While saying the government cannot prohibit sales of some everyday materials, Mr. Johnson said retailers should be trained to look for anyone who buys a lot from what he described as a “long list of materials that could be used as explosive precursors.”

Other than pressure cookers, Mr. Johnson did not say what other products might appear on the guidance that will be sent to retailers.

With fast lanes, money would flow "from your favorite websites to the ISPs, the very same companies you already pay to deliver Internet service to your home," he wrote in a blog post scheduled to go live at this link at 1:30pm ET. "In this model, the ISPs get paid twice, both to provide their service and regulate heavy-use companies, like Netflix."

Government Accountability Office researchers who studied data caps say that wireline ISPs told them "that congestion is not currently a problem." In other words, data caps on home Internet service are for making money rather than managing congestion—and paid fast lanes would be too.

Increasingly, businesses are looking for ways to suppress or erase consumers’ negative online reviews of them. In particular, we’ve recently seen a proliferation of contract clauses purporting to stop consumers from reviewing businesses online.

I recently wrote about a New York hotel’s contract that fined customers $500 if they, or their wedding guests, posted negative online reviews.

Or other businesses, such as KlearGear, have filed negative credit reports against consumers who didn’t pay the fine.

Service providers should become suspicious that customers could be pirating if they use VPN-style services and consume a lot of bandwidth, the BBC says.

Following submissions from Hollywood interests and local ISPs, BBC Worldwide has now presented its own to the Federal Government. Its text shows that the corporation wants new anti-piracy measures to go further than ever before.

WFIE 14 News is reporting that 31-year-old James Evans of Muhlenberg County, Kentucky was arrested on terroristic threatening charges after he posted lyrics from a song by the heavy metal band Exodus on Facebook.

Evans remained in jail for eight days before he was released at a hearing at which his case was deferred for six months.

The heavy metal music site Loudwire quoted additional comments by Exodus guitarist Gary Holt, who said, "The idea that an individual in this great country of ours could be arrested for simply posting lyrics to a song is something I never believed could happen in a free society."

Facebook enabled videos to automatically play by default, which has caused many people to incur high data usage charges.

“We’ve seen many complaints from people who have been stung with data bills after exceeding their monthly allowance and who believe it to be because of Facebook autoplaying videos,” reported MoneySavingExpert.com.

Even if Alibaba skews toward the conservative end of that range, it would raise $22.1 billion, eclipsing the largest American IPO to date: Visa (V), which raised $17.9 billion and beating global record holder Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (IDCBY), which raised about $21 billion in 2006.

Yesterday a federal US court found BP grossly negligent in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, one of the worst environmental disasters in US history. The ruling leaves the oil company liable for up to $18 billion in fines. But four years on, the drilling industry may not have learned any lessons.

Since the spill, the US Congress has been slow to enact stricter rules for drillers, he says. "We had a moment in time, when this disaster came to the consciousness of the public, that we had a chance of actually getting something done, but it was tamped down so quickly," says Cavnar.

"Earlier today we encountered an error while making an infrastructure configuration change that briefly made it difficult for people to access Facebook," Zuck's representative said.

... but eBay was down as well! Some users reported difficulty logging into their accounts, and in some cases the online auction site reportedly told them their accounts didn't even exist.

So Tumblr, then? Maybe we could kill the next half-hour by perusing a few celebrity photo blogs? No such luck.

In expressing his gratitude, Cohen singled out one particularly pro-merger mayor, Rahm Emanuel of Chicago.

Not mentioned in Cohen’s post, however, is the fact that during his political career, Emanuel and political committees he controls has received more than $100,000 from Comcast and its employees.

Similarly, Comcast was also one of the top donors to Emanuel’s congressional campaigns, giving $46,000 to Emanuel between 2003 and 2008, according to records from Open Secrets.