In a blog post, the company said it has parked its Street View cars and stopped collecting data after it realized that it has been inadvertently collecting data about people's online activities from unsecured Wi-Fi networks over the past four years.

Google said that it recently discovered it has accumulated about 600 gigabytes of data transmitted over public Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries.

The code that was written to collect the data was part of an experimental Wi-Fi project started in 2006.

Facebook was outted on Thursday as a distributor of unwanted applications, some of which install adware or are added to user profiles without permission.

As noted earlier by PC World, the social networking site silently adds apps to profiles whenever a user is logged in and browses to certain sites. Facebook displays no dialogue box or notification window asking permission, and there is no easy way to opt out of the process.

With nearly a month to go before News International raises its first paywall in June, both Times Online and Sun Online have stopped publishing their user numbers through the ABC in the UK.

This means it will be hard to see exactly how many readers Times Online will lose when it starts charging £1 a day and £2 a week starting June.

As Rupert Murdoch is getting ready to put paywalls on two of his UK publications, The Times of London and The Sunday Times, his competitors are remaining adamantly free online.

In fact, it seems likely that if Murdoch locks up his content behind a paywall, that will only drive more readers to sites like The Daily Mail and The Guardian and boost their ad revenue...

Google has always claimed that under the new policy, it "anonymizes" IPs - even though it doesn't.

And as Soghoian has pointed out, if a cookie stays intact for 18 months, then restoring those missing eight bits is trivial. Though Google erases the bits on your nine-month-old search queries, they remain intact on your newer queries - and both sets of queries carry the same cookie info.

We've heard that select Facebook partners will now be able to look for your existing Facebook cookie to identify you, even if you never opted into Facebook Connect on the site you're visiting. Using that, the third party site will be able to display your friends and other key information. It's possible that these sites will also be able to display any data you've shared with 'everyone', which is of course now the default option on Facebook.

But by default, you're all in. How convenient.

Facebook has contributed to a resurgence in the sexually-transmitted disease syphilis, a health expert has claimed.

Professor Peter Kelly, director of public health in Teesside, claimed staff had found a link between social networking sites and the spread of the bacteria, especially among young women.

"Social networking sites are making it easier for people to meet up for casual sex."

Starting last December, individuals and businesses that wished to register a .cn domain name were being asked to submit a photograph of themselves as well as a serial number identifying their business license in China.

Google's Alan Davidson, director of public policy, also plans to speak before the hearing, coming two days after Google announced its decision to move its Chinese-language search engine from mainland China to Hong Kong in order to bypass government laws on Internet censorship.

One researcher said that Waledac now seems to be abandoned. "It looks crippled, if not dead," said Jose Nazario, a senior security researcher at Arbor Networks.

Waledac was not nearly the largest botnet in operation, nor was it even one of the top spam-producing botnets. It numbered somewhere fewer than 100,000 infected PCs.

The plan, which involved working with law enforcement and ISPs to take down nearly 300 .com domains involved in the botnet as well as disrupting the communications among the bots, appears to have worked as designed.

You can also compile and store a health profile by adding test results, names of medications, insurance information, and electronic medical records from your computer or from third-party partners.

Since the launch of Google Health in 2008, the company has been touting the service as a benefit to consumers eager to find medical information and keep tabs on their own health care history.

Access to your account is also retrieved through a simple Gmail password, so your medical information is only as safe as your account password.