The goal of The High Authority for the Protection of works on the Internet (HADOPI) is to stop piracy, but French internet users are learning that the only thing HADOPI has effectively stopped is low rates for an internet connection.

What's ridiculous is the fact that, now, those who aren't pirating material are also being punished for these laws as well. Meanwhile, pirates are migrating to more secure sources, so the only people HADOPI is really punishing are non-pirates and pirates who don't know what they are doing.

According to multiple postings on Microsoft's official support forum for Windows Live, a number of users are reporting that their entire Hotmail accounts have been completely deleted without warning.

Users can still log in sans issue. However, they arrive at empty inboxes: No custom folders, no messages in "Sent" or "Deleted," nothing.

Google's Matt Cutts, in charge of much of the search giant's antispam efforts, tweeted over the past week that Google plans to take a closer look at the practice of "cloaking," or presenting one look to a Googlebot crawling one's site while presenting another look to users.

Still, it's rare for Cutts and Google to announce this type of algorithmic shift so publicly, which implies they're giving Webmasters a warning shot in order to reexamine their sites before the ranking changes go into effect, and that rankings may be a little fluid as it rolls out.

A New York Times report intimates that WikiLeaks cables reveal that Li was rather taken aback that he could put his own name in that helpful Google search box and, within a mere breath-length, up would pop entries that were not uniformly supportive of his politics or being.

If the WikiLeaked cables are accurate, they might well reflect the notion not merely that when a Chinese leader googled himself, he saw a threat to political hegemony.

Sunde has lost a domain in the past because of the way ICANN acted. It was taken without any consultation on their part, instead the organization relied on information from recording industry group IFPI to change the domain ownership.

His plan involves the creation of a DNS root server to begin with that uses peer-to-peer technology and is secure. It will be quite basic, but open and secure which is what Sunde wants.

The attack comes around the time of an expected release of classified State Department documents, which the Obama administration says will put "countless" lives at risk, threaten global counterterrorism operations and jeopardize U.S. relations with its allies. The expected released of State Department documents is expected to be seven times the size of the 400,000 Iraq war documents released in October.

Google has been given the go-ahead by the U.K. Information Commissioner's Office to delete the data it collected from unsecured Wi-Fi networks as part of its Street View operation.

Google said it intends to erase the data as soon as possible. It told ZDNet UK that it is not subject to any outstanding legal proceedings in the U.K. over the data harvesting.

The website is also reporting that analysis of events, photos and friends on Facebook can be used to analyse email and sort messages by what it believes is the highest priority, something that doesn't seem creepy at all.

The majority of Facebook users who don't care one bit about their privacy are unlikely to give a passing thought about the ramifications of giving the firm access to their emails.

In October, authorities in the Netherlands took down several servers associated with the Bredolab botnet. The action followed the September closure of spamit.com, a key player in the unlicensed pharmaceuticals spam racket, and arrests in the US, UK and Ukraine of scores of suspected members of a ZeuS phishing Trojan ring.

A similar study by Kaspersky Lab, published on Wednesday, also reports a drop in spam volumes in Q3 2010 to around 82.3 per cent. It credits the disabling of control nodes for the Pushdo / Cutwail botnet (blamed for one in 10 junk mail messages worldwide) and the closure of Spamit.com for the decline in spam volumes.

Cooks Source magazine had been caught pulling a story off the internet and republishing it, without permission. Making matters worse, when called on it, the editor, Judith Griggs tried to lecture the original author, Monica Gaudio, with a hilariously wrong explanation of copyright and the public domain, and even (condescendingly) suggests Monica should pay her for the editing she needed to do on the story.

Nowhere in this is there any attempt to actually explain how she thought it was okay to repeatedly copy articles and photographs into a magazine while presenting them as if they had been specifically commissioned or licensed for the magazine.