Microsoft has released a nice upgrade to its Internet Explorer, incorporating many of the useful features in competing browsers such as Opera.

This includes a new tabbed interface, which allows surfers to keep open multiple web pages within the same window. Previously a user like myself ended up with a very jammed up desktop, cluttered with up to 15 open sites! The release of an upgraded Microsoft browser, version 7, is the first in about five years.

Internet Explorer is currently used by about 86 percent of surfers. Microsoft has also beefed up the browser?s security features. It is available as a free download at the Microsoft site.

Microsoft has made the browser a part of its new operating system, Windows Vista. The company plans to release Vista for business users in November. The rest of us will get the home version in January.

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Google has unveiled a new free service allowing you to put a customised search engine on your business or personal website. The online tool allows site builders to integrate the Google search box and results into a specific website. It also allows you to specify the websites to search, include your own specific one.

For example RealClimate, one of the test sites for the search facility, has used it to focus only on sites it has vetted. It is a kind of quality control for RealClimate.

As an aside, Google also offers you a chance to make money from the relevant ads in your search results, which should provide a impetus to hot shot net addicts.

The service is available at http://www.google.com/coop/cse.

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For the last two weeks the network filter at my workplace has not been operational so I have been subject to about 50 or 60 spam e-mails a day. Scanning down the list of subjects on a recent batch, I?ve realised what a depressing way it must be for those who have to start their morning off with a daily dose.

Offers for ?love pills? and ?med for your girl to be happy? assume that the receiver is a failure in that area of life. Even more depressing for many must be the offers to help ?Stop the painful craving for more food? or to ?Stop being obese and unhappy?.

I pray for our filter to begin working again so I can lead a happier and more fulfilled life. I only wish the e-mail claiming ?We cure any disease! (sic)? also applied to spam. The percentage of spam rose to 85.11 per cent of all e-mail in June according to SoftScan, which sells filtering software.

This horrendous statistic actually represents a plateau. The figure for 2005 was 85 percent. Meanwhile the percentage of e-mail classified as viruses remained low at 0.36 per cent.

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As a follow up to the Sony battery saga I outlined a couple of weeks back, I note that the company has issued a recall of some of its Vaio notebooks that are affected by the problem. The recall currently only applies mostly to laptops sold in China and Japan, but could be extended as the company continues to assess the situation.

The company said it will offer replacements for about 90,000 battery packs with model names VGP-BPS2B and VGP-BPS3A. The problem stems from the installed lithium ion batteries, which have a tendency to catch fire or just not recharge. Dell, Apple, Lenovo and several other manufacturers using the Sony batteries have also had to issue similar recalls.

This works out to an unfortunate eight million laptops being affected. Hope you do not have one of them. To find out go to http://esupport.sony.com and click on the link to the ?Battery Replacement Program?.

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Online child porn is the most disgusting underbelly of the Internet. To give you an idea of its prevalence, one only has to turn to the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which is celebrating, if that?s the right word, its tenth anniversary in existence.

The watchdog organisation says yesterday that since its inception in 1996, it has processed an average of 1,000 reports a month with more than 31,000 websites found worldwide to contain potentially illegal child abuse content. At least 23 other countries now have a similar organisation.

The UK approach has led to the number of reported child abuse websites hosted in the UK rapidly decreasing to 0.2 percent today from 18 percent in its first year, the IWF claims.

Of all reports processed over the period, 92 percent relate to web-based content and 7 percent to newsgroups.

Of all reported content confirmed to contain child abuse content over the past decade 51 percent appeared to be hosted in the US , 20 percent in Russia, seven percent in Spain and five per cent in Japan.

?There has been a significant increase over the last 12 months in the severity of the abuse depicted on commercial child abuse websites,? the IWF noted.

If you do spot any suspected abuse visit www.iwf.org.uk to make a report.

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