Rival environmental groups are lining up supporters to try to take control of a new net domain aimed at green groups.

".eco should mean something and it should be about something more than just another domain," Trevor Bowden told BBC News.

The .eco domain has been made possible because of a relaxation on Icann's strict rules on top-level domain names.

Twitter was taken offline for more than two hours whilst Facebook's service was "degraded", according to the firms.

For example, in January this year Twitter announced that 33 accounts had been hacked, including those belonging to US President Barack Obama and singer Britney Spears.

"With the eyes of the world's media all trained on Twitter at the moment, those behind this latest attack may be using it as a means of highlighting the vulnerability of the sites we take for granted."

Users signing up for a Gmail account are now being asked to provide a mobile-phone number in the continuing war against spam, though Google will keep it handy just in case anything else turns up.

"Your number will also be associated with your account to avoid unnecessary future verifications for other Google services", though the Do-No-Evil company does clarify: "your number will never be sold or shared for marketing purposes without your permission, nor will we contact you using this number without your express permission".

Internet service provider (ISP) Karoo, based in Hull, has changed its policy of suspending the service of users suspected of copyright violations.

"They gave me a form to sign to get reconnected," she told the BBC. "The form basically said 'if I admit my guilt you'll reconnect me'. So I didn't sign it and walked out."

Governments and companies should limit the snooping they do on web users.

He also warned that attempts to censor what people could say or what they could do online were ultimately doomed to failure.

"The trend over the years is that the internet in the end goes around censorship and openness eventually triumphs," he said. "But it is by no means an easy road."

Major UK Internet provider BT opened up yesterday on the discriminatory traffic throttling it applies to streaming online video under certain plans.

That plan, called "Option 1," offers 10GB/month of data transfer, imposes throttling on P2P connections during parts of the day, throttles anyone who's a "heavy user," and places a limit of 896Kbps on video streaming services between 5pm and midnight.

But BT says it's losing millions by giving content owners "a completely free ride."

A new report about how the majority of the population uses Twitter reveals that most people, well... don't really use it.

According to HubSpot's analysis of Twitter's 4.5 million accounts, 54.9 percent of users have never tweeted and 52.7 have no followers whatsoever.

What's more perplexing, however, is that 55.5 percent of Twitter users don't follow anyone else.

A new privacy study says that Google-controlled web bugs are tracking users on 92 of the net's top 100 sites and about 88 per cent of almost 400,000 other domains.

Google Analytics was used by over 71 per cent of the domains, Google AdSense by over 35 per cent, and Google DoubleClick by over 26 per cent.

"Within the same privacy policy, we often found that a site would say 'We don't share your information with third-parties' but then elsewhere in policy they'd say 'We do permit third-party tracking via web bugs,'" Brian Carver, the professor who oversaw the study, tells The Reg. "To the average web user that's a contradiction."

Wolfram|Alpha's terms of use are completely different in that it is not a search engine, it's a computational service. The legalese says that they claim copyright on the each results page and require attribution.

Groklaw notes this is interesting considering some of its results quote 2001: A Space Odyssey or Douglas Adams. Claiming copyright on that material may be a bold move.

Fresh from a bizarre food fight with rival Giorgio Maone of NoScript, Adblock Plus developer Wladimir Palant has offered an olive branch to publishers - and along with it, an opportunity for his users to show that they're not a bunch of parasitic freeloaders.

His solution is based on the premise that "most users don't want to deny webmasters their income", and involves the addition of a tag to a page's source code, requesting that the user unblock ads for the particular site.

Adblock will look for this tag, check to see whether the user visits this site regularly, and then display a notification.