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A New York spam aficionado just got 30 months in jail for spamming AOL subscribers. He must also pay the company $180,000. Too bad nobody ever got locked up for mailing all those AOL CD-ROMs.

The spammer, 27-year-old Adam Vitale, circumvented AOL's spam filter and spammed AOL's 1.2 million subscribers on behalf of a government informant. Vitale, who has also been accused of running a Craigslist prostitution ring, had made a deal with the informant to send out junk emails advertising software in exchange for 50 percent of the software's profits.

I just signed in to my ancient AOL account to do some research and found 94 emails, aka my inbox, I would classify as spam, all received in the last month (see image). So I'm thinking it can't be that hard to crack the filter. Either way, as Vitale received his spamming sentence, the federal judge told him that "spamming is serious criminal conduct." Do you agree? Was a two-and-a-half-year sentence fair?

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• There was no link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. This fact was confirmed by a Pentagon-sponsored study released yesterday. After a review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that have come into American hands since the March 2003 invasion, the Institute for Defense Analyses found “no smoking gun.” The study's conclusion is significant as the finding comes from a federally funded research institution, and senior administration officials have used the belief of the existence of ties between Hussein and the terrorist network run by Osama bin Laden as a rationale for the invasion.



• AOL said today it was set to buy Bebo, the third most popular social networking website in the United States, valued at $850 million. AOL is set to integrate the networking site with its AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), jumpstarting AOL’s social networking strategy.
• The presidents of Sudan and Chad signed a peace agreement intended to end border rebel attacks in a region that includes Darfur. The agreement will hopefully quell the use of Darfur by Chadian rebels as a base for launching incursions into Chad. Sudan has repeatedly accused Chad’s government of backing Darfur rebel groups. The signing was witnessed by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, following talks in Senegal.

Once you sign up for AOL — you've got hell. Signing up for the service is the equivalent of throwing yourself into a dysfunctional relationship with an unrelenting stalker. When it's time to say goodbye, AOL just won't let go. Listen in on the dude's phone call below. He phoned to cancel his account and ended up getting the runaround for over 18 minutes. Where's a text message break-up when you need one?

What would happen if the worlds of our favorite viral-video stars were to collide and collapse into one? Entertaining chaos, that's what. I personally believe that all Americans should continue quoting Miss Teen South Carolina and the taser bro, only after throwing white sheets over their heads and crying alone in a corner for a few hours. Y'all with me?