Around 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq (news - web sites), more than half of them from violence, according to an estimate to be published on Friday by the British medical weekly The Lancet.

For more than two years, Kirsch, a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland, has been frantically collecting business plans of the dot-com era. To let these documents lie idle and scattered is to risk losing an important piece of American business and cultural history, he argues.

"How will future historians be able to understand the texture of this time? What information will they have access to, to understand the highs and lows?" he asks. "We can't wait 100 years for documents to wend their way into historical archives. We've got to act now."

Kirsch and a rotating staff of loyal students have created a digital database -- available at www.businessplanarchive.org -- that lists more than 2,300 companies so far, mostly from 1997 to 2002.

After more than a year perfecting their techniques on gambling and pornographic websites, the gangs are starting to turn their talents to mainstream e-commerce operations.

"It's pretty much a daily occurrence that one of our customers is under attack, and the sophistication of the attacks is getting better," said Ken Silva, a vice president at VeriSign Inc., the company that maintains the ".com" and ".net" domain name servers and provides security to many firms.

• Last month, Authorize.net, one of the biggest credit-card-services processors for online merchants, was hit repeatedly over two weeks, leaving thousands of businesses without a means to charge their customers.

• In April, hackers silenced Card Solutions International, a Kentucky company that sells credit card software over the Web, for a week after its owner refused to pay $10,000 to a group of Latvians. Only after switching Internet service providers could the company come back online.

• In August, a Massachusetts businessman was indicted on charges of orchestrating attacks on three television-services companies — costing one more than $200,000. The case against Saad Echouafni is one of the rare instances in which alleged attackers have been identified and charged. Echouafni skipped bail.

Many more attacks go unreported. "You're just seeing the tip of the iceberg," said Peter Rendall, chief executive of the Internet filter maker Top Layer Networks.

Voters in California will decide on a controversial measure this November that would impose a 1-percent tax increase on millionaires only. The money would be used to expand the states' poorly funded public mental health program. Kenny Goldberg of KPBS in San Diego reports.

What is called for, we believe, is a dramatic reorientation of fiscal policy, including substantial reversals of your tax policy. Running a budget deficit in response to a short bout of recession is one thing. But running large structural deficits over a long period is something else entirely. We therefore urge you to consider the fiscal realities we now face and the substantial burden they are placing on our economy.

Foetry (www.foetry.com): In addition to being the unacknowledged legislators of the world, poets are a bunch of kiss-ups who scramble around for prizes and teaching igs like piglets after apple cores. Or such, at any rate, is the premise of Foetry, a Web site devoted to ''exposing the fraudulent 'contests.' Tracking the sycophants. Naming names.''