The student, Parwez Kambakhsh, 24, ran afoul of Afghan authorities last year when he circulated an article about women's rights under Islam after downloading it from the Internet.

International organizations, including New York-based Human Rights Watch, said the case pointed to a troubling lack of respect for freedom of speech and individual liberties in Afghanistan, nearly seven years after a U.S.-led invasion toppled the Taliban fundamentalist Islamic movement.

Australians will be unable to opt-out of the government's pending Internet content filtering scheme, and will instead be placed on a watered-down blacklist, experts say.

"Labor's plan for cyber-safety will require ISPs to offer a clean feed Internet service to all homes, schools and public Internet points accessible by children," Marshall said.

"Illegal is illegal and if there is infrastructure in place to block it, then it will be required to be blocked -- end of story."

"Once the public has allowed the system to be established, it is much easier to block other material," Clapperton said.

Security researchers recently found that IM conversations on the Chinese Skype program were not only filtered, but also recorded on a massive, nonsecure, server. The possibility of surveillance flies in the face of Skype's supposed strong encryption, and has provoked outcry among privacy advocates.

In fact, evidence suggests that the servers used to store captyured data have been compromised in the past and used to host pirated movies and torrents (for peer-to-peer file sharing).

Earlier this week we wrote about the controversy of EA's decision to put cumbersome DRM on the highly anticipated video game, Spore. The response was that thousands of people started posting one star reviews of Spore, noting the problems with the DRM.

Now, a bunch of people have noticed that Amazon appears to have deleted all of the reviews on the Spore page. This is only going to end badly.

It appears that some, or potentially all, of the reviews are now back on the site, and Amazon is claiming that it was a "glitch" that they disappeared. Some people claim that their own reviews are not back yet, though, so the whole situation is a bit fluid.

Credit card companies successfully nixed a Mythbusters segment exposing RFID's security flaws, according to Arbiter of Truth and Mythbusters co-host, Adam Savage.

They were way, way outgunned and they absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was, and Discovery backed way down being a large corporation that depends upon the revenue of the advertisers. Now it's on Discovery's radar and they won't let us go near it.

The artist was plotting to laser-beam a billboard-size, pro-Tibet message at the Bird's Nest Stadium. Instead, he spent six days locked up and interrogated by Chinese police under conditions he likens to torture.

They did some classic torture interrogation techniques. They said they would kill us, that we were gonna spend the rest of our lives in Chinese prison...they kept us up all night and gave us water, wouldn't let us use the bathroom, wouldn't let us eat food.

The sad thing is, anything that happens to us that would be considered torture, it's nothing compared to what's happening to the Africans and Chinese nationals held, who don't get calls from embassies and senators.

Access to Apple's online iTunes Store has been blocked in China after it emerged that Olympic athletes have been downloading and possibly listening to a pro-Tibetan music album in a subtle act of protest against China's rule over the province.

On Monday, expatriate iTunes users living in China began experiencing technical problems with their previously unfettered access.

The International Olympic Committee is no stranger to overzealous protection of what they perceive to be their intellectual property. We've covered their ridiculous attempts to change British law to "protect" the terms "Olympics" and "2012".

It was hardly surprising when the IOC sent a take-down notice to YouTube for a video posted by Students for a Free Tibet.

Luckily after a number of sites questioned the action, the IOC withdrew their complaint. This remains troubling, though. The DMCA was not meant to silence legitimate speech, but the number of times litigants have suppressed content they don't like is staggering.

The state of Massachusetts is showing no signs of abandoning its fight to keep a restraining order in place against three MIT students who discovered subway card vulnerabilities. In fact, the state transit agency is escalating its rhetoric.

MBTA has demanded copies of documents including correspondence with the Defcon conference, a paper prepared for an MIT class, software, physical equipment, modified MBTA farecards, notes from meetings, and so on.

MBTA has asked O'Toole to convert the temporary restraining order, which automatically expires on Tuesday, to a longer-lasting preliminary injunction.

German hackers have constructed a route around the great firewall of China. The Chaos Computer Club said its technology will help athletes and journalists travelling to Beijing for the Olympic Games to circumvent censorship.

Visitors to China are being offered USB sticks containing a browser that connects via the TOR proxy network.

Chaos Computer Club is offering the technology partly to offer an easy way around Chinese censorship restriction but also to make a political point much closer to home.