Yahoo!News reports that “

[t]he Virginia Supreme Court declared the state’s anti-spam law unconstitutional Friday and reversed the conviction of a man once considered one of the world’s most prolific spammers.  The court unanimously agreed with Jeremy Jaynes’ argument that the law violates the free-speech protections of the First Amendment because it does not just restrict commercial e-mails — it restricts other unsolicited messages as well. Most other states also have anti-spam laws, and there is a federal CAN-SPAM Act as well, but those laws apply only to commercial e-mail pitches.”

According to the Register, “[a] VoiP application for Apple’s iPhone has been banned by the Higher Regional Court in Hamburg, Germany at the behest of T-Mobile.  The app – available through Apple’s iTunes App Store – allows users to make cheap phone calls using T-Mobile’s Wi-Fi network and bypass roaming charges.  However, that’s not why the app called Sipgate got banned. The court argues that Sipgate makes use of unfair business practices to pull customers from T-Mobile to its own services. Sipgate only runs on iPhones of the first generation up to firmware 1.1.4 and requires the ‘BSD Subsystem’ for installation. Jailbreaking the iPhone is a violation of T-Mobile’s contract terms, the court says.”

In a different article, the Register writes that “[i]n telling the world it will anonymize user IPs after only nine months, Google has appeased EU regulators. At least in part. But it looks like Mountain View’s new policy is just another example of Google Privacy Theatre.  On Monday evening, when Google deputy counsel Nicole Wong trumpeted the new nine month policy to Silicon Valley’s Churchill Club, she said the company was still mulling ‘the implementation details.’  But later in the week, the company outlined its plan with a few terse sentences tossed CNet’s way.  After nine months, the company has confirmed with The Reg, Google will ‘change some of the bits’ in the user IPs stored in its server logs. But as the plan stands now, it will leave cookie data alone.  This means the missing bits are easily retrieved.”

The Register also warns that “[m]iscreants have created a tool that dumbs down the process of using fake YouTube websites to spread malware.  The YFakeCreator tool allows budding VXers to set up a fake site and configure options such as the properties of a supposed video. Typically users are required to download a fake codec to view content, which is not actually on offer. The codec contains the malware payload which can be anything from adware to a Trojan.”

Internetnews.com has a good article explaining why “open wireless networks could come with a price.”