To be fair, even when the CAN-SPAM Act was passed five years ago, there was much skepticism over whether it would actually work. But I guess I always hoped that it would do something to stem the tide.

Here we are, five years later, and the volume of spam traffic is up tenfold, and much of it is more malicious than it was before. Now, when spammers get their hooks into you, they really sink them in.

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Earlier this week, security researchers revealed that they have discovered a way to take down Internet-connected servers with denial-of-service attacks.

The IDG News Service quotes a researcher as saying, "This appears not to be a single bug, but in fact at least five, and maybe as many as 30 different potential problems."

Vendors are now working to fix these problems with all due haste.

Where does WiMAX fit into the range of high-speed wireless options out there?

Brad Reed reports from the WiMAX World conference in Chicago, where he found a technology in search of its niche.

Ellen Messmer was at the Biometrics Consortium Conference in Tampa last week and brought back some interesting images of the latest biometric security devices at the show.

Plus, she delved into biometric technology that allows U.S. soldiers in Iraq to identify terrorists' fingerprints via a satellite link back to computers at home.

Microsoft plans to release high-performance computing server software in November - in a market where the company has less than 5% market share. John Fontana has details.

Speaking of uphill battles, Joanne Cummings points out that Microsoft's obsession with competing against Google in search is beginning to look a bit Ahab-like.

Network World's Jim Duffy reports that Enterasys President and CEO Mike Fabiaschi passed away suddenly this week at his home in Rye, N.H., at the age of 53.

Enterasys Chairman Mark Stone has been named interim CEO.

Sister site PC World has found 50 tools to help your PC run more quickly and smoothly. Check out the full list, which includes quite a few freebies.

The federal government has been working on making its Internet actions more secure, and that can only be a good thing for all of us.

The latest is that the government is deploying DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) on the .gov top-level domain. This means that you can be assured that the site you are viewing is actually irs.gov and not some spoofing, phishing site waiting to receive your Social Security number and all your financial data.

Carolyn Marsan notes in her story that banks and other institutions may follow suit - which makes you wonder what's been holding them back.

How do you know you're the "innest" of the in-crowd? When your name or likeness is co-opted by spammers and spyware writers.

Ellen Messmer reports that the top celebrities most likely to have their names appropriated these days are Brad Pitt, Beyonce and Justin Timberlake.

Read her story to find out the 15 names that McAfee says are the most abused by those peddling crimeware - and who name fell off the list this year (and won't be invited to any more spam parties).

If Sun's motto is "The Network is the Computer," perhaps Cisco's should be "The Computer is the Network." Or something like that.

According to a story by Network World's Jim Duffy, Cisco may be getting ready to push even harder into data centers by offering blade servers. At least, some observers are building a convincing case for Cisco to move in that direction, and in the short term.

Paul McNamara's house was called nine times in 24 hours by an auto-dialer - one that apparently was desperate to know what Paul and his family thought of Verizon's customer service (or it was just on the blink).

Guess what Paul's answer is.

It turns out that Paul wasn't the only victim here; 1,400 other customers were affected as well.

One Verizoner said the company was advising people to unplug their phones.

Interop just wouldn't be Interop if there weren't a bunch of network hardware announcements. Fortunately, vendors didn't disappoint.

We kick off our coverage of this week's Interop New York with a roundup of the principal players and their big unveilings.

Not content with the 100Mbps or more that is possible with the 802.11n standard, an IEEE study group is already looking ahead to gigabit-speed Wi-Fi.

Such an advance would probably make many more people think twice about running cabling in many cases. If you can get a gigabit per second over the airwaves, why not do that instead of taking on the expense of cabling?

If you can secure it, that is.

We're darn proud of the robust blogger community we've built at Network World (and are still building), so we're grateful to Datamation for recognizing three of our blogs in its recent list of Top 200 Tech Blogs.

Datamation seemed to recognize all of Network World at No. 16 on the list, but called out Paul McNamara's Buzzblog specifically:

16) NetworkWorld

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As part of its Android smartphone effort, Google went to application developers and asked them to create their best, most useful mobile applications for the Android platform. At stake was $10 million in prizes.

Check out the results, which include some pretty impressive and potentially useful tools for Android.

At 2 p.m. today we'll have a live chat on a topic that is much on network managers' minds these days. Go here to sign in as early as 1:00. Here's the description:

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In this week's deep dive into Google Chrome, reviewer Thomas Powell runs some benchmark tests that show yes, it really is faster than other browsers.

He also gets into the nitty-gritty of Chrome's standards compliance, the advantages of its browser-as-OS approach, and the shortcomings of its privacy mode.

Check it out.

Ellen Messmer reports that the "cybergang" Rock Phish is upgrading its botnet, according to RSA.

She notes that the group's Asprox botnet "gained attention earlier this year when it was linked to a massive wave of SQL-injection attacks that compromised Web sites."

On a related note, am I the only one who now has the B-52s song "Rock Lobster" in my head?

Perhaps - just perhaps - the Apple iPhone's success set the bar too high for its 3G successor. People seemed to complain right from the beginning, with one of our bloggers even famously returning her iPhone 3G after just six days.

Now we've compiled some of the more common complaints, some of which relate to cell phone basics, others of which are specific to iPhone, and one more that actually triggered a lawsuit.

Some really interesting innovations in software continue to come from companies that are part of the open source movement.

Network World's John Fontana this week selects 10 companies that stand out from the crowd for enterprise networks. Check out his list here.

Jason Meserve has added on every add-on and plugged in every plug-in. If you're ready to take your browsing to the next level, he's got a list of 10 add-ons for Mozilla's Firefox that will do just that.

Check out the full list here.

Brad Reed writes:

A network failure at a Georgia facility is being blamed for multiple flight delays across the eastern United States, including flights departing from major Northeastern cities such as Boston, New York and Washington, D.C.

Verizon choosing Google as its default search engine has obvious benefits for Google, and fairly obvious benefits for Verizon as well. But how would Verizon users benefit, if at all?

Network World's Brad Reed examines that question, and discusses the places Verizon could take the partnership if it wants to.

Researchers took a page out of clustered computing's handbook, postulating that Gigabit Ethernet switches could be used in data-center networks to save money over using 10-Gigabit switches.

The network architecture is called "fat tree," and the details are here.

Microsoft has reportedly hired Jerry Seinfeld to bring in a big gun against Apple's stream of "Mac vs. PC" ads.

Seinfeld will be paid $10 million, according to the reports, as part of a $300 million campaign.

After our story about wiring the Republican National Convention, it seems only fair that we delve into the IT behind the Democratic National Convention.

Brad Reed has the scoop on the transformation of Denver's Pepsi Center. The technology is pretty amazing and includes "3,344 miles of fiber and 140 miles of copper and coaxial cable."

Our New Data Center special package on Virtualization is live, and here is a great place to start: 10 must-have virtualization tools. From the intro:

"I'd have to hurt you." Such was the response one user recently gave when asked what he'd do if I took away his favorite virtualization-management tool. When it comes to these virtualization products, passions run deep.

Gmail users are reporting yet another outage. The e-mail service was down earlier this week and last week as well.

Although the company apologized for an earlier outage, it hasn't yet acknowledged this latest problem, according to the IDG News Service story.

Looking for a job ain't what it used to be. There's all this social media to consider, stuff that's publicly available. Any perspective employer is bound to check out your Facebook page, for instance.

We recently spoke with Rona Borre, president and CEO of Instant Technology, an IT recruiting firm in Chicago. She shared some tips for navigating this brave new world. My favorite:

How could personal beliefs hurt a person's chances at getting a job?

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In the latest installment of our popular "companies to watch" series, editor John Cox picks the nine companies set to make waves in wireless. Check out his list.