The technology ministry said the measures were designed to tackle online pornography, but internet activists see it as increased government censorship.

But the technology ministry said would-be website operators would now have to submit identity cards and photos of themselves, as well as meeting regulators before their sites could be registered.

Chillifresh claimed in a Saturday post that a discussion with Apple revealed that more than 5,000 apps have been affected by its new App Store content policy.

AppShopper sister site MacRumors on Sunday reported that app removals went from about 100 a day to a high of almost 4,000 on Friday.

Interestingly, some apps that include sexual content, such as Playboy's, seem to have been missed by the recent purge--so far, at least.

What Conroy wants is for YouTube to voluntarily censor all material on its site that is "Refused Classification" by the Australian ratings board, a government agency.

This week, the problem country was Pakistan, where someone uploaded a video of President Zardari at a political rally. In the clip, Zardari gets irritated at some people near the stage and yells at them in English to "shut up!"

Iran's government, facing major internal unrest over its recent election results and resulting brutality, Iran simply blocked Gmail altogether.

The Web site of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group, was hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that lasted 16 hours starting Saturday afternoon, the group said in an e-mailed statement on Monday.

Google this month said it had been hit by cyberattacks from China partly aimed at accessing the Gmail accounts of human rights activists.

Your Nexus One will not be so charmed by the vigor of your tongue. It will, dare I utter the word when referring to a product from the newly emancipated Google, censor you.

Every time they said something naughty into the phone, the naughty word came out as "####"--and not just "f---." It even censored the "S" part of BS.

"We filter potentially offensive or inappropriate results because we want to avoid situations whereby we might misrecognize a spoken query and return profanity when, in fact, the user said something completely innocent," Google told Reuters.

Google has decided to stop censoring search results in China, after discovering that someone based in that country had attempted to hack into the e-mail accounts of human rights activists.

Shortly after Google disclosed the hack, Adobe posted its own announcement disclosing that it became aware on Jan. 2 that it had been targeted in a "sophisticated, coordinated attack against corporate network systems managed by Adobe and other companies."

Spain has proposed a new anti-piracy law that would let intellectual property police play a speedier game of whack-a-mole with websites serving illegal downloads of music and films.

Under a fast-track judicial process the website's owner would be summoned at the time of the initial complaint and given four days to appeal.

Spain's original version of the plan, unveiled to widespread criticism in November, would have allowed the IP commission to shutter websites without any judicial authorization.

The new law, which was passed in July, means that blasphemy in Ireland is now a crime punishable with a fine of up to €25,000 (£22,000).

The justice minister, Dermot Ahern, said that the law was necessary because while immigration had brought a growing diversity of religious faiths, the 1936 constitution extended the protection of belief only to Christians.

The World Trade Organization has ruled that China's practice of funneling media imports to state-owned companies-which facilitates the country's long tradition of censorship-violates international trade laws.

The WTO has given China one year to get its act together and bring its import policies in line with international trade laws. If not, the US can ask the WTO to bring commercial sanctions against China.

A net prankster has taken advantage of Conroy's failure to reserve his own domain name by registering stephenconroy.com.au and turning it into an anti-censorship protest site.

Conroy announced this week that he would be pressing ahead with plans to force ISPs to block a secret blacklist of "refused classification" (RC) websites for all Australian internet users.