The FBI has drafted sweeping legislation that would require Internet service providers to create wiretapping hubs for police surveillance and force makers of networking gear to build in backdoors for eavesdropping, CNET News.com has learned.

The draft bill would place the FBI's Net-surveillance push on solid legal footing. At the moment, it's ensnared in a legal challenge from universities and some technology companies that claim the Federal Communications Commission's broadband surveillance directives exceed what Congress has authorized.

Require any manufacturer of "routing" and "addressing" hardware to offer upgrades or other "modifications" that are needed to support Internet wiretapping.

Authorize the expansion of wiretapping requirements to "commercial" Internet services including instant messaging if the FCC deems it to be in the "public interest."

Eliminate the current legal requirement saying the Justice Department must publish a public "notice of the actual number of communications interceptions" every year.

The concept of forcing companies to record information about their users' Internet activities to aid in future criminal prosecutions took another twist this week.

"How much would it cost your company to preserve those IP addresses?" DeGette asked at a hearing on Wednesday that included representatives from Facebook, Xanga and Fox Interactive Media, the parent company of MySpace. "You're going to store the data indefinitely?"

Michael Angus, executive vice president of Fox Interactive Media, said he agrees with the idea of data retention for MySpace. "As a media company, Fox is very committed to data retention," Angus said. "It helps us police piracy."

In those meetings, Justice Department representatives went beyond the argument that data retention was necessary to protect children--and claimed it would aid in terrorism investigations as well.

"There is more you can do," DeGette said. "You can do algorithms that will go beyond just the date of birth that they register, to start to weed out some of the underage users."

A North Carolina public school district went to court to get Google to remove Social Security numbers and test scores for more than 600 students after the information was exposed on the Web, according to article in the Winston-Salem Journal online.

Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, got more information from the school district's chief technology officer, Judith Ray, who said that Google somehow bypassed the login information. "We acted so aggressively with Google because, until the media got involved, we could not get beyond an operator at Google," she said.

"Our crawler does not have the ability to enter passwords. The fact that the information was in our index indicates that the documents were not password protected at the time when we crawled the site," Google said in a statement on Monday.

The music conglomerate is promoting a new site, called Musicbox Video, that showcases videos, artist interviews, behind-the-scenes footage and other material from a broad portfolio of its artists.

But Sony will also actively encourage fan sites and bloggers--who are mostly used to receiving cease-and-desist letters from studios--to link to the material. Links for adding Musicbox content are displayed on the site.

The turnabout largely comes amid a revamp of the company being conducted by CEO Howard Stringer. It is also taking place because the videos, in Flash, can't be pirated, at least not easily.

Customer attitudes toward Sony will also play a part. Individuals do not get to program the content on the different Musicbox channels--just the channels they add.

The common use of "flash intros" to corporate websites has never made much sense. Generally, they're a pain, and even for the few folks who want to watch them, after seeing it once, why should they ever want to go back again? Yet, for some reason, web designers love them, and somehow keep convincing corporations to use them. However, a usability expert studying these things now says that " the skip intro button is the most used button on the Internet." While you can quibble over the hyperbole, it does make sense to question why so many firms keep using these types of entryways, when it clearly keeps people from the content they actually want -- such as how to buy your product.

AllofMp3.com has managed a extraordinary level of popularity because many feel it represents what an online music service should be. The music service contains no DRM (Digital Rights Management), allowing the consumer to copy and transfer the purchased track to whatever device he or she wishes while compensating artists.

The entertainment industry however claims the service is flat out illegal. According to the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), AllofMp3.com fails to pay artist royalties - contrary to AllofMp3.com's assertions.

The site AllOfMP3.com belongs to a Russian company and for 6 years it has operated within the country, in full compliance with all Russian laws. Throughout this period the various government offices have scrutinized site's legality and have not found any breach of the law. So far there has been no decision by any Russian court contesting the site's legality.

The site AllOfMP3.com does regularly transfer substantial amounts of royalties to the Russian organizations for collective management of rights such as ROMS and FAIR, which have granted the site licenses to legally deliver music through the Internet.

In a private meeting with industry representatives, Gonzales, Mueller and other senior members of the Justice Department said Internet service providers should retain subscriber information and network data for two years, according to two sources familiar with the discussion who spoke on condition of anonymity.

During Friday's meeting, Justice Department officials passed around pixellated (that is, slightly obscured) photographs of child pornography to emphasize the lurid nature of the crimes police are trying to prevent, according to one source.

Privacy advocates have been alarmed by the idea of legally mandated data retention, saying that, while child exploitation may be the justification today, those records would be available in all kinds of criminal and civil suits--including terrorism, tax evasion, drug, and even divorce cases.

A more extensive mandate would require companies to keep track of e-mail messages sent, Web pages visited and perhaps even instant-messaging correspondents.

The Europe-wide requirement applies to a wide variety of "traffic" and "location" data, including the identities of the customers' correspondents; the date, time and duration of phone calls, voice over Internet Protocol calls or e-mail messages; and the location of the device used for the communications. But the "content" of the communications is not supposed to be retained.

The government has given internet service providers until 2008 to block all access to websites containing illegal images of child abuse listed by the Internet Watch Foundation.

The industry-funded IWF had already seen a drastic drop in the number of illegal sites reported to be hosted in the UK, from 18 per cent in 1997 to 0.4 per cent in 2005.

New ISPs would be given nine months before they had to comply, he said, but, "If it appears that we are not going to meet our target through co-operation, we will review the options for stopping UK residents accessing websites on the IWF list. Linx Public Affairs, an Internet law news service, noted that the technology used to block news sites displaying child pornography could easily be turned to other uses.

The Home Office had admitted that it had considered blocking websites that "glorified terrorism" under the Terrorism Act (2006). It said it was not policy to require ISPs to block content, but added: "our legislation as drafted provides the flexibility to accomodate a change in Government policy should the need ever arise ."

US comms companies have been massively overcharging for ages and fear that video telly will butcher their cash cow, according to new research.

Verizon is warning that video downloads will slow the Internet down to a snail's pace unless users pay it a huge amount of cash to build a two tier web. But according to this site, the problems are down to the greed of ISPs in the past. The article quotes a research firm TeleGeography as claiming that an always-on, 1 megabit-per-second tap into the Internet backbone costs an ISP $10 to $20 a month.

ISPs sell around 30 times more bandwidth to their end users than they can connect simultaneously to the Internet. The oversubscription enables the ISP to run 40 DSL accounts, each at a maximum speed of 768 kilobits per second. So the cost of providing data to each DSL is about 25 cents to 50 cents a month per customer.

Even at the top end that means that the comms companies have been charging $20 for a service that costs them 50 cents. However video is set to kill that off. Tom Tauke, Verizon Communications top lobbyist said that oversubscription doesn't present a problem as long as people are using the Internet for Web surfing, e-mail and the occasional file download. But if everyone in a neighbourhood is trying to download the evening news at the same time, it's not going to work.

Alarm usually accompanies changes to Google's algorithms, as the new rankings can cause websites to be demoted, or disappear entirely. But four months on from the introduction of "Big Daddy," it's clear that the problem is more serious than any previous revision - and it's getting worse.

"Some sites have lost 99 per cent of their indexed pages," reports one member of the Webmaster World forum. "Many cache dates go back to 2004 January." Others report long-extinct pages showing up as "Supplemental Results."

With creating junk web pages is so cheap and easy to do, Google is engaged in an arms race with search engine optimizers. Each innovation designed to bring clarity to the web, such as tagging, is rapidly exploited by spammers or site owners wishing to harvest some classified advertising revenue.