Telephone Calls

EBay Inc.'s Skype Internet phone and chat service was unavailable to millions of users for a second day Friday because of a software glitch, which the company's website said should be fixed within 24 hours. "The problems have certainly not gone away," Skype spokesman Villu Arak said. About 2.6 million Skype users were online as of 9 a.m. London time, compared with "better days," when about 8 million to 9 million people would be using the service, Arak said.

Internet phone services let people make calls for little or no money. Some customers are getting what they pay for. A software problem left many users of Skype, the popular program that routes calls over the Internet, unable to connect Thursday. Skype told customers early in the day that it hoped to fix the glitch within 24 hours. The EBay Inc.

WASHINGTON -- The nation's No. 1 baseball fan, President Bush, waited until Wednesday afternoon to call Barry Bonds to congratulate him on surpassing the sport's career home run record Tuesday night. The delay prompted speculation that Bush, a former owner of the Texas Rangers and a known baseball "purist," was sending a signal of disapproval of the San Francisco slugger, who is widely reputed to have used steroids over the years as he racked up one homer after another.

A special court that has routinely approved eavesdropping operations has put new restrictions on the ability of U.S. spy agencies to intercept e-mails and telephone calls of suspected terrorists overseas, U.S. officials said Wednesday. The previously undisclosed ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has prompted concern among senior intelligence officials and lawmakers that the efforts of U.S.

Low- and middle-income people are paying millions of dollars in fees to file their tax returns because of an Internal Revenue Service decision to end a free telephone filing service, an inspector general said Tuesday. "Once again the IRS has made a taxpayer service decision based on questionable data," said J. Russell George, Treasury inspector general for tax administration.

The multimillion-dollar windfall that New York used to receive from collect calls made from state prisons is history. The state Senate and Assembly have agreed on the Family Connections Bill, a measure that eliminates the 58% kickback that the state received from the cost of each collect call made by prisoners. It was a "tax" that netted the state more than $20 million a year until Gov. Eliot Spitzer ended the practice in January.

IT ISN'T JUST JUDGES who define the protections of the 4th Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. So do ordinary citizens, with the way they live their lives. A federal appeals court has reaffirmed that principle by ruling that e-mail messages stored by an Internet service provider deserve the same privacy protections as the contents of telephone calls.

Alec Baldwin's attorney said Friday she was determined to find out how his now-infamous cellphone message to his young daughter was leaked to the media. "The whole story has not gotten out accurately," lawyer Vicki Greene said during a break in a closed-door court hearing Friday in the custody battle between Baldwin and his former wife, Oscar winner Kim Basinger, over their 11-year-old daughter, Ireland. Greene said she thought someone in Basinger's "camp" leaked the tape to TMZ.

An emotional Alec Baldwin has offered a public apology to his daughter for his recent outburst and says he wants off his TV show, "30 Rock." "Extra" and TMZ.com reported that Baldwin made the statements while taping a segment for Friday's edition of "The View." The interview, which sources close to Baldwin described as "emotional, contrite and poignant," was conducted by two of the show's co-hosts, Barbara Walters and Rosie O'Donnell.