Lavabit's founder has claimed other secure webmail providers who threatened to shut themselves down in the wake of the NSA spying revelations had received court orders forcing them to stay up.

DoJ attorneys also dismissed Lavabit's argument that disclosing its encryption keys was incompatible with offering a secure email service. Marketing a business as a "secure" service to consumers provides no legal obstacle to court orders, US government lawyers state in the conclusion to their argument.

"I have already spent 15 months in prison. For several weeks of that time I have been held in solitary confinement. I have been denied visits and phone calls with my family and friends. This plea agreement spares me, my family, and my community a repeat of this grinding process."

"It is kind of funny that here they are sentencing me for hacking Stratfor, but at the same time as I was doing that an FBI informant was suggesting to me foreign targets to hit," he told the newspaper. "So you have to wonder how much they really care about protecting the security of websites."

The government wants internet service providers (ISPs) to filter legal pornography and other adult subjects "by default".

The government said by the end of next year, 20 million homes - 95% of all homes in Britain with an existing internet connection - will be required to choose whether to switch on a whole home family friendly internet filter.

Prime Minister David Cameron said: "As a dad, it is very simple: I want to know my children are protected when they go onto the internet.

Hollywood studios are urging theater operators to crack down on in-theater camcording with the deployment of night-vision goggles, low-light binoculars and security cameras.

The MPAA guidance urges theater employees, who are eligible for $500 rewards, to call the police immediately if they think illegal filming is occurring. “Let the proper authorities determine what laws may have been violated and what enforcement action should be taken,” according to the memo.

The most damning info comes from a broad analysis of the program in 2011 and 2012, which found wildly different techniques and rates of success.

Given that the TSA has spent almost a billion dollars on the program, that's a pretty poor record. As a result, the GAO is requesting that both Congress and the president withhold funding from the program until the TSA can demonstrate its effectiveness.

Snapchat is a mobile app that that lets users, mostly teenagers—mostly girls—add captions to photos or videos and share them with friends, and then make the content disappear. Photos can only be sent in the moment—no uploading later. Young girls take pictures of themselves making silly faces, Carlos Danger types maybe send more lascivious content, and then poof! Gone. Unless the recipient grabs a screenshot.

WikiLeaks has exposed details of secret trade negotiations that could leave Australians paying more for drugs and medicines, movies, computer games and software, and be placed under surveillance as part of a US-led crackdown on internet piracy.

Intellectual property experts are critical of the draft treaty, which they say would help the multinational movie and music industries, software giants and pharmaceutical manufacturers to maintain and increase prices by reinforcing the rights of copyright and patent owners, clamping down on online piracy and raising obstacles to the introduction of generic drugs and medicines.

The report, from broadband measurement firm Sandvine, shows a sharp decrease in the bandwidth taken up by BitTorrent traffic, some of which is associated with the downloading of illegal music and movies.

Torrent-based peer-to-peer file sharing is on the decrease, partly because people are turning to other ways to swap material.

The use of "dark nets" such as Tor and encrypted digital lockers is growing in popularity.

Retroactive copyright extension is a unilateral change in that deal -- directly taking the work away from the public domain without any recompense to the public the work has been stolen from.

Scholars have pointed out that there is no legitimate reason to do this, no evidence that it does anything useful at all. Instead, there's plenty of evidence that the cost to the public is tremendous -- somewhere around a billion euros. The cost to culture in general is even worse, because the longer copyright terms are, the more works disappear entirely, and the more it harms the dissemination of knowledge. It's basically a disaster all the way around -- except for some old record labels that still have the copyrights.

The number of lung cancer cases in the Chinese capital Beijing has soared over the last decade.

Beijing health officials say smoking is still the number one cause of lung cancer, but they admit air pollution is also a factor.

Correspondents say Chinese people are becoming increasingly worried about the health problems caused by the thick air pollution that often blankets much of their country, a result of rapid economic expansion coupled with poorly enforced laws designed to protect the environment.