Growing concern over copyright infringement has resulted in an extremely strict and in some cases privacy-violating set of requirements being laid down by the payment processing company.

Just how far PayPal is prepared to go is explained by Putlocker. The UK-based company had its PayPal account frozen three months ago after it refused to allow the payment provider to snoop on files uploaded by its users.

“They basically wanted access to the backend to monitor all the files being uploaded, and listing all files of users if they wanted, regardless of the privacy setting that the user might have selected,” Putlocker told TorrentFreak.

This month, if everything goes according to schedule, your Internet service provider may begin monitoring your account, just to make sure you aren't doing anything wrong with it -- like sharing copyrighted movie or music files.

The effort, dubbed the Center for Copyright Information, hopes to combat the illegal downloading and sharing of movies and music by monitoring it at the source - your computer.

So instead of reaching out to the Internet to track down illegally flowing bits of their movies, the studios will sit back while ISP's "sniff" the packets of data coming to and from their customers' computers.

This is strong proof that trying to force a change in behavior simply doesn’t work — especially on the internet, where its denizens value freedom above all else. History is full of shutdowns and blockades — Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, Megaupload — and yet file sharing is still just as prevalent. Instead of pissing away billions of dollars on lobbying governments and law enforcement agencies, the only way to truly curb file sharing is to provide an equivalent or better service than torrent sites and digital file lockers.

Amazon tells its customers to plan for this to happen, and to be ready to roll over to a new data center whenever there’s an outage.

According to Twitter messages from Netflix Director of Cloud Architecture Adrian Cockcroft and Instagram Engineer Rick Branson, it looks like an Amazon Elastic Load Balancing service, designed to spread Netflix’s processing loads across data centers, failed during the outage. Without that ELB service working properly, the Netflix and Pintrest services hosted by Amazon crashed.

Friday’s outage wasn’t nearly as severe as the one that took out Amazon in April 2011. Then, a botched network update rolled across several data centers, causing widespread outages on the Amazon cloud.

When Facebook forced its hundreds of millions of users into an @facebook account, commenters across the Internet talked about alterations that had begun in their contacts and address books outside Facebook -- valid e-mail addresses were being changed for @Facebook without people's awareness or consent on their phones and computers.

We now also see that the interception of people's e-mail communication with Facebook's new change is deeply problematic and potentially grave.

Suspected internet pirates will have 20 working days to appeal against allegations of copyright infringement and must pay £20 to do so, according to revised plans to enforce the UK's Digital Economy Act.

Campaign group Consumer Focus chief executive Mike O'Connor said: "Copyright infringement is not to be condoned, but people who are innocent should not have to pay a fee to challenge accusations."

"We urge ISPs to begin building their systems now and to work constructively with rights holders, Ofcom and government to get notice-sending up and running as soon as possible," said John Smith, general secretary of the Musicians' Union."

Dotcom set up a new Twitter account (@kimdotcom) and started sending out thanks to his supporters. They include Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who Dotcom apparently met with while still under house arrest.

Dotcom also promoted the launch of MegaBox with a post to Twitter. He tweeted a screenshot of the MegaBox app, writing, "The major Record Labels thought MegaBox is dead. Artists rejoice. It is coming and it will unchain you."

You might not be so happy to find out that from now, every single thing you do online will be recorded and stored by the good old Internet Service providers (ISP). What do we mean by online activity? Well, everything. From exchanging emails, browsing history, instant messaging to the most important use of social networks.

“The bill is as expected – an unprecedented and unwarranted attack on our privacy that will see the government track where we make calls, who we e-mail and what everyone does online. We are all suspects now.“

So few people voted on proposed changes to Facebook's privacy and user rights policies that even though most of the votes were against the changes the company will be adopting the revised policies after all.

That's less than 1 percent -- .038 percent to be exact -- of the total 900 million active monthly Facebook users. The results would be binding only if 30 percent of all users, or 270 million, had voted.

"Given these efforts and the subsequent turnout, we plan to review this process to determine how to maximize our ability to promote user engagement and participation in our site governance process in the future," he wrote.

As users have noticed, the Camera app requires iOS' Location Services to be turned on so it can access your locally stored photos, and the app won't let you upload a shot if you simply deny it location access from the get-go.

The work around: Just make sure that when you take photos with the iPhone camera, you've turned off location permissions. No GPS data is then attached to your photos. Then you can go into Facebook Camera and upload them location-free.

Also, while it will be little comfort to those truly paranoid about location privacy, users of the app can choose whether to share a photo's location data when posting it to Facebook.