Free Republic

Top Environmental Protection Agency officials used computer instant messages to try to circumvent open-records laws, according to a new lawsuit filed late last week by a researcher who has been demanding the agency comply with the law. Christopher C. Horner, the researcher who earlier uncovered that EPA officials were using private email addresses to conduct official business, said that in going over some of those earlier records he discovered the agency was using instant messages, too. He now is suing to get a look at those records, which he said EPA has refused to release. “It seems we have uncovered...

NEW YORK -- Instant-messaging conversations, though quick, are not always fleeting. Former Republican Rep. Mark Foley's salacious chats with teenage interns, know as pages, emerged along with e-mails last week as the congressman abruptly resigned. ABC News, which broke the story, has said former pages were the source of the revelations about instant messages from 2003. Most likely, the pages who corresponded with Foley either manually saved messages or used IM software with built-in logging capabilities, allowing time-stamped chat sessions to be kept indefinitely on one's computer. The programs vary in whether the features are initially on or off and...

New worms spreading through MSN Messenger -- and its bundled-with-Windows Windows Messenger version -- via links to a malicious site are infecting users and leaving their PCs open to hacker hijack, security vendors reported Monday. The new worms, tagged as Kelvir.a and Kelvir.b, appeared over the weekend and on Monday, respectively, anti-virus vendors said. Both use the same mechanism to attract users and infect Windows-based PCs: they include a link in the instant message. That link, in turn, downloads a malicious file -- the actual worm, a variant of the long-running Spybot -- which opens a backdoor to the compromised...

NEW YORK, Feb 5 (Reuters) - America Online on Thursday said it will let users of its instant messenger service communicate over a live video connection for the first time, months after federal regulators lifted limitations on the company. AOL, the world's largest online service and owned by Time Warner Inc. , also said it will link its live video chat service to Apple Computer Inc.'s iChat service. The deal expands a May 2002 relationship between the two companies that linked their respective messaging services. More than 35 million active users per month send on average 1.5 billion messages...

HOUSTON – THE conversation begins on the computer, nothing too atypical for a pair of teenage boys bored on a Friday night: Garret: hey Josh: sup Garret: j/cu Josh: same Garret: wut r u doing 2nite Josh: n2m Garret: cool Need a translation? Not if you're a 13-year-old who's been Internet-connected since birth. For the rest of us, welcome to the world of Net Lingo - the keyboard generation's gift to language and culture. "sup" is not a call to supper, but a query: "What's up?" And Josh's "n2m" reply? "Not too much." As in every age, teenagers today are...

The next version of America Online Inc.'s (AOL) Instant Messenger (AIM) will allow users to communicate with ICQ users in a move that will bridge the gap between the company's two popular chat services. AOL is currently beta testing the interoperability in its AOL 5.1 beta, company spokeswoman Anne Bentley said Tuesday. Currently, the beta client allows AIM users to add ICQ users to their "Buddy Lists," view when they are online and send them instant messages. But although ICQ users can receive messages from AIM users, they cannot yet add them to their Buddy Lists, Bentley said. The...