Spam king fined $234m

MySpace.com, the social networking Web site owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, has won $234 million in damages over junk e-mail sent to its members, in what is believed to be the largest anti-spam ruling, reports The Independent.

A federal judge in Los Angeles made the award against Sanford Wallace, the notorious "spam king", who has been the subject of a string of failed federal attempts to shut down his activities, and a business partner, Walter Rines, after the two men failed to come to defend themselves in court.

The pair were accused of hijacking hundreds of thousands of MySpace members' accounts and sending messages advertising Wallace's ragbag of commercial Web sites, infuriating members and forcing MySpace to spend millions of dollars on a cat-and-mouse game with the spammers.

Comcast has agreed to acquire pioneering Web start-up Plaxo, which was first to seek to turn address books into social networks and laid the foundation for Friendster and Facebook, says Reuters.

Terms were not disclosed. But a source close to the deal said Comcast, the top US cable TV company and number two broadband Internet supplier, is paying from $145 million to $175 million, based on meeting performance targets in the next few years.

Plaxo is famous in Silicon Valley for being early to see a business opportunity latent in users' e-mail address books, but only belatedly joining the social network craze that followed.

Microsoft will add its Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) scripting language back into Office for the Mac, although probably not until 2011, a company manager said yesterday, reports Computerworld.

VBA will return in the next version of Office, said Kurt Schmucker, group product manager in Microsoft's Mac Business Unit. Schmucker also defended the decision made in August 2006 to drop the macro language from what would become Office 2008 for Mac.

"Moving VBA was a much bigger project than anyone anticipated," Schmucker said. "The VBA in Office 2004 was really tightly tied to PowerPC. It wasn't a matter of just moving the code, but would have required re-architecting. And we couldn't do that with the resources we had."