Aside from speed, one crucial difference between e-mail and snail mail is that e-mail is free. That's about to change, as AOL and Yahoo are going to start charging anywhere from 1/4¢ to 1¢ to guarantee that messages will wind up in the inboxes of the recipients. Free e-mail will still be accepted, but there will be no guarantee that it will find its way through the spam filters and into users' inboxes.

Both companies are defending the surcharge, pitching it as a way to guarantee reputable companies (i.e., those willing to pony up the cost per message) that their messages will make it to their intended audience.

And just like the post office, AOL and Yahoo will be making money on the whole venture. The payments will be made to a third party, a company called Goodmail that says its mission is "to bring safety and reliability to e-mail for the benefit of all participants." Goodmail will keep half of the payments and pass the rest of the e-mail charges onto Yahoo and AOL.

In addition, AOL and Yahoo run the risk of angering their own subscribers if expected e-mail doesn't arrive because the sender decided not pay the surcharge. Cutting down on the volume of unwanted e-mail is a worthwhile goal, but AOL and Yahoo are going about it the wrong way by charging senders.

Microsoft and Cisco have turned down an invite to attend a Feb. 1 Congressional briefing on freedom of speech and the Internet in China, according to a report from AFP News. Google and Yahoo have not yet given a final answer on whether they will attend, according to the report.

An investigation published Thursday by CNET News.com showed that Google's new China search engine not only censored criticisms of the Chinese government, but went further than similar services from Microsoft and Yahoo by targeting sites related to teen pregnancy, alcohol, dating and homosexuality.

The Internet "is contributing to Chinese political engagement" as "access to the outside world is preventing more censorship," Gates was quoted as saying in an article in The Times Online.

Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft, took the rare step of standing up for arch-rival Google today as he argued that state censorship was no reason for technology companies not to do business in China.

The richest man in the world told delegates at the World Economic Forum in Davos that he thought the internet "is contributing to Chinese political engagement" as "access to the outside world is preventing more censorship".

This week, Google created controversy when it entered the Chinese market on Beijing's terms. Writing on Times Online today, Irene Khan, the secretary-general of Amnesty International, said that Google had "reinforced the trend in the IT industry of kowtowing to Chinese demands of censorship".

She said: "Last year, Yahoo provided the Chinese with details leading to the arrest and sentencing of a journalist; Microsoft has barred a blog critical of the government and launched a portal blocking the use of words such as 'freedom' and 'democracy'. Now Google has weeded out websites that China does not like."

A first-instance district court of Darmstadt, Germany, confirmed yesterday that Internet service providers may not store any customer data other than that required for invoicing purposes.

To abide by the ruling, ISPs are obliged to delete whatever information they garner from their customers, including ISP addresses, which would allow the ISP to track whatever web sites a customer visits.

T-Online customer Holger Voss argued that his service provider had overstepped the mark by storing data above and beyond that which it needed for invoicing purposes. The court agreed with him.

In Germany, ISPs are also obliged to hand over whatever data they may have on customers to the customer, on request.

From the Gmail Help Center, we learn that Gmail "doesn't recognize dots" within usernames. So to Google's mail server, eric.bangeman[at]gmail.com and ericbangeman[at]gmail.com appear the same.

This Gmail "feature" routed mail we sent to different variations of our test account to the same inbox. At least Gmail respects the period when it comes to logging into Gmail accounts. That means eric.bangeman can't log into ericbangeman's account, even though he'll be getting some of his e-mail. In theory, however, the ericbangeman account shouldn't exist if the other account is already created, because Google ignores the periods when looking at available usernames.

I guess it's still in beta for a reason, but I wonder how Google will respond to this. The simplest course of action appears to be tell the mail server about periods and all their wonderful uses, viz. separating parts of a username and distinguishing it from other usernames with identical occurrences and combinations of alphanumeric characters. Why would you want to get e-mail that isn't sent to you, anyway?

The US Department of Justice has taken Google to court, demanding it hand over all searches made in a one week period. It's a fishing expedition, unconnected with any ongoing criminal prosecution. The DOJ wants the information to back up its attempt to revive an anti-pornography law derailed by the Supreme Court two years ago.

The subpoena was issued last year, and Google refused the request - but we only learn of the case week, via a San Jose Mercury News report. The DoJ has now ordered a Federal Judge to force Google to comply.

Google sets its cookies to expire in 2038, and launched products and services which make that cookie personally identifiable with a user, such as GMail, and a "personalized" search page.

"We are moving to a Google that knows more about you," Google CEO Eric Schmidt promised last year.

If, as looks likely, the DoJ succeeds, then surfers worldwide will have a US Attorney General who knows a lot more about you, too.

A German Court has ordered the German-language version of Wikipedia shut down after the family of deceased phreaker/hacker "Tron" sued Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. for using the deceased's full name in an entry. Currently, visitors to wikipedia.de are greeted with a notice that the site has been taken offline as the result of a provisional court order.

He had spent much of his teen years working on hacking and at one point, produced working clones of German phone cards. He also created a working prototype for a phone that could handle voice encryption on its own. In October 1998, he was reported missing, and his body was found a few days later in a Berlin park. The official verdict was suicide, but his family and some of his associates harbor suspicions that he was the victim of foul play.

When the existence of the article-which appeared on wikipedia.de on May 31, 2005-became known to the family, they responded with a lawsuit. On Tuesday, a judge sided with the family and ordered wikipedia.de be taken down until the offending content was removed.

The W32/Nyxem-D worm (also known as Email-Worm.Win32.VB.bi or W32.Blackmal.E@mm) can spread via email using a variety of pornographic disguises, in an attempt to disable security software. If launched it tries to disable a number of anti-virus and firewall products, and attempts to harvest other email addresses from the infected computer, in an effort to spread itself further.

"Companies should educate their users to practise safe computing - that includes never opening unsolicited email attachments and discouraging the sending and receiving of joke files, pornography and funny photographs and screensavers," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "This worm feeds on people's willingness to receive salacious content on their desktop computer, but they could be putting their entire company's data at risk."

Why do we still let our government attach totally unrelated bills to each other to sneak in terribly written laws? It seems to keep happening, and the latest one is that a bill attached to a bigger bill concerning funding the Department of Justice (something very few politicians would ever vote against) has a tiny bit of language that now means if you're anonymously annoying online, you face two years in jail. The specific text says that using the internet "without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy... shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both." Yes. "Intent to annoy" seems like an incredibly vague standard and has basically criminalized an awful lot of the internet -- including quite a few of the folks who comment here at Techdirt. Anyway, for those of you who enjoy anonymously trolling all over the place online -- watch out. You may face jailtime. Of course, it seems quite unlikely that "intent to annoy" would hold up under Constitutional review, but it may be some time until that test case comes.

The Chinese government regularly censors Internet content in an effort to diminish the distribution of politically subversive material, but now the communist state is expanding its control and targetting Internet pornography web sites as well.

With more than 100 million Internet users, China has the second largest population of web content consumers after the United States. Although the Chinese government promotes web use for business, education, and government activity, the communist regime has committed its resources to crushing web sites that challenge government authority, or distribute content that the government considers to be detrimental to society.

The Chinese government also recently increased surveillance of mobile phone text messaging, a popular method of communication in China where 383 million individuals use mobile phones. According to Wu Heping, vice minister of the Ministry of Public Security, Chinese law enforcement agents have found 107,000 illegal text messages since the start of November, and have consequently pulled the plug on approximately 9,700 cell phone accounts.