KidZMail.com aims to help parents slowly wean their children on to the Internet by helping screen out unwanted spam messages containing porn or other potentially troubling e-mail.

About 80 percent of children who use email say they receive inappropriate spam (unsolicited e-mail advertising) daily, according to a study by Symantec. KidZmail.com provides an automated way for parents to screen messages and set controls for younger children.

The controls can slowly be relaxed as the child grows up.

This online service is only for very young children taking their first clicks on the Internet, as any child with a modicum knowledge of the Internet could easily go off and, unknown to the parents, create their own ?secret? e-mail account at Yahoo! or Hotmail. KidZMail.com is perhaps a better way of screening out unwanted messages from your child?s mailbox rather than an automated spam filter on the home computer.

Your home spam filter only works at home. KidZMail can be accessed from any computer, whether at home, at school or at a friends.

E-mails can be designated as ?Highly Trusted? (the message is sent immediately to the child without a copy to the parent and without having to be approved), through to six other levels, where e-mail is sent to mom or dad?s mailbox for approval before being viewed by the child. New senders can be designated to a level the parent wants and the controls slowly lifted as the child grows older.

The service is pricy at $70 a year for up to five e-mail boxes, but there is a 14-day free trial to see if it is worth it for peace of mind.

Get ready for the paper-based Blu-ray disc, a new optical data storage technology. Sony and Toppan announced the development of a 25GB paper form of the disc last week.

The discs will be able to store that amount of data or about two hours of high-definition video.

The Blu-ray disc format uses blue laser light and is considered a successor to today?s red-laser DVD drives, which have five times less capacity than Blu-ray discs. Sony and Matsushita plan to ship Blu-ray video recorders by the end of the year. Other big manufacturers such as Hitachi, Sharp and Samsung have also jumped behind Blu-ray.

The technology allows companies to produce discs that cost less than standard DVDs per gigabyte and, more importantly for businesses, allow the easy destruction of sensitive data.

All you need is a pair of scissors to chop up the discs. Go to www.blu-ray.com for more information.

Microsoft has released a batch of about 30 patches to its software, so get working to make sure your machine or network is secure. There are patches to plug a security glitch in Outlook Express and service packs for Internet Explorer included in the releases, so home computer users also need to get working. The patches cover vulnerabilities in versions Windows, Outlook Express, and NT, XP and NT workstations software. If you want to download the patches or watch a video presentation giving more information go to www.microsoft.com/security.

The Web Cast will start at 1 p.m. EST today (Wednesday). While we are on the subject of computer security keep a watch out for Netsky.V, a variant of a series of Internet worms that are spread through an e-mail attachment.

Except this time Netsky.V supposedly can launch simply by being viewed in an e-mail program, such as Outlook Express. To launch the executing code Netsky.V uses two separate vulnerabilities in Microsoft software, so it will not affect you if you have all the latest patches.

If the barn door was left open detection and cleaning tools for Netsky.V are available from the Symantec, McAfee, and Sophos anti-virus sites. Netsky.V appears as a ?Mail delivery failed? message.

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