Skype users in China will have to wait until 2008 to make phone calls from their PCs to landlines under new rules from the Chinese government. Wang Leilei, CEO of Chinese Internet group Tom Online, said that his government "is not going to issue VoIP licenses until 2008," and even then, nothing is assured.

Due to its popularity, Skype is a special target of the government's ire. Though the Chinese version of the software offered through Tom Online does not include SkypeOut (the name for Skype's PC-to-landline service), users can easily download the full software directly from Skype's website and use it to make international calls that are far cheaper than those available from China Telecom. China Telecom, a state owned firm, has apparently had enough of its upstart competition and managed to block most Skype calls last year. With VoIP apparently under central control, the government seems intent on taking its time in allowing the new technology into the Chinese market.

It's former "Net Queen", space cadet, and Register reader favorite Esther Dyson, whose latest transmission has been captured, decoded and published by the New York Times.

Well, as she explained in the Times on Friday, it unleashes the goodness of market forces. And the doubleplus emergent goodness of Darwinian evolution!

Instead, AOL and Yahoo! are endorsing a scheme which guarantees to deliver email to their subscribers only if the senders have paid an intermediary of their choice. Which happens to be GoodMail Systems.

Email sent from the rest of the world, which GoodMail considers "uncertified", must therefore risk running through AOL and Yahoo!'s discrimination process. And as this potential profit center for the two net giants takes off, there's no incentive for either company to deliver the "free email" - and every incentive for them to get the world conditioned to paying for guaranteed delivery.

It's as if the police began charging crime victims for the guarantee that they would log and investigate an incident. Do you think the crime figures would begin to rise or fall with the introduction of such an "innovation"?

When you earn on a dollar a day, paying a cent for send is not a trivial amount. (Let's put it this way, when Esther herself earned $10,000 a day for providing vacuities to ignorant dotcom companies, that would have worked out as $100 an email.)

"In my case," she says, "I'd have a list. I'd charge nothing for people I know, 50 cents for anyone new … and $3 for random advertisers. Ex-boyfriends pay $10."

Google has been ordered to turn over some data on sites in its popular search engine to the US federal government -- but only 50,000, far fewer than the government wanted, under a judge's ruling.

But he rejected the Justice Department's attempt to obtain more sensitive data that might disclose the online search habits of web users, noting that that could spark a possible "loss of good will" among its users.

Federal prosecutors sought the information as ammunition in a legal fight to revive an overturned 1998 statute making it a crime for websites to allow minors access to adult material online such as pornography.

The government wants the information to bolster an effort to resurrect the law, which it contends made it tougher for minors to access pornography on the Internet.

The Chicago Tribune says it has compiled a list of 2,653 CIA employees, just by searching the internet.

The newspaper said it gathered the information from online services that compile public data, that any fee-paying subscriber can access.

It did not publish the names, at the CIA's request. Many of the agents are believed to be covert. The paper also located two dozen "secret" facilities.

The paper also identified facilities in Chicago, northern Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah and Washington state. It said some were heavily guarded, but others appeared outwardly to be private residences.

Asked how so many personal details of CIA employees had found their way into the public domain, a senior US intelligence official told the Tribune "I don't have a great explanation, quite frankly".

Asked about fears that the details might be accessed by terrorist groups, he replied: "I don't know whether al-Qaeda could do this, but the Chinese could."

Surfing the Internet is now more popular than watching television, according to new figures.

It is believed to be the first time that using the Internet has overtaken what was traditionally seen as the nation's favourite pastime.

And experts claim that future computer-literate generations will see an increase in the amount of time spent online. Analysts from TNS surveyed more than 1,000 adults aged 16 to 64 for the Internet search engine Google. They found that, on average, we spend 164 minutes online every day compared to 148 minutes watching television. One reason for the increase is thought to be that many people can access the Internet at work.

Google wants to mirror and index every byte of your hard drive, relegating your PC to a "cache", notes on a company PowerPoint presentation reveal.

The file accompanied part of Google's analyst day last week. Google has since withdrawn the file, telling the BBC that the information was not intended for publication.

The justification for this enormous data grab is that Google would be able to restore your data after a catastrophic system failure.

Perhaps it's Google's gift to the US government. In August 2003, Admiral John M Poindexter was forced to resign after his 'Total Information Awareness' data mining program was revealed to be indexing "everyday transactions as credit card purchases, travel reservations and e-mail."

A week long experiment to run an international scientific computing grid under working conditions has resulted in sustained transfer rates of a gigabyte per second.

Tony Doyle, leader of the UK particle physics grid, said that corresponds to transferring a DVD worth of scientific data every five seconds. "At these rates it would take 25 days to transfer the nearly 400,000 films listed at IMDB.com and only an hour and a half to transfer the 1,000 flms produced each year by Mumbai-based Bollywood."

RAL works with sites at UK universisties to form GridPP, the UK particle physics grid, consisting of over 4,000 CPUs and 250 terabytes of storage.

Google last night revealed their plans to offer Gmail service for third party mail servers. Currently in beta, the service will allow mail server operators to essentially hand the reigns over to Google's Gmail cluster.

This is probably about as close to an ideal turn-key solution for e-mail as you can get. Colleges, small-to-medium sized businesses, non-profits, and others should see this as a stellar opportunity to essentially "outsource" their e-mail-and all that comes with it (downtime, spam management, etc.)-to Google. How many organizations can offer 2GB of e-mail space and a user interface as refined as Gmail? Not many. How many can do it for free? Practically none.

As with other recent Google ventures—such as adding remote logging service to Google Talk and adding Search Across Computers to Google Desktop Search—this announcement also suffers from a bit of the bad timing blues. This now makes the third new development to come out of Google in the wake of their battle with the US government over the infamous search data subpoena.

Google has added a chat feature to Gmail. It brings Google Talk, minus voice calls, into your webmail client. Gmail now also logs your IMs, whether they originate in Gmail or Google Talk. In the commentary at InsideGoogle, I note that Google recommends you disable Firefox's AdBlock, which can block Google's ads, if you want Gmail Chat to function properly.

The car maker BMW has had its German website bmw.de delisted from Google. The delisting was punishment for using deceptive means to boost page ranking, which has now been set to zero for BMW. Matt Cutts, a Google employee who works to stop unethical search manipulation, originally reported the delisting in his blog and suggests that camera maker Ricoh is not far behind.