MySpace has "won" around £120m from two spammers who used their network to send junk mail to members, but it has little chance of seeing the cash.

It's no surprise that Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines (who apparently are real people) failed to turn up in court -- it's likely no-one even knows where they live.

By nature, spammers, phishers, and the other assortment of scammers who infest the Internet, hide behind false names, email addresses, and locations. They know what they're doing is largely illegal, yet they also know it's notoriously different to track them down.

Because every Apple fan and gadget fashionista will automatically buy it anyway. As long as it's sleek and expensive enough to brag about on the internet.

Even if Mr Jobs pulls a solar-powered calculator (iAddsUP) out of his shirt pocket and announces it goes on sale - tomorrow! - for a mere $699 for the 8-digit screened version and $799 for the 10-digit screened model, it'll be a smash.

Apple fans will now buy anything from Apple. Not only that, but Apple's become some sort of global fashion icon. People just have to have its new stuff, regardless of if it actually fills a gap in their lives or not. It's a far cry from the Apple of the 1980s.

Hello everyone. Don't panic - this isn't another battery review! Instead, this is my entry for the Shiny/Cisco My Video Life competition.

The idea is you make a video about what video means to you, whack it on YouTube, then someone gets the honour of being described as A WINNER. Imagine that. Imagine the feeling of being a winner! Here's my attempt at winning. I doubt I will be feeling the feeling.

You should enter. Any video will do, even just one of you watching telly while eating sausages filmed on a mobile phone. If that's what video really means to you, there's no arguing with it. There's £500 worth of stuff for the winner. And I'm probably not allowed to have any of the prizes, what with being a Shiny Media employee :(

I have sort of wasted everyone's time in doing this, to be honest.

Related posts: WIN BIG! | WIN BIGGER!

I had some sort of religious dawn last week. Some kind of personal discovery, a moment of clarity, if you will. I used a Mac - and it was fine!

Now, I pretty much hate Macs. I've only ever used old Macs, rubbish ones from the distant past that are unable to cope with newer operating systems. So I associate Macs with PAIN.

But I just used one and it was fine. Because the only thing I use is Firefox.

freesat, the free-to-air satellite service due to launch in a matter of weeks, is a great idea and one that many people are looking forward to, but the organisation is behaving as if the pre-launch phase is a covert military operation, and that's hurting the brand.

Last week we wrote about the launch of Hauppauge's USB2 tuner that should be able to receive the freesat signal via a compatible satellite connection. That's not how freesat sees it.

Gary Cutlack writes...

Today might be the day my laptop finally breaks. I hope it does. The bloody thing cost me £850 about two and a half years ago but is now little more than an embarrassment and liability.

So if it breaks, I'll be able to buy a new one for half that amount. One with three times the power and enough memory to open up several applications at the same time. And it'll be smaller and lighter. Please break, laptop. I don't love you any more.

I'm even hoping Microsoft brings out a new type of internet that's incompatible with this laptop, so I'll have no choice but to upgrade.

Ofcom has decided to conduct a survey of Britain's pipework to test its suitability for carrying fibre-optic cabling for use in high speed broadband networks.

Bournemouth Council has already tested broadband via the sewers, so it's possible, but the main problem is that most ISPs don't have a real incentive to roll out faster services.

Two issues -- the growing use of mobile Internet, and Internet users' skyrocketing demand for Video on Demand and other bandwidth-intensive multimedia -- were never envisaged when the Internet was born.

Jonathan Weinberg writes...

It's amazing what you can do when you don't have much money. The best innovators often produce the most fantastic efforts when they're doing it on a shoe-string. Look at Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, he didn't have millions of pounds when he started it, he simply had passion, drive and a simple idea for something he believed would work.

So the news today that the BBC's New Media boss is to stand down and move to launch an on-demand video service for the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 strikes me as interesting. Ashley Highfield has been feted as one of the most important people on the Internet. But admittedly, he controls a budget of £74m a year. Surely even a chimp in a tutu could do some decent work with that kind of cash to fund it.

Gary Cutlack investigates...

Spurred on by media reports of pro-cocaine groups INFESTING the beast that is Facebook, I thought I'd have a look around and see what other shameful activities are listed on the social networking hotspot.

This is no mere blog update - it's fierce investigative journalism that could bring the Facebook house of cards CRASHING DOWN!

Here are the top ten most shameful Facebook groups I've dug up today.

1. "People who like to sit in baths full of champagne whilst wanking and eating truffles and caviar and filling in forms for Job Seekers Allowance" Sadly no one has uploaded any videos, which leads me to believe this may be a fake. I have signed up anyway, to, er, investigate further.

2. "If Kate Moss does cocaine, it should be legal" Probably not entirely serious, this one, especially as it has the tagline "Cocaine is still illegal. Even with Kate Moss as their spokesperson." Still, it's all you'd need to hang a story off if you were a News of the World reporter looking to brand Facebook a SICK DRUGS DEN.

Anyone who loves gadgets and lives in the UK will know of the Innovations catalogue. Sadly it no longer exists, it went out of business a couple of years ago, but it was often found dropping through your letterbox inside the Sunday newspapers.

And what you'd find within its pages were some of the most weird and wonderful gizmos in the world. All the stuff you never really needed (ever) but bought from your hard-earned cash just in case - and because it looked "interesting". I wasted a fortune back in the days of Innovations and was horrified when it bit the dust.

So imagine my joy last week when I caught an internal flight from Orlando to Miami in the States on American Airlines and found a copy of the SKY MALL catalogue in the pocket in front of my seat. It's Innovations US-style and I've picked my five favourites over the jump. Best thing about it, even those in the UK can order from it!

Freesat launched on 6th May.

This FAQ was last updated on 6th May 2008.

1. What is freesat?

freesat is a subscription-free satellite service due to launch in the UK in Spring 2008.

freesat is a joint collaboration between the BBC and ITV, approved by the BBC Trust.

Jonathan Weinberg writes...

OK, so let's do a straw poll. What do you think would stop a sex offender abusing children? I know this is not a comfortable topic but it is an extremely important one in tech and Internet terms. Stiffer sentences maybe? The threat of castration? A life term in jail? Perhaps even death by lethal injection?

We've all had those "If I were Home Secretary" moments and this is one of them because the plans today released by the UK's Home Secretary Jacqui Smith seem the worst kind of limp proposals for such a serious matter.

The idea is for sex offenders to have their email addresses passed to social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo to prevent them contacting children. I can just see them running for cover right now!

I thought making a list of my favourite websites would be incredibly easy. I've spent exactly half my life on the Internet. Part of the first generation raised on it. I use it everyday.

But after 5 minutes I realised, in reality, nowadays I use the Internet like a pensioner at 'club', and only visit things like 'Guardian Unlimited' and 'BBC News'. Far cry from my days as a 1337 h4xxor, feasting on a diet of warez and pr0n. Anyway, I digress. Here are 10 sites that you doubtlessly would have already been to because, whilst being incredibly vast, the Internet is f*****g tiny.

Seems like a good idea to test laptops on the beach, until you get to the beach. Where it's cold. And windy. And raining. And suddenly you're more worried about your camera and laptop breaking than seeing which screen is best for using outdoors.

Still, I soldiered on - and you should've seen how happy the shopkeeper was when I bought that Cornetto! Definitely the first Cornetto he's sold in 2008. Made his week.

So there you go. A stunning victory for the Portege R500, with its modern, new and fancy transflective screen technology making it very possible indeed to work while on the beach. You might want an umbrella and coat, mind, if you're planning on doing it before June.

Related posts: Battery power tests | Working from home

Jonathan Weinberg writes...

So you're buying a new laptop. Large hard disk, check! Fast processor, check! Windows Vista, well if I must! Face-recognition to stop unauthorised people from logging into it, blimey - what is this, Star Trek?

Well, that could be the newest addition to your techno-arsenal if you snap up one of
Toshiba's latest notebooks, the Satellite U300, A300 or P300.

Not only are they full spec'd up to the nines, the most interesting bit of gadgetry inside
has to be the camera that matches your face to the one stored in the memory, before it'll let you into the desktop.

And it's also the most useless bit of gadgetry I've seen in a while.

Jonathan Weinberg writes...

It's a row that's been rolling on for far too long. It's a row that does nothing to help the perception of gaming among wider society. And it's a row that is going to run and run for quite some time yet.

Rockstar has now finally overturned a ban that meant it was unable to release Manhunt 2 in the UK. But while that's good news for the firm, for gaming itself, this whole bloody saga is just another nail in the coffin of gaming.

The media is already far too focused on the negatives - the violence, the calls to ban so-called "killer games" and the conflicts over having a voluntary code to provide an age rating for the majority of titles.

Occasionally a positive story will slip through, like the OAPs playing Wii to keep in shape, but on the whole, games are treated with far more disdain than rap music and horror movies, both of which have had their fare share of criticism in the past.

Despite reviewing games for a living, I've still not been sent a copy of Manhunt 2 to preview. Now the British Board of Film Classification has been curtailed and their decision to stop it going on sale overturned, I'm sure one will drop through the post soon enough.

But the argument here is not whether Manhunt 2 is bloody, brutal, sick or whatever other superlative people want to choose. What it shows is that the current certification system the Government can't wait to get involved in, is now not worth the paper it's written on.

Just a week after Apple launched the iPhone SDK, it's been hacked.

Pretty fast going, but unsurprising.

Let's not think that Apple didn't see this coming a mile off.

Given the speed with which the original iPhone firmware was hacked to allow third-party applications, and to release it from the exclusive mobile network carriers, Apple knew that exactly the same thing would happen when the SDK launched.

I got sent a proper thing to review! It's the Flexii Precision Mini Battery Checker, an amazing little device that lets you check the charge levels of your batteries!

Having played with it for a few days, I now simply cannot remember how I used to live without it - and without being able to constantly monitor the power levels of my batteries. Here's my video review of the incredibly handy German/Chinese power-checking gadget.

That was easily the most fun I've had in recent memory. Every battery in my home has now been checked and verified and catalogued. Never again will I have to wonder if my camera is going to go flat when I'm out on "a shoot." Brilliant device.

PS: Sorry the video is so long, it's just that time really whizzes by when you're testing the power levels of batteries!

If you want one (oh yes you do!), you can buy one here from Vavolo.

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Katherine Hannaford writes...

Last week, when reading the upcoming features for the next issue of the Observer Magazine, I was worried to see they promised an article entitled 'The world's 50 most powerful blogs'. Old media reporting on new media? It could only mean trouble, and stir a generous helping of some angry-sachet into the big online pot.

When having my weekly Sunday morning lie-in in bed with a copy of that day's Observer, I realised I overestimated the knowledge of the journalists writing for that paper, and indeed, the magazine. Sure, I can't tar them all with the same brush, considering the Observer and its brother-newspaper, the Guardian, have internet-savvy journalists like Bobbie Johnson and Jemima Kiss snuggled under their wings, amongst others. But what I saw before my eyes on the morning of the 9th of March angered me greatly.

It appears I wasn't the only blogger infuriated over the dubiously-named list of 'powerful blogs' (available online here). The 26-odd commenters who've shared their opinions on the article online all agree, as do thousands more across the world, that the list is possibly the worst, most confusing collection of so-called blogs ever put together. Collaborators Jessica Aldred, Amanda Astell, Rafael Behr, Lauren Cochrane, John Hind, Anna Pickard, Laura Potter, Alice Wignall and Eva Wiseman, you should hang up your Bloglines accounts for good. Although I'm guessing one of them, if not all of them, doesn't even know what an RSS Feed is, according to one of the many mistakes they made in the summary about Engadget.

Jonathan Weinberg writes...

Help, I need somebody, help, not just anybody, help, you know I need someone... who can blooming well tell me if we are ever going to be able to buy Beatles songs on the interweb!

I'm not one of those nuts who says they're the greatest band in the world, but I can understand why it's so important to have their tunes in digital form. After all, there's millions of people out there who'd listen to the Liverpudlian Fab Four eight days a week if they could.

For Apple and Sir Paul McCartney, it's a major money-spinner but also a worry. A mass release of Beatles tracks would see them fill the top 40, with a potential top 10 chart totally Beatles-filled. That'd be bad for the music industry so I can appreciate the reservations of many. It'd be much easier to release them in waves, otherwise we'd all be having a hard day's night sitting in front of our PCs or Macs trying to download dozens of them at once.