Under Government plans to monitor internet traffic, raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database.

It is further evidence of the Government's desire to have the capability to vet every telephone call, email and internet visit made in the UK, which has already provoked an outcry.

They were told that the security and intelligence agencies wanted to use the stored data to help fight serious crime and terrorism.

The French Senate has overwhelmingly voted in favour of a law that would cut off access to the internet to web surfers who repeatedly download copyrighted music, films or video games without paying.

The legislation is the transposition into law of an extra-parliamentary initiative of President Nicholas Sarkozy from last November, the so-called Olivennes accord, in which some 40 stakeholders from the music, cinema and internet service provision sectors agreed that repeat illegal downloaders would have their internet cut off by ISPs.

In September, the European Parliament approved by a large majority an amendment outlawing internet cut-off.

Google's Gmail suffers an outage, while the search engine's Start Page suffers a bug, disconnecting users from their content. The blips cast another pall over SAAS, cloud computing and Web services at large.

Indeed, some Google Apps users scoff outright at others who put mission-critical business operations in the hands of SAAS from Google.

The veiled threat to shut down iTunes if royalty rates on downloaded songs were hiked has been averted.

The National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) asked for the rise while Apple opposed it and said it could result in iTunes being shut down.

"Apple has repeatedly made clear that it is in this business to make money and would most likely not continue to operate iTS (the iTunes Store) if it were no longer possible to do so profitably."

The CRB also rejected a call to cut the rate to 4.8 cents and in the end agreed to peg it at 9.1 cents a song for the next five years.

The leaders of three of Australia's largest ISP's have declared the Net neutrality debate as solely a US problem - and further, that the nation that pioneered the internet might want to study the Australian market for clues as to how to solve the dilemma.

"The [Net neutrality] problem isn't about running out of capacity. It's a business model that's about to explode due to stress. The problem, in my opinion, is the US business model," said Hackett.

American customers have never been able to put much of a dollar value on traffic, as historically, US ISPs have "had it very easy" in terms of bandwidth costs.

Facebook users with even slightly unusual names beware: your account can be suspended by the site's draconian administrators without warning and your personal information held to ransom until you show them a government-issued ID.

This and countless other questionable rules has led some to sound the alarm on the dangers of entrusting one's online identity to Facebook and relying on it so heavily for social interaction.

Despite a long, heated email exchange Facebook refused to tell Keep why she was banned - for "security reasons" - and asked her to verify her identity by sending "a scanned copy of a government-issued ID".

Facebook has also banned people for having too many friends, joining too many groups, posting too many messages on a wall or in a group, "poking" too many people and using duplicate text in multiple messages.

Comcast has become the latest ISP to shut down access to Usenet newsgroups as part of a voluntary agreement to try and fight child porn online.

In response to a question over whether Comcast offers newsgroups service, the company advises interested subscribers to choose from one of several third-party newsgroup providers. Of course, you'll have to pay extra for that and Comcast's monthly fees won't be going down in order to compensate for the loss of a service that's not being replaced.

According to a statement filed Friday with the FCC, the big-name ISP began using a traffic switch from Sandvine Inc. in May 2005 in an effort to determine which protocols were causing congestion on its cable-based network.

After an independent network researcher revealed the company's P2P throttling in May 2007, Comcast flatly denied it. And though it eventually acknowledged the basic practice, it has always said that it "temporarily delays" P2P uploads rather than blocking them. But this is misleading.

Using Sandvine's equipment, Comcast sends reset packets that prevent one machine from connecting to another. And if the number of uploads drops below Comcast's threshold, these connections are not reinstated. In other words, they're blocked, not delayed.

A would-be social network called Wallop has shut its doors, according to a message on the homepage.

But Wallop wasn't just another tale of crushed Silicon Valley dreams. The site, which once aimed to compete with the likes of MySpace, had backing from none other than Microsoft.

Obviously, it never really caught on: Wallop was never talked about in the same sentences of even third-tier social networks.

A United Nations agency is quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous.

The potential for eroding Internet users' right to remain anonymous, which is protected by law in the United States and recognized in international law by groups such as the Council of Europe, has alarmed some technologists and privacy advocates.

Bellovin said in a blog post this week that "institutionalizing a means for governments to quash their opposition is in direct contravention" of the U.N.'s own Universal Declaration of Human Rights.