Britain’s National Hi-Tech Crime Unit announced that it has caught up with a Russian gang involved in online extortion and money laundering. The British agency, also known as NHTCU, arrested three men in connection with a series of raids that targeted an online “protection” racket that threatened to crash Web sites unless the gang was paid off. More arrests are expected.

A bulk emailer in Florida has been charged with electronically breaking into a massive data warehouse and stealing gigabytes of personal information on Americans, federal prosecutors said Wednesday. Scott Levine, 45, of Boca Raton was indicted by a federal grand jury in Arkansas for allegedly breaking into Acxiom’s servers and downloading 8.2 gigabytes of data in what the US Justice Department called one of “the largest cases of intrusion of personal data to date.”

Toshiba is launching its first multimedia laptop that will feature a clearer-than-average display and quick-start video and TV functions to try to carve out a position in the promising field. With the Qosmio line, Toshiba seeks to benefit from expected growth in demand for multimedia computers that can play and digitally record TV programs, DVDs and other video and audio materials from the Internet.

Satellite-tracking features on some Motorola cell phones haven’t been working for the last few days, and some people believe the culprit is a Y2K-like software bug. Nextel Communications and Motorola said they are aware of what they describe as a “software issue” that affects the assisted global positioning satellite location services inside possibly hundreds of thousands of Motorola phones.

More than six months after acknowledging a Bluetooth security flaw in a number of its mobile phones, Nokia said it has released a software upgrade that fixes the vulnerabilities in some of its products.

Microsoft announced that it will donate $46,000 worth of software to an agency fighting phishing and will make a full-time analyst available to the group. The recipient of these contributions is the National Cyber-Forensics & Training Alliance, an organization set up jointly by the FBI, the National White Collar Crime Center, Carnegie Mellon University and West Virginia University.

Telenor Interactive announced they will be launching a text messaging dating service through a partnership with Voice Courier Mobile this fall. In addition to providing an innovative way for singles to mingle in a safe environment, the service also will allow participating wireless carriers to generate healthy ARPUs via its data and voice traffic.

Dell announced two Bluetooth-compatible accessories for its Axim X30 handheld computer: a GPS navigation unit and a QWERTY keyboard.

In an effort to beat back the growing problem of cellular phone spam in the US, Verizon Wireless has quietly filed a lawsuit against spammers it claims sent more than four million junk messages to cell phone users.

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has reached a settlement with Scott Richter, a prominent Internet marketer who was sued in December on accusations of sending deceptive junk e-mail. Richter and his company, OptInRealBig.com, agreed to pay a $40,000 fine and $10,000 toward the investigative cost.