As BP sweats to clean up the oil spill in Gulf of Mexico, it is simultaneously waging a public relations (PR) war, trying to fend a wave of negative attention, by buying search phrases like "oil spill" on Google and Yahoo.

While a host of companies resort to this strategy in crisis situation, BP has received flak from many critics who condemned the move as unethical.

HP is set to unveil a line of printers with their own email addresses, allow people to print from devices such as smartphones and the iPad.

That will allow users to email their documents or photos directly to their own - or someone else's - printer.

HP predicted it will sell 15 million of the web-ready printers by next year.

Apple is hyping HMTL5 again, this time with a new website purporting to show open web development in action.

But Mozilla, Opera, and Google support Javascript and parts of HTML5 and CSS3 in newer versions of their browsers. And Apple's demos only work with Safari.

"It's because Apple uses browser sniffing and vendor prefixes, and in addition to that they aren't really testing a lot of HTML5 at all. Most of their demos seem to have got nothing to do with HTML5, as a matter of fact."

Its video demos won't work in Opera or Firefox because its two rivals refuse to use H.264, preferring open and royalty-free coding instead. Apple, along with Microsoft and others, is part of the patent pool that licenses H.264 to the rest of the world.

After mistakenly saying that it did not collect Wi-Fi payload data, Google had to reverse itself, saying, 'it's now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) Wi-Fi networks.' OK, mistakes happen. But, as Seinfeld might ask, then what's the deal with the pending Google patent that describes capturing wireless data packets by operating a device - which 'may be placed in a vehicle' - in a 'sniffer' or 'monitor' mode and analyzing them on a server?

Although they are not the first papers to erect pay barriers around their content, the papers are going a step further by making most of their site invisible to Google's Web crawler. Except for their homepages, no stories will show up on Google.

The British papers are the first within the News Corp. fold to jump off the search bandwagon.

Mountain View has released a browser add-on that opts you out of Google Analytics, the traffic monitoring service now used by 71 per cent of the top domains on the interwebs.

According to a study from the University of California, Berkeley, Google Analytics was used on 71 per cent of roughly 400,000 top domains as of March 2009.

The Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on is available for Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Google Chrome 4.x and higher, and Mozilla Firefox 3.5 and higher.

Google May 21 began adding SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption for its search engine, a direct response to the company's accidental collection of users' personal information in countries all over the world.

Privacy advocates have been calling for Google to SSL-enable its search for years; the WiFi privacy gaffe accelerated Google's plans to offer SSL for search.

The company turned on HTTPS as the primary setting for Gmail one day after revealing that the Gmail accounts of users had been accessed in a Chinese cyber-attack.

Sixty percent of respondents to a Sophos poll say they are considering quitting Facebook due to privacy fears.

Of roughly 1,600 people surveyed, 60 percent said it is either "highly likely" or "possible" that they will leave Facebook due to concerns over privacy. Just 24 percent said they either wouldn't leave or it is "not likely." The remaining 16 percent of the respondents had already left the site.

Earlier in 2010, Sophos conducted a survey of businesses that rated Facebook ahead of Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace as the riskiest social networking site.

Facebook has been giving advertisers data that they can use to discover users' names and locations, contrary to its privacy policy.

Advertisers were getting reports whenever users clicked on their ads, as is typical across the web. However, Facebook and MySpace's reports contained the URL of the user's profile page, which often included their real name or user name.

Major changes to its privacy settings are expected after it decided to publish users' private information, and IM transcripts showed CEO Mark Zuckerberg calling those same users "dumb fucks" for trusting him with their data.

Even without cookies, popular browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox give websites enough information to get a unique picture of their visitors about 94 percent of the time, according to research compiled over the past few months by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

This means that most Internet users are a lot less anonymous than they believe, Eckersley said. 'Even if you turn off cookies and you use a proxy to hide your IP address, you could still be tracked,' he said.