IBM, whose secure messaging system is used within many of the biggest companies, on Monday said its customers would soon be able to chat with instant messaging users from America Online, Yahoo and Google.

International Business Machines Corp. said it plans by midyear to allow its Lotus Sametime corporate instant messaging system to work with the three consumer platforms, marking the latest move to break down barriers that have separated instant messaging audiences from one another.

Missing from the deal is Microsoft Corp., the most direct rival of IBM in the corporate instant messaging world, where customers often demand greater security and the ability of managers to audit what users say.

Lotus Sametime counts 20 million users inside companies worldwide, including more than 25 companies with over 100,000 users apiece. IBM said 60 percent of the world’s 100 largest companies use Sametime.

America Online’s AIM, the most popular instant messaging system, has more than twice as many users, or more than 40 million in the United States alone, a comScore Media Metrix survey showed.

Yahoo had roughly 20 million users, and Microsoft had around 15 million users, according to mid-year 2005 data. Google had far fewer users, having only introduced IM midway through 2005.

By allowing corporate messaging systems to work with consumer versions of IM, office workers will be able to communicate instantly with friends or family outside of work.

The ability to interconnect the separate instant messaging systems of IBM, AOL, Yahoo and Google is based on an industry standard technology known as Session Initiation Protocol, or SIP.

The computer company also said it planned to incorporate “click-to-call” Web-based calling and videoconferencing features into Sametime through deals with Avaya, Nortel, Polycom, Premiere Global Services, Siemens AG and Tandberg ASA.

IBM made the announcements at Lotusphere, the annual conference it holds in Orlando, Florida, to discuss innovations in its corporate mail, messaging and collaboration software.

IBM said its Lotus business, which has been losing market share to Microsoft Outlook/Exchange in the broader field of corporate e-mail systems, nonetheless enjoyed 10 percent growth in 2005 — its first year of double-digit growth in a decade.

Lotus Notes counts 120 million users of the e-mail and document management system, according to industry data.

Sex.com, long coveted as potentially one of the most lucrative sites on the Web because of its catchy name, has been sold for about $12 million in cash and stock, a source familiar with the deal said on Monday.

A group of anonymous buyers, Boston-based Escom LLC, said in a statement it had acquired the Web address Sex.com from Gary Kremen, chief executive of Grant Media LLC and the founder of Match.com. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Sex.com is seen as one of the most recognizable and therefore financially most promising Web domain names but does not currently have much content.

The new owners said in the statement that they plan to transform Sex.com into “the market-leading adult entertainment destination,” which they said would include “adult dating opportunities,” sex and relationship advice, erotica, video-on-demand and live chat.

XBiz.com, an adult entertainment trade site, first reported the sale of Sex.com last week and said Escom had agreed to pay $14 million.

But the source said the value of the deal was closer to $12 million and involved cash and stock, as well as requirements that the business meet certain performance targets.

The sale ranks as one of the most expensive Web domain name transfers ever and outpaces the $7.5 million paid for business.com in 1999 at the peak of the dotcom boom.

Kremen — the founder of Match.com, the matchmaking site now owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp — regained control of Sex.com after a legal battle dating back to 1997 and subsequent struggles over management and ownership interests.

The site makes money selling banner ads pointing to online pornography sites. Apparently because of its current role as an intermediary site, Sex.com does not even rank among the top 1,000 adult entertainment sites among U.S. Internet users, according to data by Web measurement firm Hitwise.

Kremen plans to continue as an adviser to the site.

A large number of people carry more than one cellphones (or two sim cards), some to keep their personal and professional life separate and some because they travel to a single destination quite often for long periods. However, not many know that it is actually possible to run two SIM cards in your cellphone.

If you are forced to carry more than one cellphone, for whatever reason, and are looking for a better option, then this article is for you.

The first option is to get SIM card holders which accept two or more SIM cards, but still fit into your handset. This will enable you to switch between the two SIM cards without having to remove one and replace it with the other. However, this means that the phone requires to be switched off and on again each time.

The second option is to buy a small device called a dual SIM card adaptor, which when inserted into the phone allows the handset to carry two SIM cards and therefore two phone numbers at the same time.But these devices work only on GSM phones.

If you have a Nokia phone, all you have to do is simply press #3370# to switch between SIM cards, but if you have any other phone then you would need to switch the phone off and on again to change the SIM card. However, both the SIM cards have to be from the same operator.

There is another option, USB SIM card holder, which can extract the contents of up to 16 cards and download them to a blank, consolidated SIM. The new SIM card has the characteristics of all the other SIMs that have been consolidated to it.

A 20-year-old accused of using hundreds of thousands of hijacked computers, or “bot nets,” to damage systems and send massive waves of spam across the Internet, pleaded guilty to federal charges on Monday.

Jeanson James Ancheta, who prosecutors said was a well-known member of the “Botmaster Underground” — a secret network of hackers skilled in “bot” attacks — was arrested in November in what prosecutors said was the first such case of its kind.

The Los Angeles area man pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy, damaging computers used by the U.S. government and fraud. He had been scheduled to stand trial later this year on a 17-count indictment.

Ancheta faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison, although prosecutors say federal guidelines recommend between five and seven years.

“Mr. Ancheta was responsible for a particularly insidious string of crimes,” U.S. Attorney’s spokesman Thom Mrozek said. “He hijacked somewhere in the area of half a million computer systems. This not only affected computers like the one in your home, but it allowed him and others to orchestrate large scale attacks.”

A bot is a program that surreptitiously installs itself on a computer so it be controls by a hacker. A bot net is a network of such robot, or “zombie,” computers, which can harness their collective power to do considerable damage or send out huge amounts of junk e-mail.

Prosecutors say the case was unique because Ancheta was accused of profiting from his attacks by selling access to his “bot nets” to other hackers and planting adware, software that causes advertisements to pop up, into infected computers.

Among computers he attacked were some at the Weapons Division of the U.S. Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California, and at the U.S. Department of Defense.

In entering the guilty pleas, Ancheta admitted using computer servers he controlled to transmit malicious code over the Web to scan for and exploit vulnerable computers, which he then controlled as “zombie” machines.

As part of the plea, he agreed to pay some $15,000 in restitution to the military facilities and forfeit the proceeds of his illicit activities, including more than $60,000 in cash, a BMW automobile and computer equipment.

Top executives of Google Inc. have once again agreed to be paid annual salaries of $1 each in 2006, counting instead on stock options and grants of the company’s volatile stock for their pay.

In a regulatory filing on Monday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Web search leader said it had approved a base salary of $1 for Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt and its two co-founders and co-presidents, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

The three were paid $1 a piece in salary during 2005.

The action — which was approved by Google last Tuesday but only disclosed this week — occurred ahead of the 14 percent decline in the company’s stock price last week amid investor concerns over the Internet sector’s growth outlook and revelation of a legal spat with the U.S. Justice Department.

But before anyone offers to spring for bus fare for Google executives, note that the 7 percent rebound in the price of the company’s stock on Monday alone means that Schmidt’s shares had recovered $413.8 million in value during the one-day trading session, according to CNET’s CEO Wealthmeter site. As a result, his total wealth in shares is roughly $6.3 billion.

Shares of Google gained $28.04 to close at $427.50, almost fully recovering from a sharp sell-off on Friday. Bullish Wall Street analysts argued that Google continues to gain market share that may insulate it from any slowing of the overall market.

The practice of paying the top Google executives $1 per year in base salary started in the second quarter of 2004, during the run-up to the company’s initial public offering in August 2004, according to the company’s regulatory filings.

Previously, Schmidt had earned $250,000 and Brin and Page had been paid about $150,000 in salary, even as they accumulated stock options that have made them billionaires, at least in the potential value of their shares and options.

Four additional executives received a 43 percent increase in their base salary, to $250,000 from $175,000 in 2005, according to the company’s latest regulatory filing.

They include Chief Financial Officer George Reyes; legal counsel David Drummond; Omid Kordestani, sales chief and developer of Google’s original advertising business; and Shona Brown, senior vice president of business operations.

Internet attacks are increasingly being motivated by financial gain, with organized crime supplanting thrill-seekers as the main computer security threat, IBM said on Sunday.

Cyber-crime is likely to become more targeted and sophisticated this year than in the past, when the biggest threats were widespread viruses aimed at disrupting entire networks, IBM said in a report summarizing security trends in 2005.

“There’s an underground economy out there that’s trading fraudulent credit card information and extorting money from Web sites,” said David Mackey, director of security intelligence at International Business Machines Corp., the world’s biggest computer company.

Businesses have made their networks more secure, using software from companies such as IBM, Symantec Corp. and McAfee Inc. to thwart viruses and worms that wreaked havoc on computers in 2003 and 2004. In 2005, only one attack, the so-called “Zotob” worm aimed at media organizations, was big enough to generate widespread attention, IBM said.

“Gone are the days of curiosity-seekers looking for their 15 minutes of fame,” Mackey said.

In 2003, the Blaster worm targeted Microsoft Corp. software and devastated hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide.

In addition to more-sophisticated software and hardware, high-profile arrests in a number of virus cases appear to have thwarted would-be attackers, Mackey said.

Symantec, the world’s biggest security software maker, found a similar pattern in a September report. It said viruses exposing confidential information made up three-quarters of the top 50 viruses, worms and so-called Trojans in the first half of last year, up from 54 percent in the year-earlier period.

Cyber-vandals increasingly use “phishing” — fraudulent Web pages that look like legitimate sites — to gather personal and financial information, IBM said. Also in vogue are spam attacks that seek confidential data, Mackey said.

Financial fraud cost consumers and businesses nearly $15 billion in 2005, with some 10 million people falling prey to identity theft, according to market researcher Gartner.

Global music sales fell about 2 percent last year as surging digital music revenues failed to offset continued declines in physical media like CDs, the head of the industry’s trade body said.

Sales for 2006 are expected roughly flat, said John Kennedy, chief executive of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, as the music business sees increasing benefits from selling songs online after its long-running battle with illicit online file-sharing.

“We have tipped the scale on Internet piracy. Newcomers are going to legal online stores,” he said at the music industry’s annual Midem conference this weekend.

Roughly three-quarters of countries and regions have submitted their music sales figures for 2005, with final numbers due in March. Global music revenues in 2004 were $33.6 billion.

Digital music revenues increased threefold in 2005, to about $1.1 billion.

IFPI research shows that more consumers in Britain and Germany are now opting for legal online music services than for file-sharing networks such as Kazaa. The situation is reversed in Spain, France and Sweden, where file-sharing is twice as common as legal online services.

“Converting illegal file-sharers to legal consumers will take time,” Kennedy said in a briefing at the music industry’s annual conference in Cannes.

The music industry has relied on a carrot-and-stick approach, launching a range of legal music stores at the same time it is filing lawsuits against illicit file-sharers.

Riding high on legal victories against Kazaa and Grokster, the industry is now in talks with many of the peer-to-peer file-sharing networks to put in software filters that will screen out copyrighted materials.

“The legal landscape has tilted dramatically,” said Eric Nicoli, chairman of the world’s third-largest music company, EMI Group. “We have to work with everyone to discourage this.”

The music industry has also been pushing for Internet service providers (ISPs) to join their campaign, but with little success so far.

Kennedy said he has seen “a zero response from ISPs” since giving a speech to their trade body nearly a year ago, and that more drastic action may be needed.

“Litigation is the last resort,” he said. The music industry has already filed lawsuits against tens of thousands of file-sharers in the last several years.

Magazine publisher Time Inc. on Monday said it has purchased the Golf.com Web site for an undisclosed price.

The site will be run by the company’s Time4Media division, under Chris Wightman, the publisher of Time Inc.’s Golf Magazine.

Time Inc. said it purchased Golf.com owner SirenServ from a holding company owned by several owners that include General Electric’s NBC Universal, the New York Times Co. and private investors.

Time Inc. is a division of global media conglomerate Time Warner Inc.

Top executives of Google Inc. have once again agreed to be paid annual salaries of $1 each in 2006, counting instead on stock options and grants of the company’s volatile stock for their pay.

In a regulatory filing on Monday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the Web search leader said it had approved a base salary of $1 for Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt and its two co-founders and co-presidents, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

The three were paid $1 a piece in salary during 2005.

The action — which was approved by Google last Tuesday but only disclosed this week — occurred ahead of the 14 per cent decline in the company’s stock price last week amid investor concerns over the Internet sector’s growth outlook and revelation of a legal spat with the US Justice Department.

IBM is open sourcing its Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) in a bid to foster wider participation and create a new open standard.

UIMA is an IBM developed framework that has been in development and use since at least 2004. It is currently part of a number of IBM products including WebSphere OmniFind Edition.

Marc Andrews, IBM director of strategy and business development for content discovery, said UIMA is a framework that defines an implementation for plugging content sources together and providing a common structure for sharing information, sending in text and passing out the results. However, it doesn’t include the facilities to feed the content into it or what you do with the analysis results afterwards.

“If you look at companies today if they want to be able to leverage text analytics they have to manually tie together the analytics technology with their business applications,” Andrews told internetnews.com. “The goal of UMIA is to make it so you can plug and play those things.”

One goal behind the move is to drive standardization around the UIMA framework. The process of moving toward broader involvement and standardization has been underway for at least a year. The federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is among the users of UIMA and in January 2005 sponsored a working group that consisted of a number of academic, medical and industrial institutions.

“They basically helped to evolve the architecture and take it to the next level,” Andrews said.

In order to truly make UIMA a standard, the working group concluded that the framework can’t just be an IBM project.

“Our goals around this is to really foster the standardization so that both us and other vendors and organizations can plug and play text analytics technologies to really deliver more advanced business applications and intelligence solutions,” Andrews added. “To do that we felt that we really should make this available to the open source community.”

The first part of open sourcing UIMA is that it now available for download on the popular SourceForge.net open source software repository. According to Andrews, SourceForge.net is the first open source home for UIMA; it may not be the only one.

“We’re not set on which model we will use, Andrews said. “There are a lot of open source development models out there like Apache, Eclipse or Sourceforge that can be fostered to develop a community and we haven’t yet determined which is the best environment for this framework.”

Though the code is available via SourceForge.net, the project is not yet a fully open collaborative project. For now, the only thing users can expect to be able to do is to download the code. According to Andrews, users will have to wait “a few months” until the project will start accepting contributions.