Microsoft, ISPs launch anti-spam offensive

Microsoft, America Online (AOL), Yahoo and Earthlink have filed a handful of lawsuits against spammers, allegedly targeting some of the world`s largest unsolicited mail offenders.

Microsoft has filed three lawsuits, which allege that spammers spoofed the domains of Internet service providers and used open proxies to route the e-mails. According to Newsfactor, the defendants allegedly sent millions of e-mail messages advertising herbal growth supplements, mortgage services and get-rich-quick schemes - all of which violate the Can-Spam law.

AOL`s two lawsuits name numerous defendants, alleging federal and state law violations. One lawsuit is the first to expressly target "spim", or instant messaging abuse.

Earthlink and Yahoo have also filed suits against defendants who are alleged to have sent illegitimate pharmaceutical and pornographic spam.

Toshiba wants to replace as many as 600 000 memory modules that were used in 27 notebook models worldwide between April 2002 and 2004, ZDNet reports.

According to the PC maker, these modules could potentially cause problems, including intermittent lockups or undetected memory data corruption.

Toshiba said it would mail replacement memory cards to customers and provide instructions on how to install the new memory cards and mail the old cards back. It will cover shipping costs and give customers a free 32MB USB storage device.

None of its current notebooks contain the potentially problematic memory, the company added.

Intel yesterday unveiled a chip it says is aimed at gamers looking to push their PCs to the limit.

According to Halifax Live, the enhanced performance of the Extreme Edition Pentium 4 processor at 3.46GHz is attributed to its large 2MB Level 3 cache and HT Technology.

Intel says the new platform can boost performance by as much as 25%, when the computer system has an Intel processor with HT Technology and enabled chipset, BIOS, operating system and application software.

The processor can also work on two sets of tasks simultaneously using resources that would otherwise sit idle. Intel is offering the chip at $1 000 (R6 100) in quantities of 1 000.