Silicon Valley Programmer First Ever Arrested for 'Spam Rage'
A Silicon Valley computer programmer has been arrested for threatening to torture and kill employees at a company he believed was responsible for spam and pop-up ads on his computer. 44-year-old Charles Booher was arrested on Thursday and released on bail.
Australian Teens Going Into Debt Over Cell Phone Bills
University of Newcastle eggheads Margaret Griffiths and Bill Renwick found in a study that some 34 percent of Australian 18-24 year olds had gone into debt because of telephone bills, 78 percent of which were mobile phone bills.
American retail giant Wal-Mart may begin selling Wal-Mart branded notebook PCs, according to CRN, c|net, PC World and MSNBC. The story broke on a news site called The Taiwan Economic News. Based on "industry sources," according to the site, Wal-Mart plans to "place an order for over 100,000 notebook PCs with Taiwan's Arima Computer Corp." Arima, however, would not confirm the report. Cheap Wal-Mart notebooks could drive industry margins down even further, damaging revenues by companies like Dell that are overdependent on PC revenues and profits and companies like Hewlett-Packard, which currently sell large numbers of their consumer notebooks through Wal-Mart stores.
Move Over, Dell: Wal-Mart Mulls Own Brand of Cheap PCs
Wal-Mart Stores plans plans to offer Wal-Mart-brand notebooks staring early next year, according to a report in the Taiwan Economic News. If Wal-Mart does to the PC industry what it has done to other sectors -- which is essentially starve it of oxygen by killing margins -- it could be very bad news for companies like Dell who rely almost entirely on PC sales.
The web site Neowin.net has posted three screenshots of the upcoming version of Hotmail -- which not coincidentally looks a lot more like Microsoft Outlook. You can see them here, here and here.
They start 'em young in Japan. A new toy camera phone called "Tommy for the girl" is actually a toy phone but a real camera, taking 64×48 pixel monochrome digital pictures.
AT&T Sues PayPal, eBay Over Alleged Patent Infringement
AT&T today filed a patent infringement suit against PayPal and eBay, alleging that their payment systems infringe on AT&T's 1994 transaction patents. It took them this long to file suit? . . .
Now that Google has spurned Microsoft's takeover bid, it can expect the Redmond giant to start rolling out directly competitive services one by one, and building them into the Windows operating system. The first of the lot is a competitor to Google's new and popular News service called MSN NewsBot. Here's the beta version, which was launched in the UK.
Yahoo Inc., which removed adult ads from its U.S. web portal in 2001 after protests by conservative groups, is back in the pornography business. After buying Overture Services last month, Yahoo will now sell ads that link to hard-core porn web sites.
Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina is always talking about the "Adaptive Enterprise," using the language of natural selection and pointing out that, in nature, the most adaptive species survive. But what would Darwin do if HE ran HP?
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They start 'em young in Japan. A new toy camera phone called "Tommy for the girl" is actually a toy phone but a real camera, taking 64×48 pixel monochrome digital pictures. 
