A 12-year-old girl took her dad to court after he grounded her for disobeying his orders to stay off the Internet. And she won. The father banned his daughter from going on a school trip after she used a friend's computer to chat on websites he had blocked at home, and then posted pictures of herself online that her dad considered inappropriate.

It all began 30 years ago today. The mother lode of all spam - the bane of everyone's online existence - was first sent out via the U. S. Defense Department's Arpanet by a salesman named Gary Thuerk. The first junk mail or "Spam" as we know it today, was an invitation for a demo of the new system-20 mini computers being marketed by the Digital Equipment Corp.

"W00t," an exclamation of joy or excitement used by online gamers and hardcore Internet chat enthusiasts, is the word that best sums up 2007, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The word took the Word of the Year prize in Merriam-Webster's annual poll of favorite new terms such as "facebook," a verb that means to look up someone's profile on the popular online social networking site Facebook, and "blamestorm," to hold a meeting in order to find out who to blame.

It isn't often that a man asks for sympathy because he is addicted to pornographic Web sites. That might be a good because it's revealing such an addiction is more likely to generate disgust than sympathy. Except if the sex addict was feeding his habit at work while being paid by his employer to work. Then such an addiction is likely to generate unemployment, as was the case with an American working for IBM. When James Pacenza, 58, was caught using an online sex chat room at work, IBM fired him. But Pacenza, a Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, claims IBM should have kept him on and given him sympathy instead of giving him a pink slip.

A 77-year-old father and grandfather in Concord, New Hampshire is being inundated with calls from people who think he is Brad Pitt. Retired teacher Richard Perkins, father of three and grandfather of three, doesn't have a clue how his phone number was posted on the Web Site Students of the World as Brad Pitt's number. The Web site belongs to six French teenagers who share numbers of their favorite celebrities.