Basically there are sites out there that completely focus their efforts on SEO and not content and those results would rank higher than sites that don’t focus on SEO.

The search engine at Google is about to go through a major overhaul and de-prioritizing sites with heavy SEO is just a small part in the big picture to bring better search results. The changes to the search engine will be coming in the next few months.

Last July, Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable and other bandwidth providers announced that they had agreed to adopt policies designed to discourage customers from pirating music, movies and software over the Web. Since then, the ISPs have been very quiet about their antipiracy measures.

The program, commonly referred to as "graduated response," requires that ISPs send out one or two educational notices to those customers who are accused of downloading copyrighted content illegally. If the customer doesn't stop, the ISP is then asked to send out "confirmation notices" asking that they confirm that they have received notice.

Hackers claim to have stolen the details of more than 73,000 subscribers to porn site Digital Playground.

The data includes user names, email addresses and passwords. Also taken were the numbers, expiry dates and security codes for 40,000 credit cards.

Manwin management was overseeing the investigation and Digital Playground subscribers had been contacted to let them know what had happened.

In Maryland, job seekers applying to the state's Department of Corrections have been asked during interviews to log into their accounts and let an interviewer watch while the potential employee clicks through wall posts, friends, photos and anything else that might be found behind the privacy wall.

Student-athletes in colleges around the country also are finding out they can no longer maintain privacy in Facebook communications because schools are requiring them to "friend" a coach or compliance officer, giving that person access to their “friends-only” posts.

RapidGator, one of the file-hosting sites that grew exponentially following the Megaupload shutdown last month, has been banned by PayPal. As a result, the Russian-based site says it will close the service in a month. According to PayPal, the RapidGator account was closed due to the “high risks” associated with processing payments to file-sharing services.

PayPal has frozen the cyberlocker’s funds for 6 months and new users can no longer make payments through PayPal. The ban probably means that “affiliates” can’t be paid through PayPal either.

If its .music is approved by ICANN, the domains will be limited to members of accredited music industry associations and will be regularly patrolled for copyright infringement.

“We’re definitely looking at content, and besides the vetting process, in the registrant agreement there’ll be a warrant you’re not going to violate anyone’s intellectual property rights,” said Styll.

“We’re retaining the right to conduct searches. If we find evidence of infringing activity we’ll give you the opportunity to correct that, or we can take down the site,” he said.

Facebook is still working on deleting photos from its servers in a timely manner nearly three years after Ars first brought attention to the topic.

When we asked Facebook about it, we were told that the company was "working with our content delivery network (CDN) partner to significantly reduce the amount of time that backup copies persist."

Amusingly, after publishing the 2010 followup, Facebook appeared to delete my photos from its CDN that I had linked in the piece. The company never offered me any explanation, but my photos were the only ones that were deleted at that time.

But with the process not expected to be finished until a couple months from now—and unfortunately, with a company history of stretching the truth when asked about this topic—we'll have to see it before we believe it.

In its very own press release on the subject, it goes much further: it flings the ultimate insult at Hollywood by claiming that not only are the two of them spiritual kin, but that The Pirate Bay is the New Hollywood.

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: "stole") other peoples creative works, without paying for it.

The Wikipedia encyclopedia and blogging service WordPress are among the highest profile pages to remove material.

Google is showing solidarity by placing a black box over its logo when US-based users visit its site.

The news recommendation site Reddit, the online magazine Boing Boing, the software download service Tucows and the German hackers' group the Chaos Computer Congress also removed access to their content.

ICANN has started to accept applications for new generic top level domains, which will include words for brands, and non-Latin characters.

ICANN has faced a number of criticisms of the application process, including that the fee, at $185,000 (£120,000), may be too high for applicants from smaller organisations, charities, and developing countries.

Some organisations have called ICANN's ability to provide efficient internet governance of thousands of new TLDs into doubt.