Children's charities are backing a plan to make web retailers ensure young people cannot buy age-restricted goods.

The age-checking systems would have to be used if one of 20 separate products were sold including knives, alcohol, tobacco, age-restricted video games and DVDs, solvents and spray paints.

Only three of the retailers asked for the teenager to confirm his age at the time of purchase. He got round these by lying about his age.

Security researchers have managed to infiltrate the Torpig botnet, a feat that allowed them to gain important new insights into one of the world's most notorious zombie networks by collecting an astounding 70 GB worth of data stolen in just 10 days.

During that time, Torpig bots stole more than 8,300 credentials used to login to 410 different financial institutions, according to the research team from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

The maps date back to the country's feudal era, when shoguns ruled and a strict caste system was in place. At the bottom of the hierarchy were a class called the "burakumin," ethnically identical to other Japanese but forced to live in isolation because they did jobs associated with death, such as working with leather, butchering animals and digging graves.

They still face prejudice, based almost entirely on where they live or their ancestors lived. Moving is little help, because employers or parents of potential spouses can hire agencies to check for buraku ancestry through Japan's elaborate family records, which can span back over a hundred years.

Swedish telecom supplier Tele2 said Monday it will delete information allowing their customers to be identified, a move police argue could make the hunt for Internet pirates "impossible."

A high-ranking police official told the TT news agency that this could have a serious impact on their bid to crack down on Internet pirates.

"In certain cases, this will make an investigation impossible," said Stefan Kronkvist, the head of Swedish police's internet crime unit.

BT and other mobile broadband providers are blocking access to The Pirate Bay, as part of a "self-regulation" scheme.

"This uses a barring and filtering mechanism to restrict access to all WAP and internet sites that are considered to have 'over 18' status," the warning states. It goes on to list a series of categories that are blocked, including adult/sexually explicit content, "criminal skills" and hacking.

After the surprising rejection of Nicholas Sarkozy's "three strikes" law in France to kick file sharers off the internet, Sarkozy and the bill's supporters have decided to bring the law back for another vote on April 29th.

What does kicking people off the internet have to do with creative diversity?

You don't force people to buy a product they don't want to pay for.

Amazon has said it will not allow online advertising system Phorm to scan its web pages to produce targeted ads.

Phorm builds a profile of users by scanning for keywords on websites visited and then assigns relevant ads.

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, said: We expect more sites to block Webwise in the near future and also ISPs to drop plans to snoop on web users."

He said other sites - LiveJournal, mySociety and Netmums - had contacted the Open Rights Group to say they too would be blocking Phorm's technology.

Gmail's got a new option in its labs section that lets users insert images directly into their e-mails, and not just as attachments. This has been something you've been able to do in standard e-mail software for ages, but Gmail's way of handling them for the last five years has simply been to stick them on as attachments that show up in the bottom of your outgoing message.

Between 35,000 and 40,000 attempts to access child pornography sites via BT Retail's broadband network are blocked every day, it was revealed today.

BT's system has been in place since 2004. The government said in 2006 that it wanted all ISPs to implement the IWF's blocklist by the end of 2007, but small ISPs holding about five per cent of the market have not. They argue blocking does not address the real problem, as those determined to access child pornography can easily circumvent such systems.

Hulu has apparently taken steps to thwart nontraditional browsers from accessing its video content by using JavaScript to encode and decode HTML sent to the browser.

Still, the JavaScript "fix" apparently wasn't a very complex one, as Millmore has already released an update to TunerFreeMCE that gets around the encoding process. Anyone can to employ the same tactics as Millmore, so it's not entirely clear why Hulu even bothered in the first place. Now, the company is just getting bad press for trying (poorly) to outsmart those who are already intent on getting around the system.