Google has revealed that aerial fibre links to its data centre in Oregon were "regularly" shot down by hunters, forcing the company to put its cables underground.

"What people do for sport or because they're bored, they try to shoot at the insulators," Gill said.

"Every November when hunting season starts invariably we know that the fibre will be shot down, so much so that we are now building an underground path [for it]."

A hundred organizations fighting sex trafficking have joined the chorus of voices asking Craigslist to remove its erotic services section worldwide as the company has in the U.S.

The groups added that the few actions taken by Craigslist so far "do not measure up to the amount of daily harm being facilitated by Craigslist through the thousands of Erotic Services ads around the world each day."

Craigslist had resisted the public and political pressure at first, saying that it thoroughly screened each ad posted in the adult section.

During a three-month study of its global malware database, Panda Security found on average 57,000 new Web sites created each week with the aim of exploiting a brand name in order to steal information that can be used to drain peoples' bank accounts.

While many people are duped by the fake e-mail messages and attachments, there are typically some obvious clues that the message is not legitimate. Usually there are egregious misspellings, poor grammar, and bad punctuation.

Beyond the fact that not too many people are signing up to pay, the move has upset advertisers who don't want to advertise to such a small audience.

On top of that, various PR people and publicists are keeping their sources away from Times reporters, preferring to provide access to news organizations where the story might actually get seen by people, rather than locked up behind Murdoch's paywall.

eBay will be moving to a single, consolidated checkout process, and effective June 30, 2011, eBay Checkout will be the only checkout process on eBay.com.

A single, familiar checkout experience is key to reducing confusion and improving how people shop on eBay. We've been working with sellers and providers for some time and will continue to do so for a seamless transition next year.

Security researchers are reporting an uptick in malware hidden in .zip files being sent out in spam to Web users.

Unlike many of the other FedEx-related malware attacks in the past, the e-mails' message about a failed delivery comes in the form of an image rather than text - possibly in an attempt to avoid anti-spam filters.

Botnets are now responsible for sending 95 percent of all spam, up from 84 percent in April, and almost half of that spam comes from a single botnet, Rustock.

Rustock sent 41 percent of the world's botnet spam in August, up from 32 percent in April. This is despite the network actually shrinking in size from 2.5 million to 1.3 million bots over the same period, security company Symantec said on Tuesday.

Between July 4 and August 6 of this year, Telenet's single largest user slurped up 2.7TB of data. He was followed by similarly impressive downloaders who transferred 1.9TB, 1.5TB, and 1.3 TB.

Telenet doesn't want to call its plans "unlimited," but it does say that "'fair use' means that you can send and receive a very large quantity of data via the Telenet network.

The Federal Communications Commission reported this week that broadband users see about half the advertised "up to" speeds promised by Internet providers, and similar findings were made earlier this year in the UK.

Hungary faced the same issue and has tried to address it with a novel solution: ISPs must offer guaranteed minimum speeds.

A lawsuit filed in federal court last week alleges that a group of well-known Web sites, including those owned by Disney, Warner Bros. Records, and Demand Media, broke the law by secretly tracking the Web movements of their users, including children.

They allege the data was obtained by tracking users as they moved "across numerous Web sites, even spotting and tracking users when they accessed the Web from different computers, at home and at work.