When the U.S. Justice Department stepped up its investigation of cybercrime, it found spam originating from an unexpected source: hundreds of powerful computers at the Department of Defense and the U.S. Senate. The machines were "zombies" that had been compromised by hackers and integrated into bot networks that can be remotely controlled to send spam or launch distributed denial of service attacks.

The Senate's computers have previously been criticized for lax security that allowed Republican political operatives to obtain confidential Democratic memos, which were then leaked to the press.

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The gigabyte is becoming the new storage benchmark for shared hosting accounts, as providers seek to compete on features like server space and bandwidth, rather than price. Go Daddy today expanded its shared hosting plans, offering 1 gigabyte of web server space on accounts priced at $9.95 a month. The move comes a week after Yahoo upgraded its shared hosting plans to include 2 gigabytes of storage in its $11.95 "starter" package.

Pair Networks, another large shared hosting provider, increased its storage allowances earlier this month to offer 1 gigabyte plans for the first time, limiting them to its premium webmaster-level accounts. That followed a similar move by Hostway, which doubled the server space on all its plans, pushing its platinum plan to 1.2 gigabytes of storage. 1&1 Internet currently offers 1 gigabyte on its $9.99 a month plan in the U.S. market, and 1.5 gigs on the equivalent plan in the UK.

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When the Indian ship State of Nagaland dropped anchor in the Sri Lankan port of Colombo Sunday, its crew probably expected it to be a routine event. Instead, the ship is being detained in Colombo under court order, with Sri Lanka Telecom asserting that its anchor severed the island nation's connection to the Internet.

"We have lost connectivity to global Internet due to failure in the international submarine cable system," SLT said in a statement, adding that a satellite uplink was being used to restore connectivity, but was only able to provide "limited capacity." The telecom provider said 800,000 customers were without Internet access, and attributed the cable failure to the State of Nagaland's anchor. The damage could take several more days to repair, the company said.

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After days of intermittent performance problems, the BlogAds web site is experiencing an extended outage. BlogAds operates an advertising network for weblogs, and has seen a marked increase in traffic in recent months amid surging advertiser interest in blogs.

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Today's initial public offering by Google has been touted as a bellwether of investor confidence in Internet companies. It arrives as web hosting appears to be back in favor on Wall Street, with Business Week recently anointing the U.S. hosting industry "one of the hottest sectors in tech today."

Speculation about hosting IPOs is natural, since many of the industry's strongest recent performers are privately held, including Go Daddy, Rackspace, EV1Servers and The Planet. But the history of public companies and hosting is a tortured one, featuring more bankruptcies and dashed hopes than breakout successes. Despite Google's 20 percent jump in today's first day of trading, prospective hosting IPO prospects are treading carefully, weighing the pros and cons of public ownership amid market conditions that have caused several tech companies to postpone offerings.

Go Daddy President Bob Parsons discounts reports that the company is preparing for a public stock offering. "Sure, we think about it," said Parsons. "Do we expect to go public in the near future? No, we don't. But we're always looking at all our options."

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