King County Superior Court Judge Palmer Robinson has ruled Washington State's 1998 anti-spam legislation unconstitutional under the interstate commerce clause of the U.S

Galleon Software has released eMerge 1.6.2, a small-numbered revision that nonetheless greatly improves the direct-email program's functionality (see "Legitimate Direct Email eMerges" in TidBITS 465)

Netscape Communications has released Netscape Communicator 4.72, the latest version of its integrated Internet client and HTML authoring application. Although you'd never guess from the release notes, version 4.72 contains no new features

On 22-Feb-00, the United States Patent and Trademark Office awarded Amazon.com a patent (applied for in Jun-97) covering the concept of affiliate programs for merchant Web sites

Alessandro Levi Montalcini has released version 1.3 of USB Overdrive, a universal driver for USB mice, joystick, and game pads. (See "Pointing the Way with USB Mice, Part 2" in TidBITS 507 and "Maximizing the Mouse" in TidBITS 483 for more information.) New features include an accelerated scrolling option for scroll wheels, an absolute cursor movement mode for joysticks and game pads, and support for Apple's standard USB drivers, which increases compatibility with Mac OS 9 and the new Game Sprockets

IBM has posted the free 1.0.2 update to its ViaVoice continuous speech recognition software, correcting some annoying minor bugs such as problems with extra spaces, backtracking over errors, and training words with special characters

Digital Technology International has released FaceSpan 3.5, the latest version of its interface builder for AppleScript and other OSA languages. In a nutshell, FaceSpan enables scripters to create stand-alone applications and scripts with modern Mac OS interfaces, including multiple windows, dialogs, styled text, scroll boxes, tabbed panels, Appearance-savvy objects, pictures, movies, and a myriad of other elements

Palm Computing today released the Palm IIIc, a new handheld device sporting a color screen, 8 MB of memory, and a built-in rechargeable lithium ion battery

Lemke Software has updated GraphicConverter to version 3.8, adding AppleScript support (to the PowerPC version only) and numerous tweaks to its multipurpose tool for working with image files

During his keynote at Macworld Expo Tokyo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs rolled out enhanced versions of Apple's laptop and professional desktop products. The latest PowerBook G3 (known as the "PowerBook (FireWire)") uses a case similar to the previous PowerBook G3 (Bronze Keyboard) and features speeds up to 500 MHz, up to ten hours of battery life with the dual-battery feature, room for an internal AirPort card, and two new FireWire ports supporting digital video, all for prices between $2,500 and $4,000

Farallon Communications today announced a version of the company's SkyLINE 802.11 wireless networking card that runs at 11 Mbps instead of the previous speed of 2 Mbps

After yesterday's abortive release of Eudora 4.3, Qualcomm has quickly uploaded version 4.3.1, which fixes a bug caused by a single line of code being inadvertently removed in the final compile

After the January 1999 release of Connectix's Virtual Game Station, a emulator that enables a G3-based Macintosh to play many games designed for Sony's PlayStation (see "Meet Me at the Virtual Game Station" in TidBITS 471 for a full review) Sony promptly sued to force Connectix to stop selling the product

BoxTop Software has released ProJPEG 4.0, a Photoshop plug-in for saving optimized JPEG images. Like BoxTop's PhotoGIF (see "Crunch GIFs Quickly with PhotoGIF" in TidBITS 479), ProJPEG's image compression outperforms Photoshop's built-in filters, creating smaller files for the Web

Apple has released AirPort 1.1, a software update that improves user control over AirPort Base Stations and adds a few eagerly-awaited features to the wireless networking technology

The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project has updated its SETI@home client to version 2.0, adding security features, improving proxy support, and fixing bugs to the software that utilizes distributed computer processing power to analyze data from the Arecibo radio telescope

Perhaps the most essential utility that fell prey to compatibility problems when Mac OS 9 came out was Connectix's RAM Doubler 8, which replaces Apple's built-in virtual memory scheme with alternative methods of increasing the amount of memory available to applications

Apple Computer posted a $183 million profit for its first fiscal quarter of 2000. Apple's unit shipments were up 46 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago: Apple sold nearly 1.4 million systems during the quarter (including 700,000 iMacs and 235,000 iBooks) and 51 percent of those sales were to international customers

At each Macworld Expo, we endeavor to locate a singular example of what the show represents: a product or clever metaphor that perfectly encompasses the deeper currents of what it means to float in a sea of 70,000+ Mac enthusiasts

Casady & Greene has shipped SoundJam 1.6, a free update to the company's popular MP3 player and encoder. SoundJam 1.6 can now encode into MP2 format (MPEG Audio Layer 2), supports transparent skins, adds hierarchical playlists, provides fast forward and fast reverse buttons for currently playing music, supports live window dragging, and includes a skin builder utility plus a SoundJam Extension that changes CD track names in the Finder to those found in the CDDB