If Electrolux has its way, the home refrigerator will soon become the hub of activity for the family. Come to think of it, for my family the fridge is already a hub of activity since my mother is a great cook and has as many as five types of "leftover" dishes on rotation at any one time.

But Electrolux, with its prototype Screenfridge, aims to go one step further. The Screenfridge marks an initial first attempt to put an Internet connection into every section of the home. Screenfridge is a combination of refrigerator and computer. And by the way, it comes equipped with a TV and radio receiver.

Now why would I want to watch TV, listen to the radio, send e-mail or surf the Internet on my fridge? Electrolux comes up with a load of reasons.

"Just imagine getting rid of that bulky TV-set in the kitchen and watching the morning news directly on the fridge instead," Electrolux states at its website (www.electrolux.com/screenfridge). "You can also connect surveillance cameras to your fridge to monitor your backyard or maybe your newborn."

Electrolux says the fridge is also a means of internal communication among family members using e-mail or video mail.

"A touch of a button is all it takes to record a video message and post it to another family member. Instead of using a traditional keyboard, we have installed a virtual keyboard using the touch-screen on the fridge."

Along with these features the fridge's computer will also give advice on how to store, handle and prepare food, and provides a digital cook book. It all sounds so space age but ultimately useless.

The price will depend on whether Electrolux decides to lower the price to consumers in return for displaying banners on their fridge doors. Electrolux has not set a date for production of this multitask fridge.

New worm: A new mass-mailed worm discovered last week picked up steam this week, causing some security firms to raise their alert warnings. The worm has been various labelled as "Worm/MiMail.A" and "W32.MiMail.Amm". The worm comes through an attached Zip file and is only activated when the recipient opens the compressed file.

Once opened the worm harvests e-mail address on the infected computer and tries to exploit vulnerabilities within Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Microsoft released patches for the vulnerability in April this year. Download the patch at www.microsoft.com.

If your computer is already infected then go to http://securityresponse.symantec.com.

Sign of the times: The average amount of spam arriving in corporate mailboxes surpassed the 50 percent mark for the first time in July, according to MessageLabs. The anti-spam vendor also said that virus and spam techniques are becoming increasingly integrated, as one in 166 e-mail messages sent to corporate mailboxes in July contained a virus.

MessageLabs said its anti-spam software stopped 79.7 million spam messages sent to its corporate clients in July, or one in every two messages. The number of spam messages in July surpassed by 10 million the total number of spam messages stopped in all of 2002 (one in every 10.9 emails).

"In addition, MessageLabs has identified a new trend in the ongoing convergence between viruses and spam whereby spam messages are being found to contain a backdoor-trojan attachment," it said. "These spam messages are being sent in large volumes and the attached trojans are being altered and redeployed, almost on a daily basis, to outsmart traditional, signature-based, anti-virus software."

In the past, backdoor-trojans were typically sent by virus makers and distributed through some of the sophisticated mass-mailing techniques contained within viruses themselves. The backdoor-trojans, once they have entered a company's network can be used to create an "open-proxy" through which the compromised computer can be used to send millions of new spam messages.

In July MessageLabs' porn protection software scanned about 123.7 million messages and found about 200,000 contained attachments with pornographic images. This equated to a ratio of one in 589 e-mails. This is a lot less than I get. I estimate that one in ten of the spam messages I receive through Hotmail and through my corporate account is porn.

A copy of the report can be found at http://www.messagelabs.com/intelligence.

Tech Tattle deals with issues in technology. Contact Ahmed at editor@offshoreon.com.