The Register reports that the popular Icefortress Web site has enjoyed record-breaking popularity since receiving an incoherent legal threat from a credit card transaction processor.

ZDNet UK reports that London police are investing a company for fraudulent PlayStation 2 orders. “Payments were accepted by cheque, but the consoles never arrived despite the cheques being cashed, and as of Friday the telephone numbers of both Games Master and Peter Lawrence, apparently the company’s sole representative, had been switched off. “

ZDNet News reports: “Japan’s dominant mobile Internet network may be coming to the United States, but industry observers say it will face an uphill battle there because of wildly different market conditions between the two countries.”

ZDNet Developer reports: “You’ve done all you can to avoid getting targeted. But you find that you are still getting spam mail. You should not be surprised. No matter what we do to hide ourselves, if people are tenacious enough, they’ll find out our e-mail address.”

“Until someone designs an operating system that reads minds, security will depend on diligent configuration and administration, no matter what OS software you use. Your Linux machine can be extremely secure, but it’s not going to get there on its own. Here are a few basic measures.” More at ZDNet Sm@rt Partner.

IndigoPerl (formerly DynamicPerl) version 5.6 is now available; the product is a binary build of Perl 5.6 for Win32 with an integrated Apache Web server. It includes a browser based GUI package manager for installing pre-built binary packages from repositories. The package manager can also be used to build and install CPAN source modules.

ZDNet’s Richard Shim comments on the Transmeta Crusoe chip: “With the holidays upon them, the folks at Transmeta Corp. are asking for one thing: a fighting chance against that chip Goliath, Intel Corp. But after testing a notebook powered by one of Transmeta’s new Crusoe processors, I think the company should be asking for a miracle.”

use Perl; has a complete list of new modules introduced into CPAN between the 26th of November and the 30th of November.

From IDG via PC World: “Imagine transferring a list of contacts from your mobile telephone to your desktop–without cables. Or accessing a corporate network without an ethernet card; or using your mobile phone to buy food from a vending machine or a store. That is the promise of Bluetooth.”

Oreillynet picks apart init, the FreeBSD system startup daemon. “When you boot your computer, you have probably noticed that the kernel does a hardware probe and prints its results to your terminal. Once this probe is finished, the kernel starts two processes: process 0 (swapper) and process 1 (init). The daemon responsible for process control initialization is init; without it, no other processes would be able to start.”