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All this nonsense has left me scared to death to let my kids get e-mail accounts. One pass through my own Hotmail message list reveals topics that would take months to explain to a youngster (I'd need some education myself first). Filters help a little, but just one stray message can undo years of diligence.

Bennett Haselton, my latest hero, has devised a perfect way to fight back. Either he's way madder than I am, or he's just more motivated. Last year Haselton took spammers to small claims court under a Washington state antispam law. Keeping to their anonymous roots, none of the four spam defendants even bothered to appear. Now Haselton awaits the $2,000 he won just for showing up.

Some of the millions of spam messages sent every day will inevitably end up in Washington. This is where people like Haselton come in. If enough suits are filed and won, spammers will get sick of the pain and the costs and find new ways to hoodwink people.

Meanwhile, a California appeals court in January upheld the state's antispam law. Under that law, spam must be labeled as an ad, and unsubscribing must be easy. Even though I'm basically a free-speech guy, I don't think everyone should be exposed to what I, or anyone else, thinks is acceptable. I'd like to see the content of spam controlled. Let's face it, we'd much rather have our kids get messages about mortgage rates than what Kiki or Cheri or Sparkles has in mind.

Net Worth?

Usually computer viruses attack software that's been around for a while, giving authors (read: jerks) a chance to figure out exactly where the code is most vulnerable.

But Network Associates and Symantec claimed that a virus has already been written that attacks Microsoft .Net–based Web services, which are still months away from availability.

This is the last thing Microsoft, already suffering from a series of security black eyes, needed. The Microsoft folks have never taken bad news lying down, so they came out fighting, claiming this is not a .Net virus but just a plain old Windows virus.

Microsoft has good reason to defuse the .Net virus brouhaha. Under .Net, code can run nearly anywhere -- on a Web page, on a PDA, as regular Windows code or as a mix. This creates more exposure for the executable code, which means viruses can spread in countless new ways and attack more system types. If Microsoft can't lock down .Net and convince IT that it's done so, .Net will go nowhere.

One obvious problem is that .Net doesn't just offer new programming languages and deployment possibilities, it also relies heavily on Windows, which remains far too vulnerable to viruses and security breaches. That's pretty much what happened with the .Net virus. The author simply took an existing Windows virus -- W32.Donut -- and modified it to infect .Net files. Microsoft claims this makes the virus no big deal. But this is exactly why it is a big deal -- because compromising .Net is apparently as easy as compromising Windows, but the consequences are far worse.

So how easy is it to mess with .Net? The virus was written by a teenager.