The Italian government has proposed introducing new restrictions on the Internet after a Facebook fan page for the man who allegedly attacked Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Sunday drew almost 100,000 users in under 48 hours.

Members of his own party, however, were quick to warn against any curtailment of Internet freedom, suggesting that current laws already provide sufficient protection against the criminal use of the Web.

Australia intends to introduce filters which will ban access to websites containing criminal content.

A seven month trial in conjunction with ISPs found the technology behind the filter to be 100% effective.

Mr Conroy said the filters included optional extras such as a ban on gambling sites which ISPs could choose to implement in exchange for a grant.

The city of Vancouver has ordered the removal of a mural hanging outside a Downtown Eastside gallery depicting the Olympic rings as four sad faces and one smiley face.

While this removal was ordered under the city's graffiti by-law, a sign bylaw in Vancouver has faced heavy criticism. First passed in July, it was accused of stifling debate by giving police and city officials broad power to seize signs and placards, with one civil libertarian saying the city was at risk of becoming "Beijing 2.0."

The congressmen are outraged that sites like Cryptome and Wikileaks republished the manual after it was posted online by a government contractor working for the Transportation Security Administration.

The 93-page manual provided details about which passengers are more likely to be targeted for secondary screening at airports, who is exempt from screening, TSA procedures for screening foreign dignitaries and CIA-escorted passengers, and extensive instructions for calibrating metal detectors and screening for traces of explosive materials.

For most of the past week, when someone typed "Michelle Obama" in the popular search engine Google, one of the first images that came up was a picture of the American first lady altered to resemble a monkey.

Google faced a firestorm of criticism over the episode. First, it banned the Web site that posted the photo, saying it could spread a malware virus. Then, when the image appeared on another Web site, Google let the photo stand.

Now Microsoft is sacrificing the integrity of Bing searches so as to cozy up to State Security in Beijing. In effect, it has chosen become part of the Communist Party's propaganda apparatus.

Search "Tiananmen" and you'll find out about the army firing on pro-democracy protesters in 1989. Search Dalai Lama, Falun Gong and you also get credible results.

But conduct the search with the simplified characters used in mainland China, then you get sanitized pro-Communist results. This is especially true of image searches. Magic! No Tiananmen Square massacre. The Dalai Lama becomes an oppressor. Falun Gong believers are villains, not victims.

As part of the conference an anti-Internet censorship group was disrupted by a gang of UN officials who demanded removal of a poster that mentioned Internet firewalls in China.

The poster was thrown on the floor and protesters were told to remove it because of the reference to China and Tibet. They refused, so security guards came and removed it.

Deibert has filed a complaint against the censorship of the event and sent it to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

The People's Daily had reported on a Chinese group's complaint that Google's planned online library of digitised books might violate Chinese authors' copyrights.

For three days Google searches for the report, in the books section of the website, warned users the site might contain harmful software. The paper argues that the Chinese search engine Baidu did not return a similar warning.

Yesterday the website WikiLeaks* published TOP SECRET information about loans made by Kaupthing bank just before the Big Meltdown last October.

The leaked document shows definitively that massive loans were made to a select few during that time, most notably the largest shareholders in the bank and associated parties.

As soon as the information became available on WikiLeaks, Kaupthing's legal department went into overdrive trying to get the info removed.

Yes, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos has apologized for the Orwellian removal of Orwell from digital book readers tucked inside the pockets of American citizens. And yes, the new-age retailer has promised not to repeat its Big Brother moment. But that's not a promise it can promise to keep.

To his credit, Jeff Bezos acknowledged that Amazon's Big Brother moment was ill-conceived. "Our 'solution' to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles," read his online apology.

But that doesn't mean this is the last time Amazon will remove books from citizen Kindles.