the-word line on the relationship between Larry Page and 'blond, blue-eyed force of nature' Marissa Mayer. Guess it's the least Time Warner could do after pocketing $1B of Google's money."

tiltowait wrote to mention a report on MSNBC's site stating that AOL and Yahoo are both planning to introduce a for-pay way to circumvent their spam filters. From the article: "The fees, which would range from 1/4 cent to 1 cent per e-mail, are the latest attempts by the companies to weed out unsolicited ads, commonly called spam, and identity-theft scams. In exchange for paying, e-mail senders will be guaranteed their messages won't be filtered and will bear a seal alerting recipients they're legitimate."

theodp writes "Today, Amazon confirmed that they are testing what some are calling 'Amazon-Sense', a paid ads program in its affiliate network that resembles Google's ad program." From the article: "The speculation about Amazon's potential AdSense clone arose from the statements made by one of the members of the e-tailer's associates program."

Philip writes "Business electronics firm Toshiba is bidding for 100% control of Westinghouse - famous for making blenders and LCD televisions, but principally in the business of building nuclear reactors. 'By 2020 the market for nuclear power generation is expected to grow 50 percent compared to 2005,' Toshiba CEO Nishida said at a London news conference. 'Toshiba is responding to this challenge by acquiring Westinghouse.'"

Kesch writes "Zdnet has a posted a FAQ describing the storage of personal information done by the search engines of AOL, MSN, Yahoo, and, of course, Google. They describe what information is stored, how it is stored, what laws protect it (none), how you can attempt to protect your privacy, and what Congress is doing with regards to the issue."

theodp writes "All 120 Super Bowl XL footballs will be marked with a drop of synthetic DNA to thwart potential counterfeiters (free reg. required to read) who might be tempted to sell phony game-used Super Bowl footballs, which can be worth thousands of dollars. Exposed to a specific laser frequency, the DNA glows to a bright green. 'The chance of replicating this exact DNA sequence is one in 33 trillion,' said the president of PSA/DNA Authentication Services."

pdclarry writes "AOL announced on January 30 that it will phase out its Enhanced Whitelist service in June in favour of Goodmail CertifiedEmail, which carries an as yet unspecified per-message fee. Until now, a mailing list gets on the AOL whitelist by following good e-mail practices, such as cleaning up dead addresses, making it easy for people to leave mailing lists, and of course not sending any spam. This is all going to be thrown out the window and replaced with the payment of hard currency to Goodmail. People who can afford to pay this fee will have the privilege of reaching AOL subscribers, others will end up in junk folders. Yahoo is expected to follow down the same path."

theodp writes "Upgrade or keep crashing was the tagline when Windows XP was introduced. So how will Windows Vista be marketed? 'I'd hate to see something bad happen to your PC,' seems to be one pitch. Even if new features won't get you to upgrade to Vista, you should buy Vista for the security, urged Windows Chief Jim Allchin. Are commercials featuring Tony Soprano next? Bada Bing!"

You posted a lot of great questions for Mike Nash last week, and he put a lot of time into answering them. As promised, his answers were not laundered by PR people, which is all too common with "executive" interviews with people from any company. Still, he boosts Microsoft, as you'd expect, since he's a VP there. And obviously, going along with that, he says he likes Microsoft products better than he likes competing ones. But this is still a great look into the way Microsoft views security problems with their products, and what the company is trying to do about them.

An anonymous reader writes "At their Lotusphere conference, IBM announced IM interoperability with AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo!, and Google Talk, to be shipped in the next release of its Sametime enterprise IM/web conferencing product in mid-2006." The omission of Microsoft's instant messenger seemed to raise quite a few questions, however.

Anonymous Coward writes "With little fanfare, Microsoft just announced that the x64 version of Windows Vista will require all kernel-mode code to be digitally signed. This is very different than the current WHQL program, where the user ultimately decides how they want to handle unsigned drivers. Vista driver developers must obtain a Publisher Identity Certificate (PIC) from Microsoft. Microsoft says they won't charge for it, but they require that you have a Class 3 Commercial Software Publisher Certificate from Verisign. This costs $500 [EUR 412] per year, and as the name implies, is only available to commercial entities."

theodp writes "Declaring that small town life no longer has to be separate from financial success thanks to technology, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos told North Dakota state officials to take hope in people such as Napster's Shawn Fanning. Interesting remarks, considering that Fanning conceived Napster in small-town Boston and the jobs Amazon's brought to rural areas don't exactly scream financial success."

d2viant writes "Elaborating on a previous article on Slashdot, it appears that the search engines which complied for Department of Justice requests for logs were apparently AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. According to the article, Justice is not requesting this data in the course of a criminal investigation, but in order to defend its argument that the Child Online Protection Act is constitutionally sound."

Gamepocalypse writes "I noticed over on GamePro that Valve is considering legal action over the Subway ads that Engage In-Game Advertising was pumping into Counter-Strike matches. Valve's Doug Lombardi: 'Advertising or any other commercial use of our games requires our written permission.'" I'm unclear on this: Were the ads actually in the game already, or was the company just saying they were going to put the ads in? If the ads were displayed in-game, how was that done without Valve's knowledge? If the ads weren't in the game ... why would you make a public claim like this without clearing it with Valve first? Odd all around.