US advocacy groups urge regulators to block any deal Google and Yahoo might strike after a two-week experiment.

We have to find an effective way to stand together on this, because we are all going to find out on a personal level the penalty for having such contrary beliefs.

Software giant Microsoft drops its three-month-old bid to buy internet firm Yahoo after the two sides fail to agree a price.

Pentagon is setting up a global network of foreign-language news websites, hiring mainly Arab journalists to promote US interests.

A Tory MP is told his own 12-year-old daughter has broken a website's rules, during an MPs' inquiry into internet safety.

A bill outlawing the possession of "extreme pornography" is about to be passed. But is it bad law?

Another opponent of the new law is Edward Garnier, an MP and part-time judge, who questioned the clause when it was debated in the Commons.

"My primary concern is the vagueness of the offence," says Mr Garnier. "It was very subjective and it would not be clear to me how anybody would know if an offence had been committed."

Yet opponents have also seized on what they see as an anomaly in the new law, noted by Lord Wallace of Tankerness during last week's debate in the House of Lords.

"If no sexual offence is being committed it seems very odd indeed that there should be an offence for having an image of something which was not an offence," he said.

With that partly in mind, the government is tabling an amendment that would allow couples to keep pictures of themselves engaged in consensual acts - but not to distribute them. Lord Hunt, who has charge of the bill in the Lords, admits it is being rushed through to meet a deadline. But he denies the law has not been thoroughly considered and maintains it will only affect images that are "grossly offensive and disgusting".

The popular Saudi internet blogger Fouad al-Farhan is set free after four months in detention.

A blogger arrested for his pro-reform opinions in Saudi Arabia has been released without charge after being imprisoned for nearly five months.

A pro-Israel pressure group is orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged.

A series of emails by members and associates of the pro-Israel group CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), provided to The Electronic Intifada (EI), indicate the group is engaged in what one activist termed a "war" on Wikipedia.

Water and electricity pipes could be utilised to deliver superfast broadband, says Ofcom.

Internet sites and blogs which peddle the gospel of an "anorexic lifestyle" to teenage girls were outlawed by the French parliament yesterday. The law is the first attempt anywhere in the world to stamp out the "pro-ana" movement, a cult-like attempt to promote anorexia as a lifestyle which began in the United States eight years ago.

I don't really know why Google Earth is censored but here are some proof.

Dale Williams interviews Mike Rivero, webmaster of WhatReallyHappened.com. Most of the content on Mike's site has been banned by Digg. Why the censorship? Find out with this in-depth interview. H.R. 1955 - the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 and the Truth and Freedom Movements are just a few of the topics discussed.

Israeli defence chiefs move to tighten internet social networking rules after sensitive military photos appear.

Web shows produced by social networking site MySpace could soon air on TVs outside the US.

The number of malicious programs in circulation has hit the one million mark, says security firm Symantec.

It was a happy moment when I heard the news that UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) launched in coordination with Google Earth, a new layer that focus on refugee camps around the world. This should be a great tool to follow the crisis of Palestinian refugees under occupation and expose it to the world through one of the most used Web 2.0 applications (Google Earth claims to have more than 350 million downloads and counting).

However, my happiness did not last for long when I discovered that NONE of the Palestinian refugee camps within the Occupied Palestinian Territories are published there (see map below). So, even if you “Sit in front of your computer“, with a few clicks you can “see, hear and develop an emotional understanding of what it is like to be a refugee“, but not the Palestinian refugees’ experience. They don’t exist!

In an online auction, the domain www.pizza.com fetched $2.6 million for a US man who had maintained the site for just $20 a year since 1994.

The record label EMI appoints a senior Google executive to run its digital strategy - the first such post at the firm.

US intelligence agencies have recruited search engine giant Google to help its agents share information about their suspects.

Google's vice-president, Kent Walker, has come under fire from MPs over the company's failure to censor a YouTube video of a gang rape. By Ben Dowell

A New Zealand teenager is convicted of computer crimes linked to an international cyber-crime ring.

New Zealander accused of leading international hacker ring which skimmed millions of dollars from bank accounts

Most Internet users deplore child pornography and the purveyors of it. I’ve personally been involved in a number of pedophile busts in my day, so I've seen my share of these criminals in the past. However, there’s a new, disturbing trend in law enforcement that could have wide and dangerous consequences for people who have no interest in ever viewing child pornography.
The FBI has begun busting people for clicking on links that advertise child pornography. At first blush, that may sound like a good thing, so let me just re-state: The FBI can arrest and convict you based on no other evidence than the fact that your browser visited a Web page.

Still not scared? Let me give you a few examples of how I could easily make your browser visit the wrong site, if I wanted to ruin your life.

According to a complaint filed Tuesday in Washington state court, the company caused some people surfing the net to receive a torrent of pop-ups that advertised porn links and other sketchy sites. The messages were sent through Windows Messenger Service, a feature in Windows that allows network administrators to send notices to users. (The service has been turned off by default since Microsoft pushed out Service Pack 2 for Windows XP, but evidently plenty of people still have it turned on for one reason or another.)

With end users' nerves rattled by the mysterious pop-ups, the company would then send out a new batch of notifications that were designed to look like official Windows alerts. They warned that the computer was vulnerable to malware attacks and directed the end user to reduce the threat by installing one of the software titles.

Adobe Systems launches Photoshop Express online as a Web-based image editor providing a simple way touch-up, share and store photos.

Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick argue over transport policy on the Guardian's Comment is free site

With Ken and Boris London's mayoral race is a knock-off of Celebrity Big Brother

A Shas member of Knesset who has proposed to restrict access to pornographic, violent, and gambling-related Web sites spent handsome sums of public money for personal computer and internet usage, official Knesset figures show. ...

John Naughton: It was a brilliant idea - a killer web application whose usefulness was immediately apparent

A new opinion poll suggests that over 54 percent of Americans do not trust mainstream media and consider news websites more reliable.

Some 41 percent said they trust the 'Internet news and information websites' more than the press.

The new Harris Interactive survey reflects the findings of a Harvard University study conducted last year, which found 'nearly two-thirds of Americans have no faith in campaign coverage by the news media'.

The poll indicates that only 30 percent 'tend to trust the press', while 44 percent say Radio is the most trusted media in the United States.

The poll suggests that the selective media coverage of the ongoing Iraq war has caused Americans to lose faith in mainstream media.

Six years and £4.3bn after construction started, Terminal 5 at Heathrow will soon open, but will it be enough to sort out the issues at the airport?

A privacy campaign group praises the identity protection measures of a controversial online ad system.

The FBI has acknowledged that it improperly accessed the citizens' telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic in 2006.

US intelligence officers could soon be visiting virtual worlds as they seek out terror groups using online spaces.

Information has come to light about why Pakistani action against YouTube made the site inaccessible.

Pakistan has lifted a ban on YouTube after the video-sharing website removed content that was offensive to Islam, officials say.

Pakistan's attempts to block access to YouTube have been blamed for a near global blackout of the site on Sunday.

Google, the owner of YouTube, blamed the outage on "erroneous internet protocols", sourced in Pakistan

BBC News has learned that the nearly two hour blackout was almost certainly connected to Pakistan Telecom and internet service provider PCCW.

The country ordered ISPs to block the video-sharing website because of content deemed offensive to Islam.

The BBC News website's technology editor, Darren Waters, says that to block Pakistan's citizens from accessing YouTube it is believed Pakistan Telecom "hijacked" the web server address of the popular video site.

Those details were then passed on to the country's internet service providers so that anyone in Pakistan attempting to go to YouTube was instead re-directed to a different address.

But the details of the "hijack" were leaked out into the wider internet from PCCW and as a result YouTube was mistakenly blocked by internet service providers around the world.

The block on the servers was lifted once PCCW had been told of the issue by engineers at YouTube.

A statement from Google said that the problems lasted for "about two hours".

"Traffic to YouTube was routed according to erroneous internet protocols, and many users around the world could not access our site," it said.

Japan has put 'Kizuna' into orbit, a ground-breaking satellite which is slated to offer super high-speed Internet access to Asian countries.

In response to the abuses during the Nixon administration, Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, in 1978. The law provides that no electronic surveillance may occur by anyone in the government at any time under any circumstances for any reason other than in accordance with law, and no such surveillance may occur within the U.S. of an American other than in accordance with the 4th Amendment.

The 4th Amendment was written in response to the Colonial experience whereby British soldiers wrote their own search warrants, thus literally authorizing themselves to enter the private property of colonists.

The amendment has been uniformly interpreted by the courts to require a warrant by a judge; and judges can only issue search warrants after government agents, under oath, have convinced the judges that it is more likely than not that the things to be seized are evidence of crimes. This standard of proof is called probable cause of crime. It is one of only two instances in which the founders wrote a rule of criminal procedure into the Constitution itself, surely so that no Congress, president or court could tamper with it. Those who believe the Constitution means what it says should tremble at every effort to weaken any of its protections. The Constitution protects all "persons" and all "people" implicated by government behavior. So the government should be required, as it was until FISA, to obtain a 4th Amendment warrant to conduct surveillance of anyone, American or not, in the U.S. or not.

If we lower constitutional protections for foreigners and their American correspondents, for whom will we lower them next?

One of the most important web sites in recent months has been Wikileaks.org. Created by several brave journalists committed to transparency, Wikieaks has published important leaked documents, such as the Rules of Engagement for Iraq [see my The Secret Rules of Engagement in Iraq], the 2003 and 2004 Guantanamo Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures, and evidence of major bank fraud in Kenya [see also here] that apparently affected the Kenyan elections. Wikileaks has upset the Chinese government enough that they are attempting to censor it, as is the Thai military junta.

Now censorship has extended to the United States of America, land of the First Amendment. As of Friday, February 15, those going to Wikileaks.org have gotten Server not found messages. Today I received a message explaining that a California court has granted an injunction written and requested by lawyers for the Cayman Island’s Bank Julius Baer. It seems that the bank is trying to keep the public from accessing documents that may reveal shady dealings. Wikileaks was only given a couple of hours notice “by email” and was not even represented at the hearing where a U.S. judge took such a drastic step attempting to totally shut down an important information outlet. The result was this totally unprecedented attempt to totally wipe out the existence of Wikileaks:

Website claiming to reveal corporate and governmental fraud vows to defy closure attempts

The U.S. economy is faltering. Family debt is on the rise, benefits are disappearing, the deficit is skyrocketing, and the mortgage crisis has worsened. Conservatives have attempted to deflect attention from the crisis, by blaming the media’s negative coverage and insisting the United States is not headed toward a recession, despite what economists are predicting.

The Bush administration’s latest move is to simply hide the data. Forbes has awarded EconomicIndicators.gov one of its “Best of the Web” awards. As Forbes explains, the government site provides an invaluable service to the public for accessing U.S. economic data:

Yet the Bush administration has decided to shut down this site because of “budgetary constraints,” effective March 1:

The reported talks between News Corporation and Yahoo have presented an ingenious alternative to the Microsoft takeover. But some shareholders believe Microsoft offers a more secure future for the firm. By Jemima Kiss

Internet access could be cut for people who illegally download music and videos under government proposals.

Six million people a year are estimated to download files illegally in the UK.

"If the law were enacted it would turn ISPs, like BT, Tiscali and Virgin, into a pro-active net police force." quote from Darren Waters, technology editor BBC News website

"Internet providers are no more able to inspect and filter every single packet passing across their network than the Post Office is able to open every envelope" quote from Internet Service Providers Association

Some of the UK's biggest internet providers, such as BT, Virgin and Tiscali have been in talks with the entertainment industry over introducing a voluntary scheme for policing pirate activity, but no agreement has been reached.

So far, they have failed to resolve how disputed allegations would be arbitrated - for example, when customers claim other people have been "piggybacking" on their internet service.

The Internet Service Providers Association said data protection laws would prevent providers from looking at the content of information sent over their networks.

BBC News learns that a hacker crashed a number of Northern Ireland government websites.

"Over the weekend of 2-3 February an attempt was made to hack into a web server, owned and maintained by the Northern Ireland Civil Service's IT Shared Service Centre, which hosts a number of government websites including Planning Service's," said the DoE spokeswoman.

"The security systems in place identified this activity and the server was immediately shut down."

The Planning Service's website contains, among other things, information about planning applications being made across Northern Ireland's 26 council areas.

Environment Minister Arlene Foster said she only learned of the security breach on Monday night.

"It is very concerning to hear of people being able to hack into government sites," she said.

"Obviously it is something that the government will have to review, just as we did with our data.

"This is another issue which we are going to have to look at very seriously."

Antony Walker, chairman of the Broadband Stakeholder Group, gives his thoughts on broadband.

Safer Internet Day is being marke