A distributed denial-of-service attack that affected thousands of customers at Codero and other hosting providers appeared to come from within China and to be launched at a Chinese site that is critical of communism or its Domain Name System provider, Codero said today.

"We were receiving more than 1.5 million packets per second in the attack. It paralyzed our core routers, and our upstream providers were unable to pinpoint where the target IPs were," he said.

As well as missing e-mails, many reported that their contacts had also disappeared.

In a statement, Google said: "This is affecting less than .08% of our Gmail user base, and we've already fixed the problem for some individuals."

He told BBC News that although service was being restored, many users were angry about the way the outage had been handled.

Google has made a major change to its search algorithms in order to try to scrub more link farm results from appearing near the top of search results.

Results almost always contain at least one or two links to pages that have merely scraped content from other sites based on "hot" search terms likely to attract people from search engines.

Discussions should focus on requiring that communication providers and Web sites have legally mandated procedures to divulge unencrypted data in their possession.

In response to lobbying from the FBI, a House committee in 1997 approved a bill that would have banned the manufacture, distribution, or import of any encryption product that did not include a back door for the federal government.

Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., said that the panel's members received a secret briefing last week from the FBI, but that the bureau should make its arguments in public. "It is critical that we discuss this issue in as public a matter as possible," he said.

A Senate proposal that has become known as the Internet "kill switch" bill was reintroduced this week, with a tweak its backers say eliminates the possibility of an Egypt-style disconnection happening in the United States.

But the revised wording continues to alarm civil liberties groups and other critics of the bill, who say the language would allow the government to shut down portions of the Internet or restrict access to certain Web sites or types of content.

Some of the companies and industry groups listed as supporting last June's version of the bill, before the protests in Egypt, the FBI's push on Internet wiretapping, and the Justice Department's campaign for Internet data retention, stopped short of endorsing the revised version.

The FBI pushed Thursday for more built-in backdoors for online communication, but beat a hasty retreat from its earlier proposal to require providers of encrypted communications services to include a backdoor for law enforcement wiretaps.

The FBI's further push for expanded powers to wiretap online communications in real time comes against the backdrop of revolutions in the Middle East that relied heavily on social media communication tools and as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for worldwide internet freedom.

Apple finally unveiled the shape of its new subscription model for the App store today, confirming that it will force magazine and newspaper publishers to hand over 30 per cent of their cover price.

Apple's process will give buyers the "option" of providing their name, email, and zip code.

It's almost certainly going to be too much for Amazon, who may discontinue their iOS Kindle app, rather than make a substantial loss on sales.

The reverberations of Wikileaks publication of so many confidential and secret documents will be felt for many years, and he has attracted a large band of supporters, but the support for Assange is as much about his personal situation as it is an expression of support for what Wikileaks does or proposes to do.

Napster was neutered by court action in the US, but its failure inspired peer-to-peer services that were far harder to control. The sharing of music is now unstoppable, and Wikileaks and the organisations that come after it will ensure that the same is now true of secrets.

When Craigslist withdrew from the adult services business last year, some wondered whether the prostitution business would be driven to less obvious and, perhaps, more dangerous places.

Venkatesh estimates that 83 percent of prostitutes have a Facebook page. Moreover, he believes that by the end of 2011, Facebook "will be the leading online recruitment space."

Even in 2008, he estimates that 25 percent of prostitutes' regular clients came through Facebook (compared with only 3 percent through Craigslist).

In recent months Google has received dozens of copyright infringement warnings from MPAA-affiliated movies studios.

The movie studios are not happy and are warning the search giant that it might get disconnected from the Internet.

This is an awkward situation for a company that is trying to help out the entertainment industry, and has even revealed a censorship policy towards certain BitTorrent-related terms.