BRIEFLY
Businesses lose $4B to spam

Advertiser Staff and News Services

All those junk e-mail messages may promise instant wealth, but they can be quite painful to the bottom line.

A recent study attempts to quantify the annual cost of spam: $8.9 billion for U.S. corporations, $2.5 billion for European businesses and another $500 million for U.S. and European service providers.

Marten Nelson of Ferris Research says that while most spam can be deleted quickly, occasionally someone is duped into clicking the message.

Figuring it takes 4.4 seconds on average to deal with a message, the messages add up to $4 billion in lost productivity for U.S. businesses each year.

Internet as we know it turns 20

Happy birthday, Internet. By some accounts, Wednesday marked the 20th anniversary of the online medium.

It was on Jan. 1, 1983, that the 400 or so computers hooked to what was then called ARPANET had to switch to a communications protocol called TCP/IP, said Vint Cerf, the protocol's co-inventor.

It was TCP/IP that allowed multiple networks to coexist and permitted applications like the World Wide Web to develop and thrive.

'.biz' operators to refund fees

Operators of the ".biz" domain name have agreed to refund the "nonrefundable" application fees it had collected as part of the initial awarding of names in 2001.

Radio disc jockey David Smiley and other applicants had filed a class-action lawsuit accusing NeuLevel Inc. of running an illegal lottery because losers do not get their application fees returned.

Before opening ".biz" to general registrations on a first-come, first-served basis, NeuLevel had permitted businesses to submit online requests with application fees of about $2. For multiple submissions for the same name, one was picked at random.

New software will limit file trading

Macrovision Corp., Microsoft Corp. and RealNetworks Inc. are among companies developing software for media companies that want to control viewers' use of programs and music, The New York Times reported.

Such systems can control how many times something is copied and whether it can be transferred to other devices, the newspaper said. The systems could eliminate a user's ability to access movies or songs after a day or leave it in place forever.

Media companies can charge different fees for different privileges. The music industry blames falling sales on Web-based file trading.