Leo Globe and Mail

From the Great White North... the tech news of the day. The first auto race took place on this day in 1895. The Main Street Electrical Parade debuted at Walt Disney World in 1977. ET was released in 1982. MS-DOS 5.0 was released in 1991.

1. The FBI made arrests in several countries in connection with the theft of the source code for Half-Life 2 thanks to tips from unhappy gamers. Half-Life developers had to delay the game and re-code part of it when the stolen source code was released on the Internet. The eagerly awaited sequel to the 1998 hit is expected later this summer.
2. Microsoft has filed lawsuits against eight spammers accusing them of misleading consumers. The company now has over 80 pending suits against junk emailers.
3. Zombie PCs infected by various spam viruses were used to send out anti-immigrant polemics in German to computers all over the world Thursday. Experts believe that political activists used spammers to send out the emails.
4. Comcast, whose broadband subscribers unknowingly send out hundreds of million spam messages a day via zombie PCs, has finally decided to selectively block port 25 - the outgoing email port - in an effort to control the traffic. The port is only being blocked on machines that are suspected of sending out spam.
5. British advertising watchdogs have upheld a complaint against Apple for their G5 ads. The Advertising Standards Authority took issue with ads claiming that the G5 was the "world's fastest personal computer." Noting that the G5 was not the fastest computer "in all circumstances for all applications" the ASA will require Apple drop the language from future advertising. The ASA did uphold two other Apple claims that the G5 was the world's first 64-bit personal computer and that it could support more memory than any PC.
6. According to Slashdot, McDonald's Germany will begin using SuSE Linux in all its stores.
7. The remaining Beatles are finally considering putting their music online.

Tune in tomorrow at 7:40a Eastern for my weekly visit with John Donabie on 1010 CFRB Toronto. And, of course, every Saturday and Sunday, noon to 3p Pacific on KFI 640 AM, Los Angeles.