I'm one of those people who considers Internet access to be a basic function of any computer. My laptop is not always near my home network, but the AirPort card is advertised work only with a 150-foot (50m) range, and I often find myself farther from a network than that

Talk about deja vu. I recall having written this introduction for a TidBITS article about spam before, each time changing the unhappy statistics about spam volumes in an upward direction

Spam is known to the law as "unsolicited commercial electronic mail," or UCE, and is usually defined as email in which someone is trying to sell someone else a product or service, or otherwise part recipients from their money

After my recent two-part article on spam laws (see "Email Spam: The Bandwagon Plays On" beginning in TidBITS-528), many readers wrote privately and to TidBITS Talk with requests for practical information

TidBITS has published a variety of articles about how to deal with unsolicited commercial email (UCE), more commonly referred to as "spam" (see "Responding to Spam" in TidBITS-442)

As the Internet has evolved to provide ever more opportunities to separate fools from their money, the number of people trying to do just that has also increased

People began committing crimes with personal computers soon after the machines started rolling off assembly lines. Early crimes, such as those involving hacking into mainframes, viruses, and fraud, haven't disappeared; however, recent computer crimes noted in the media concern issues like sexual predators, credit card theft, child pornography, and scams

Brady Johnson writes to announce a new product that might be of interest: DayDoubler is a new product from Connectrix that gives you those extra hours in each day that we've been asking for

[Yes, Brady is a lawyer, and doesn't just play one on the nets. Note that the discussion below applies in the U.S. and may vary in your part of the world