Doctors have reported the first case of someone using the internet while asleep, when a sleeping woman sent emails to people asking them over for drinks and caviar. The 44-year-old woman found out what she had done after a would be guest phoned her about it the next day. While asleep the woman turned on her computer, logged on by typing her username and password then composed and sent three emails. Each mail was in a random mix of upper and lower cases, unformatted and written in strange language. One read: "Come tomorrow and sort this hell hole out. Dinner and drinks, 4.pm,. Bring wine and caviar only." Another said simply, "What the......." If I had known that researchers were interested in unformatted, rambling email I would have let them read my inbox. They could start a whole new school of medicine.

CWmike writes "Microsoft today called its first month of predicting whether hackers will create exploit code for its bugs a success — even though the company got its forecast right just 40% of the time for October. 'I think we did really well,' said Mike Reavey, group manager at the Microsoft Security Research Center (MSRC), when asked for a postmortem evaluation of the first cycle of the team's Exploitability Index. 'Four of the [nine] issues that we said where consistent exploit code was likely did have exploit code appear over the first two weeks. And another key was that in no case did we rate something too low.' Microsoft's Exploitability Index was introduced last month."

GSGKT writes "Google's Anti-Malware Team has made available some of their research data on malware distribution mechanisms while the research paper[PDF] is under peer review. Among their conclusions are that the majority of malware distribution sites are hosted in China, and that 1.3% of Google searches return at least one link to a malicious site. The lead author, Niels Provos, wrote, 'It has been over a year and a half since we started to identify web pages that infect vulnerable hosts via drive-by downloads, i.e. web pages that attempt to exploit their visitors by installing and running malware automatically. During that time we have investigated billions of URLs and found more than three million unique URLs on over 180,000 web sites automatically installing malware. During the course of our research, we have investigated not only the prevalence of drive-by downloads but also how users are being exposed to malware and how it is being distributed.'"

castrox writes to tell us that The Pirate Bay's legal concerns are continuing to grow. Prince and the Village People are planning to sue the popular torrent site with the help of the Web Sheriff law firm. John Giacobbi of Web Sheriff has also asked Swedish band ABBA to join the cause. The suit is seeking "millions of dollars" in damages, although it's still uncertain to whom the charges will be directed. The likely targets are the four Pirate Bay founders who were indicted a few weeks ago on charges of breaking copyright law. Prince has taken investigative action against The Pirate Bay in the past.

Googling Yourself writes "Harpers magazine has published a blueprint of Google's new data center at The Dalles, Oregon where they will be tapping into some of the cheapest electricity in North America. Although the plans show three 68,680-square-foot storage buildings, only two of the buildings have been constructed so far. Based on a projected industry standard of 500 watts per square foot, the Dalles plant can be expected to use 103 megawatts of electricity. Google's server farm represents a new phase in the transformation of the Columbia River over the past half-century. Across the street from the Google data center is an example the last generation of high energy consumers; Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask.com are also planning data centers on the Columbia River."

A number of readers are writing in to tell us that Google is rolling out IMAP support for Gmail accounts. Several people say that some of their gmail accounts offer the IMAP option (in Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP) and others do not.