The video site, owned by Google, has launched nine versions across Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK.

Each site is translated into local languages and has country-specific video rankings and comments.

"Our mission is to entertain, inform and empower the world through video."

Auction website eBay has pulled its US advertising from search engine giant and adversary Google.

The move comes after Google angered eBay with a provocative decision to hold an event on the same evening as eBay's annual merchants' conference.

Google hoped to alert PayPal users who would have been in Boston attending the eBay Live annual seller event to its own service, according to market experts.

It could also have been seen as part of an effort to get eBay to accept Google Checkout, currently banned on the online auctioneer's site.

Yahoo shareholders have rejected plans for the company to adopt a policy that opposes censorship on the internet.

Proposals to set up a human rights committee which would review its policies around the world, specifically China, were also heavily defeated.

Yahoo has been criticized by human rights groups since 2005 for its role in turning over some political dissidents' e-mails.

At the company's annual general meeting, the censorship proposal won only about 15% of support while only 4% backed the idea of a human rights committee.

Neither Yahoo nor any other company has released a list of websites that have been de-listed for their political and religious content.

The internet firms argue it is better to offer Chinese users some information than none at all.

We are aware that the decision to place Google at the bottom of the ranking is likely to be controversial, but throughout our research we have found numerous deficiencies and hostilities in Google's approach to privacy that go well beyond those of other organizations. While a number of companies share some of these negative elements, none comes close to achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy.

Google's increasing ability to deep-drill into the minutiae of a user's life and lifestyle choices must in our view be coupled with well defined and mature user controls and an equally mature privacy outlook. Neither of these elements has been demonstrated. Rather, we have witnessed an attitude to privacy within Google that at its most blatant is hostile, and at its most benign is ambivalent. These dynamics do not pervade other major players such as Microsoft or eBay, both of which have made notable improvements to the corporate ethos on privacy issues.

In the closing days of our research we received a copy of supplemental material relating to a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission concerning the pending merger between Google and DoubleClick. This material, submitted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and coupled with a submission to the FTC from the New York State Consumer Protection Board, provided additional weight for our assessment that Google has created the most onerous privacy environment on the Internet.

While network admins will complain about the volume of spam that clogs up and drains resources, for the average Joe, this is not such a problem.

What no one ever points out, however, is that there is another form of spam, a much older form of spam, that is alive and well. And it is a much bigger drain on resources. It’s what I think of as 'paper spam'.

Think about it for a moment. What goes into the production of 'paper spam'? Trees. Printing with poisonous inks and dyes. Trucks to distribute it. Warehouses to hold it. People paid a pittance to shuffle about, sticking it in out letterboxes. And if, as inevitably happens, we don't want it, how much of it ends up not being recycled, possibly thrown onto the street, and washed down into our sewers. Which leads to where? Our oceans, rivers and seas.

Yet no one seems half as concerned with 'paper spam' as they do with electronic spam, despite the production costs involved. Where are the environmental reports? Where are the corporate social responsibility acts? And how often, really, does anyone ever pick one of those catalogues up and think "Ooh, I'm going to go to Best Buy now and buy the USB Toaster in that catalogue."

Security researcher Robert Hansen, aka RSnake, has published details of a new attack on Google Desktop. Basically, Hansen found a man-in-the-middle attack, this time placing an attacker between Google and someone launching a desktop search query. From this position, the attacker is able to manipulate the search results and possibly take control of other programs on the desktop.

Hansen writes: "This should drive home the point that deep integration between the desktop and the Web is not a good idea" since Google's site is unencrypted and therefore can be subverted by an attacker. But Hansen notes there are two caveats here: one, you need to have Google Desktop installed, and two, the attacker must be sophisticated enough to launch a man-in-the-middle attack upon you.

Wired News, with help from some readers, attempted to get real answers from the largest United States-based ISPs about what information they gather on their customers' use of the internet, and how long they retain records like IP addresses, e-mail and real-time browsing activity. Most importantly, we asked what they require from law-enforcement agencies before coughing up the data, and whether they sell your data to marketers.

Only four of the eight largest ISPs responded to the 10-question survey, despite being contacted repeatedly over the course of two months. Some ISPs wouldn't talk to us, but gave answers to customers responding to a call for reader help on Wired's Threat Level blog.

AOL, AT&T, Cox and Qwest all responded to the survey, with a mix of timeliness and transparency.

But only Cox answered the question, "How long do you retain records of the IP addresses assigned to customers."

Some of the most sensitive information sent across an ISP's network are the URLs of the websites that people visit. This so-called clickstream data includes every URL a customer visits, including URLs from search engines, which generally include the search term.

When asked if they allow marketers to see anonymized or partially-anonymized clickstream data, AOL, AT&T and Cox said they did not, while Qwest gave a muddled answer and declined to answer a follow-up question. Comcast, EarthLink, Verizon and Time Warner didn't respond.

Google has been told that it may be breaking European privacy laws by keeping people's search information on its servers for up to two years.

Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, said the firm was committed to dialogue with the group.

"We believe it's an important part of our commitment to respect user privacy while balancing a number of important factors, such as maintaining security and preventing fraud and abuse," Mr Fleischer said.

Earlier this year Google said it would anonymise personal data it receives from users' web search after 18 to 24 months.

Google collects and stores data from each query. It holds information such as the search term itself, the unique address of the PC being used, known as the IP address, and details of how a user makes searches, such as the browser used and previous queries to Google.

Google has said it was using this information to help improve its different services and to monitor how its search engine was functioning.

When Firefox launched in beta release five years ago, it burst on the open-source browser scene like a young Elvis Presley -- slim, sexy and dangerous.

But, with Firefox 3.0 poised for release this summer, the "IE killer" is in danger of morphing into an early Fat Elvis, if increasing numbers of die-hard fans turned reluctant critics are any guide.

The alleged culprit: bloat, the same problem that once plagued Mozilla, the slow, overstuffed open-source browser spawned by Netscape that Firefox was originally meant to replace.

In our poll, readers rated Firefox's mysterious habit of gobbling up every remaining scrap of a computer's memory their No. 1 gripe about the browser. Complaints of slow performance and instability ranked highly as well.

In an effort to stamp out incompatibilities between extensions, the Firefox team has slowly been adding standard features that were previously available as add-ons. Firefox 2.0, released in November 2006, saw the addition of an inline spell-checker, an RSS reader and a new search engine manager.

E-mail solicitations that use graphical images of text to avoid filters are not new. Recently, however, they became more sophisticated and account for roughly 40 percent of spam today.

The spammer's challenge, then, is to deliver something that the filter hasn't yet learned is spam. Eventually, the filter incorporates the new derivations into its list of spammy traits. Then the spammer changes convention again, and on and on.

Spammers have made image spam really effective by using not just one but multiple filter-thwarting techniques. Some confuse optical character recognition filters, some automatically alter images to create randomness, and some even buffer against defenses that don't yet exist but that spammers anticipate will be built in response to image spam.