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SEATTLE (Reuters) - Charges against a man accused of being one of the Internet’s most notorious spammers could spell relief from millions of unwanted message clogging e-mail in-boxes, computer security officials said on Thursday.

“This is a great day for the Internet,” said Patrick Peterson, vice president of technology for IronPort Systems, which provides e-mail and Web security products. “Everyone involved in clapping those handcuffs on (him) are heroes.”

Robert Alan Soloway, 27, is currently being held without bail after his initial appearance in U.S. District Court here on Wednesday.

Soloway was indicted by a federal grand jury on 35 counts that include mail fraud, wire fraud, fraud in connection with electronic mail, aggravated identity theft and money laundering.

Consumers may not immediately notice much change in the amount of e-mail-borne spam, because there are other, even bigger spammers out there, Peterson said. But the long-term effect from Soloway’s arrest could be great, he said.

“The message it sends is going to have a much bigger impact than what we see in our in-boxes, which is undetectable,” Peterson said, adding that he have recently seen more aggressive efforts by federal authorities to combat the scourge.

Soloway is the first spammer in the nation to be charged with aggravated identity theft under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

His detention hearing is scheduled for next Monday. Soloway has been dubbed the “Spam King” by federal prosecutors for allegedly sending hundreds of millions of spam e-mails via hijacked networks.

“Spam is a scourge of the Internet, and Robert Soloway is one of its most prolific practitioners,” Jeffrey C. Sullivan, U. S. Attorney for Western Washington, said in a prepared statement.

According to the indictment, between November 2003 and May 2007, Soloway operated the Newport Internet Marketing Corp, which offered a “broadcast e-mail” software product, at prices ranging from $195 to $495.

Those services constituted illegal spam, or high-volume commercial e-mail messages that contained false subject headers designed to trick e-mail security systems. Spam was relayed via networks of captive computers, known as “botnets,” the indictment claims.

Furthermore, he promised a full refund to customers who purchased e-mail products if they weren’t satisfied. But customers who later complained or asked for refunds were threatened with additional financial charges and referral to a collection agency, the indictment asserts.

Spam volume actually increased in the wake of the CAN-SPAM law, peaking in July of 2004 at 94.5 percent of global e-mail traffic. The rate of spam infection of e-mail networks has fallen back since then to 76.1 percent of traffic in April 2007, according to a report by security vendor MessageLabs.

“Certainly, every spammer in the United States had better think twice about staying in the business,” Peterson said.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Google on Thursday provided software developers with technology to keep online applications like e-mail running on computers even if Internet connections are dropped, unavailable or unreliable.

The world’s most popular Internet search engine introduced the Google Gears Web browser extension at the opening of Google Developer Day 2007 in Sydney, Australia.

Google’s offering provides developers with a free tool to make Web-based applications more appealing and comes as a threat to the Microsoft empire, which is built on sales of software installed on people’s computers.

“With Google Gears we’re tackling a key limitation of the browser in order to make it a stronger platform for deploying all types of applications and enabling a better user experience in the cloud,” Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said in a statement.

“We believe strongly in the power of the community to stretch this new technology to the limits of what’s possible and ultimately emerge with an open standard that benefits everyone.”

The browser extension downloads enough data to a computer to enable people to continue using Web-based programs such as e-mail, calendars, or word processing even while on flights or otherwise cut off from the Internet.

“This announcement is a significant step forward for web applications,” said Brendan Eich, chief technical officer at Mozilla Corporation which makes the FireFox Internet browser.

Google Gears is open-source, meaning developers are free to adapt it as they wish, and the Mountain View, California-based company said it will work with other firms to develop standards for offline functionality.

“We’re very excited to be collaborating with Google to move the industry forward to a standard cross-platform, cross-browser local storage capability,” said Adobe vice president Kevin Lynch.

Google expects the new technology to increase the popularity of its host of Web-based applications but said its intent in releasing the open-source technology is to enhance all programs of that type.

A trend away from downloading software onto personal computers and toward using applications hosted and maintained online is considered a defining characteristic of “Web 2.0,” the latest iteration of Internet life.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc. said on Wednesday it had created Web software that runs both online, and offline, marking a sea change for the Internet industry by letting users work on planes, trains, spotty connections and even in the most remote locations.

The technology, called Google Gears, would allow users of computers, phones and other devices to manipulate Web services like e-mail, online calendars or news readers whether online, intermittently connected to the Web or completely offline.

By bridging the gulf between new Web services and the older world of desktop software, where any data changes are stored locally on users’ machines, Google is pushing the Web into whole new spheres of activity and posing a challenge to rival Microsoft Corp., leader in the desktop software era.

“The Web is great but it doesn’t work very well when you don’t have a Web connection,” Jeff Huber, Google’s vice president of engineering, said in an interview. “Gears addresses a functional gap on the Web.”

Google plans to make the Gears technology available for free as “open source” software, meaning other developers are free to use and enhance the software in their own products.

Gears promises to expand the usage of scores of Google products and services, as well as thousands of programs from independent software makers, by making them more accessible at previously inconvenient times and places.

The technology also allows developers to build Internet search and indexing of Web pages into their own software applications, Huber said.

Many such products will be able to make limited searches offline, since they will have downloaded data automatically when connected. Google’s full Web search functions would return once the user reconnects to the Internet.

Early partners who will use Gears in their products include design software leader Adobe Systems Inc., maker of Flash animation and Acrobat document-sharing software, as well as new Apollo tools that work online and offline, Adobe said.

Other organizations working with Google are Norway’s Opera Software ASA, maker of a Web browser popular with mobile phone users, and Mozilla, the group behind Firefox, the biggest alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, according to Google.

BEYOND DESKTOP

Analysts said Google’s move capitalizes on a growing trend over the past couple of years for Web applications to behave as responsively as desktop software.

Microsoft already offers technologies like Groove, which allows users to work offline, then synchronize changes when connected later. But the software giant has been reluctant to make existing products work both online and offline.

Technologies such as AJaX, shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, Adobe’s Flash or Microsoft’s new Silverlight technology have made this increasingly possible.

“Now the Web is becoming so good that there is less and less of a reason to build software that just runs on desktop computers,” said Gartner analyst David Smith of Bedford, New Hampshire. “In the past, developers had to make some pretty clear trade-offs between the Web and software for desktops.”

Google Gears promises to help further close the gap for software developers across the industry. “This is a very big step, but I would say it is an obvious step,” Huber said.

The first Google product to feature Gears will be Google Reader, which allows consumers automatically to track updates to hundreds of Web sites. Users could connect temporarily for updates, then go offline and read up on recent Web news.

“We expect this to be extended to other Google applications over time,” Huber said, without setting any timeframes.

Once retrofitted, for example, Google Apps, the company’s free, advertising-supported group of Web programs including word processing and spreadsheets that can be shared and edited by groups, could work with only periodic Web connections.

Huber said Gears’ biggest impact could be in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America, where poor or non-existent Internet connections hobble access to digital information.

Google made the announcement ahead of its Google Developer Day conference, which is taking place on Thursday in 10 cities around the world starting in Sydney and culminating at the San Jose Convention Center in Silicon Valley later in the day.

NEW YORK - The parent of MySpace is buying the media-sharing site Photobucket for about $300 million, bringing together two of the Internet’s most popular hangouts.

The deal announced Wednesday will give MySpace and sister sites under News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media access to Photobucket Inc.’s photo and video technologies, while Photobucket gets Fox’s resources to accelerate development of its tools.

Peter Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive, said Photobucket also would be able to incorporate advanced slideshow generators and other editing tools from Flektor Inc., which Fox also announced Wednesday it bought.

“Together, they represent a powerful combination and we are thrilled for them to join our network,” Levinsohn said.

Financial terms of the two deals were not disclosed. But three people familiar with the Photobucket deal, citing anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the price, said Fox was paying about $300 million for Photobucket, about half of the $580 million News Corp. paid in 2005 to buy MySpace.

The Photobucket deal comes just weeks after a public spat in which MySpace partially blocked content from Photobucket. It was announced the same day CBS Corp. said it purchased global online social network Last.fm for $280 million in cash in a move to attract younger viewers and listeners across its businesses.

MySpace offers a mix of messaging tools to encourage its youth-oriented visitors to expand their circles of friends. Central to the site are personal profile pages where users can post photos and video clips, blast messages to friends and have visitors leave comments.

MySpace users often embed material from outside sites like Photobucket and Google Inc.’s YouTube, both of which make that easy by providing the programming code to cut and paste into MySpace profile pages.

The practice has made Photobucket one of the leading sites on the Internet, even though relatively few access content directly through its home page.

Under the deal, Photobucket would remain a standalone operation within Fox, and users of rival social-networking sites such as Facebook could continue to incorporate Photobucket content in their profiles. For now, Photobucket will continue to offer basic services for free, with a fee for more storage and other features.

Most noticeable for users will be the acceleration of new editing tools, such as cropping and red-eye removal, Photobucket Chief Executive Alex Welch said. With the resources of a larger company, he said, Photobucket won’t be spending much of its time “in a firefighting mode.”

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the acquisition isn’t likely to boost MySpace’s audience given the significant overlap already between the two. MySpace alone had 56 million U.S. unique visitors in March, while Photobucket had 15 million. The combined audience would have been 58 million had the combination been in effect then.

But Levinsohn said users don’t hang out at two places at once, so the combination still would mean more time spent on Fox properties overall.

And it could give Fox a foothold on sites run by its rivals, especially as Photobucket makes more sponsorship deals of the type that led to a block by MySpace in April. Photobucket had encouraged users to build slideshows promoting Sony Corp (NYSE:SNE - news).’s “Spider-Man 3,” which MySpace considered a violation of policies banning unauthorized commercial activities.

The block was mysteriously lifted after about two weeks, but both sides had been silent on the details of their peacemaking. Executives from Fox and Photobucket said Wednesday that the acquisition talks were unrelated to that dispute.

Fox’s agreements to purchase Photobucket and Flektor represent the latest acquisitions of startups by larger Internet companies. In November, Google bought video-sharing site YouTube for $1.76 billion. The Flektor deal closed Tuesday, while the Photobucket acquisition was signed Tuesday and should close next month.

Flektor’s deal represents a coup for that site, which has been open to the public for only a month. Flektor, like Photobucket, will remain a standalone site, but Fox already has concrete plans to incorporate into MySpace its Web-based tools for creating slideshows, video mash-ups and other interactive presentations.

Jason Rubin, Flektor’s co-founder, said the deal lets the site grow its audience more quickly than it can alone. So far, he said, the site has fewer than 40,000 users, nearly all through word of mouth.

Shares in News Corp. rose 25 cents, or 1 percent, to $23.97 Wednesday.