It sounds counterintuitive to involve the government in anything that has to do with the Internet, but instilling trust means stopping the fraudster email problem.

If they could agree on a third-party service that could be the receptacle on a 24/7 basis for rapid account suspension, the 419 Fraud problem might dwindle down to a trickle quickly.

A fast shutdown process, however, thwarts the predators, and protects the innocents that we let use the Internet, despite its enormous potential for fraud.

The service, called KISSmetrics, is used by sites to track the number of visitors, what the visitors do on the site, and where they come to the site from - and the company says it does a more comprehensive job than its competitors such as Google Analytics.

"Both the Hulu and KISSmetrics code is pretty enlightening," Soltani told Wired.com in an e-mail. "These services are using practically every known method to circumvent user attempts to protect their privacy (Cookies, Flash Cookies, HTML5, CSS, Cache Cookies/Etags...) creating a perpetual game of privacy 'whack-a-mole'."

App developer Michael Lee Johnson, conscious of the need to be big on Google+ or be nobody, wondered what the best way to levitate his Google+ circles might be. He hit upon a fine idea: he placed an ad on Facebook. It was a simple thing that was headlined: "Add Michael to Google+."

You're not guessing what happened with the ad, are you? You know what happened, don't you? Facebook didn't, according to Johnson, merely erase this heinous horse of Troy from its pages. It reportedly banned all his other campaigns too.

Vrignaud, it seems, committed the foul of using more than 250 GB of data on Comcast two months in a row, triggering the company's overage policy that results in a year-long ban from using its services.

And all Comcast is saying is that he's kicked off - and under the terms of the ban, he can't even switch to a uncapped, higher-priced, lower-speed business connection.

Spokesman Charlie Douglas says the 250 GB limit, which it imposed in October 2008 after agreeing to not throttle peer-to-peer traffic, is intended to keep users like Vrignaud from impacting their neighbors.

"People should be careful if they have a terabyte of data to back-up," Douglas said. "They should manage their consumption carefully, and do it over time."

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said there were were 41% fewer websites at the end of 2010 than a year earlier.

Civil rights campaigners have long railed against China's web censors, who impose controls known as the Great Firewall of China.

A number of websites are routinely blocked, such as the BBC's Chinese language service, and social media sites like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter.

"Total WordPress sites just passed '50 million' today!", wrote Wordpress core developer Andrew Nacin yesterday as he pointed readers to the ever-counting up Wordpress user clock.

The Wordpress stats page also provides other fascinating information, such as the fact that in the week ending 3 July its users enjoyed some 579,930,820 page views of 2,794,824 posts.

At approximately 21:20 GMT a hacker took control of the Twitter account of online payment broker PayPal UK.

For almost two hours the attackers had control of the profile and have even taken to changing the avatar photo. As of 23:15 GMT the profile had been taken offline.

It appears whoever has hacked the account is having some kind of a dispute with PayPal over a frozen account.

Facebook Friend Exporter is a Chrome extension developed by Mohamed Mansour, an open source software engineer, that lets you grab all the information about your Facebook friends so you can import them elsewhere. Because it got popular recently, Facebook noticed and began to block the extension.

Mansour says that Facebook removed emails from their mobile site, which were critical to the original design of his extension. He told me that the company had implemented a throttling mechanism: if you visit any friend page five times in a short period of time, the email field is removed.

It seems that a hacker who uses Twitter obtained parts of the Florida voting database which has been subsequently posted to Paste2.

"So, this is a little ironic. Here is inside details of florida voting systems. Now.. who still believes voting isn't rigged? If the United States Government can't even keep their ballot systems secure, why trust them at all? FAIL!"

One thing is for sure though, it's hard to imagine that this would not have very big political implications.

So The Times, a long-standing UK newspaper known across the world can stand proud and say that as of this week, 100,000 people are reading it and the Sunday Times combined every month.

Meanwhile, having seen the newspaper's latest figures as reported by Nielsen, we can tell you that in May 2011 both newspapers had 11.9 million page impressions, while in April of last year that number was 40.6 million.

The newspapers' reach has also fallen, down from around seven per cent to around two per cent, a decline of over 71 per cent from its previous readership.