Virgin Atlantic eases up on the laptop battery restrictions. Pioneer sues Samsung over plasma patents. Phishing is up this year so you'd better do your best to safeguard yourself.

More than 157,000 unique phishing messages were sent out around the world in the first half of 2006, an increase of 81 percent compared with the six-month period to end-December 2005. Each message can go to thousands or hundreds of thousands of consumers, according to the bi-annual Internet Security Threat Report from security software vendor Symantec.