Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has again begun its clampdown on scammers in Lagos State.

In its latest move to check activities of the fraudsters, the anti-graft agency swooped on cyber cafes at FESTAC Town last week and arrested over 87 of operators and fraudsters who use the facilities to send scam letters.

A competent EFCC source said the exercise was necessary following reports from prominent residents of the area alleging an increasing number of such cyber cafés and how their activities were becoming a threat to the neighbourhood.

The official, who would not want his name in print, said after the mop-up, over 87 persons, including operators and scammers, were arrested. He added that most of them had made useful statements to the agency and would soon be charged to court.

A blade is a server that slides into a big, tall box called a chassis that is about the size of a refrigerator. Companies can replace all the hundreds of servers in their data centers with a blades that fit into these big boxes. They take a lot less room, and a lot less power. Blade servers count as one of the fastest growing product introductions in IBM's history—the business went from zero revenues three years ago to $800 million last year. And Zeitler expects blades to be a $10 billion business by the end of the decade.

The key to hitting that goal is IBM's committment to making those blade slots standard. So if you don't like IBM's blades you can theoretically swap in a blade from another supplier. (Although, in reality, HP's blades don't fit in those slots, and I'm not sure that Sun's do either).

But the rise of blade servers presents a few interesting business opportunies. (VC's, by the way, have poured an estimated $1 billon into blade startups since 2000, and will invest another $1 billion over the next four years, according to VC David Helfich).

Such a move might help in the battle against adware, FTC Commissioner Jon Leibowitz said Thursday at an event here hosted by the Anti-Spyware Coalition. Adware is software that displays pop-up ads on PCs, often after Internet searches.

"I think that could have a beneficial effect," Leibowitz said in an interview. "In this context, maybe shaming a company on how they are spending money might inure to the benefit of consumer's privacy."

The FTC would publicly announce and publish the name of a company that advertises using adware that installs itself surreptitiously on consumer PCs or by using spyware, Leibowitz said. He would recommend publicly shaming advertisers to the other FTC commissioners if the adware problem doesn't decrease, he said.

The idea is a good one, several attendees at the Anti-Spyware Coalition event said. However, Trevor Hughes, executive director of the Network Advertising Initiative, called it "drastic action."

That's beginning to change, with an assist from wireless technology. Vivid Sky, a St. Louis start-up, on Wednesday unveiled SkyBox, a 17-ounce Wi-Fi device and service. The Windows Mobile gizmo, worn around the neck, would give fans at baseball parks, basketball courts and other venues a perspective previously unavailable.

Unsure which player has a higher lifetime batting average? You can check numbers in real time. If you think the umpire erroneously called a strike, you can check the 4-inch display and see where it crossed the plate. Plus, you can tap replays from any stadium camera.

"You no longer have to miss the action because you ran to the restroom," says Chris Shipley, producer of the Demo tech conference here where SkyBox was demonstrated.

FanView gives spectators a view from inside up to seven cars while a NASCAR race is underway. Fans can also access lap times, speeds, positions and point standings in real time.

According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I've only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they've correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.

"That's how flame wars get started," says psychologist Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, who conducted the research with Justin Kruger of New York University. "People in our study were convinced they've accurately understood the tone of an e-mail message when in fact their odds are no better than chance," says Epley.

The researchers took 30 pairs of undergraduate students and gave each one a list of 20 statements about topics like campus food or the weather. Assuming either a serious or sarcastic tone, one member of each pair e-mailed the statements to his or her partner. The partners then guessed the intended tone and indicated how confident they were in their answers.

Those who sent the messages predicted that nearly 80 percent of the time their partners would correctly interpret the tone. In fact the recipients got it right just over 50 percent of the time.

QUESTION: Is Microsoft going to develop a handheld like MP3 player to combat iPod, Apple's dominance of the last year?

BILL GATES: Yeah, Apple has done a fantastic job with the iPod. How many of you have iPods? OK, some.

Well, we are talking with partners about how we working with those partners can make even better music players. We've got some in the market today. I'd say in total they may have about 20 percent market share, which is lower than we like and so we're seeing where we could come together to make a device that's less expensive and connects in better ways, does photos and videos in better ways.

And so I don't think what's out in the market today is the final answer, but again it just shows the magic of software; Apple did a very good job on iTunes, did the user interface design right, and so that means we'll have to match all that good work and do something even better.

So between us and our partners, you can expect to see some pretty hot products coming out over the next couple of years.

The government provided a list of 138 agencies that may need to be excluded from a shutdown, along with their related contractors. The list includes the Central Intelligence Agency, the Army and the National Security Agency.

The government left the door open for an injunction that would leave the network in operation but stop sales of new BlackBerries to private users.

For its part, RIM has agreed with the Justice Department that it would be difficult to separate government from private BlackBerry users. In a filing Wednesday, it also argued that public interest in the network extends beyond government users. For example, it said, the financial services industry relies heavily on the devices.

The number of Danish websites alone - those carrying a ".dk" suffix -- knocked offline in the past week numbered 578 between 30 January and 6 February, according to Zone-H.org, a cyber-crime observatory that tracks website defacements. Hundreds more websites of European, Israeli and American companies and private citizens have also been defaced during that period, with the vast majority occurring after the re-publication last week of the cartoons in European newspapers.

"The number is nearly doubling every day," said Roberto Preatoni, the founder of Zone-H.org. A team of Zone-H technicians collect and verify reports of sabotaged Web sites from both victims and hackers. The number of attacked Web servers has been at record levels since the controversy reignited last week, Preatoni said.

"This is the largest ever attack directed against a single country, bigger than the Intifada, the Chinese-U.S. spy plane incident, and even the war in Iraq."

Google charges users nothing to search the internet; neither does Yahoo nor Microsoft MSN. E-mail? Instant messaging? Blogging? Free. Skype, the Luxembourg-based company that is now a multibillion-dollar division of Ebay, offers free VOIP - Voice Over Internet Protocols - telephone calls worldwide. San Francisco-based Craigslist provides free online classified advertising around the world.

In America, the Progressive insurance group gives comparison-minded shoppers free vehicle insurance quotes from its competitors. Innumerable financial service companies offer clients free tax advice, online bill payments and investment research. Michael O'Leary, Ryanair's colourful founder, predicts his discount carrier may soon offer free tickets to his cost-conscious euro-flyers.

Of course, Milton Friedman, the Nobel economist, is right: just as "there's no such thing as a free lunch", there is also no such thing as a "free innovation". These "free" offerings are all creatures of creative subsidy. Free search engines have keyword-driven advertisers. Financial companies use cash flow from profitable core businesses to cost-effectively support alluringly "free" money management services. Ryanair counts on the lucrative introduction of in-flight gambling to make its "free tickets" scenario a commercial reality. Innovative companies increasingly recognise that innovative subsidy transforms the pace at which markets embrace innovation. "Free" inherently reduces customer risk in exploring the new or improved -- and bestows competitive advantage. To the extent that business models can be defined as the artful mix of "what companies profitably charge for" versus "what they give away free", successful innovators are branding and bundling ever-cleverer subsidies into their market offerings. The right "free" fuels growth and profit. Technology has successfully upgraded King Gillette's classic "razor & blades" business model.

The web-based reality series will run across several sites on the AOL network, including AOL.com, AIM.com, Moviefone.com, and MapQuest.com. Challengers will be able to hunt for clues across the sites and look for hidden treasure buried across the United States.

The clues and the online reality show will also be promoted on television, print, and cell phones. Mr. Burnett said he was amazed by the number of fans who communicated online about his TV series.

He believes that with more people able to watch content on their computers during the daytime, the hours from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. could become the equivalent of the next prime time on the TV programming schedule.

Gold Rush! will begin with 13 trucks containing solid gold, burying 13 caches of lucre around the United States, according to Mr. Burnett in an interview Tuesday. Clues regarding the whereabouts of those caches will be embedded online through the AOL web sites and other media.

Microsoft's implementation of tabbed browsing in IE 7 includes something called Tab Groups which enables user to collect their tabs into a group and open a group with one click. A native toolbar search box is also part of the new browser.

Perhaps most notably though is IE 7's new RSS (define)features.

"RSS is probably the biggest area of innovation in IE 7," Schare said. "We've done work both on the end user to expose the average user to RSS in a really great way and we've done a lot of work on the platform to enable RSS for any application to take advantage of."

Schare explained that the RSS capabilities allow users to subscribe to feeds within the browser and once subscribed that data is available to any application, whether it's an RSS reader or any other business or consumer application that might want to use the data.

It's all part of how IE 7 and eventually Vista will fully integrate RSS into the system.

Sling Media's first product, the Slingbox, is a consumer electronics device that turns existing cable and satellite TV feeds into packets and then sends them across the Internet. Slingbox allows consumers to select regular TV programming they see at home and see it on any Internet-connected Windows-based laptop, smart phone or PDA.

The product is popular among business travelers, who, for example, can watch their hometown sports team while on the road. The device costs about $250, and there is no ongoing subscription fee to use the service. Slingbox is already sold in more than 3,000 retail locations.