News that the NSA has unfettered access to most of the leading Internet services inevitably has an international dimension. After all, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google and the rest of the Naughty Nine all operate around the world, so spying on their users means spying on people everywhere.

New data protection rules currently being discussed by the European Union have come under fierce attack by US companies, who want them watered down. For the most part, they were succeeding, but it's possible that the revelations that the very same companies who have lobbied so hard to neuter EU regulations have allowed the NSA to access customer data may start to tip the balance the other way.

Without Safe Harbor status, no US company would be allowed to transfer personal data about Europeans out of the EU. It's unlikely that the European Commission would contemplate such a drastic move, but it's an indication of how high feelings are starting to run -- and this is only a few hours after the NSA story broke.

A top-secret surveillance program gives the National Security Agency surreptitious access to customer information held by Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, Google, Facebook, and other Internet companies, according to a pair of new reports.

This afternoon's disclosure of PRISM follows another report yesterday that revealed the existence of another top-secret NSA program that vacuums up records of millions of phone calls made inside the United States.

Some of the companies named in the pair of news reports responded this afternoon with statements indicating they did not provide direct server access, or PRISM was not as described.

The largest number of sites censored when attempting to block one particular site ASIC believed was defrauding Australians was 250,000. Of these, ASIC said about 1000, or 0.4 per cent, were active sites. It said the 249,000 other sites hosted "no substantive content" or offered their domain name up for sale, rather than hosting a fully-fledged active site.

In another already reported case, about 1200 sites were blocked by mistake. On the other eight occasions ASIC said "only the targeted criminal site, or the targeted site and a very small number of other sites" were affected.

A Georgia school bus driver is so upset when a 6th-grader tells him that he was 40 cents short for lunch, and therefore hungry, that he posts about it online.

Cook felt "in my heart of hearts" that the child told him the truth. He says he was fired, a fact that the school doesn't deny. School officials told the Times-Georgian that he was fired for making derogatory statements about the school.

If, as the school contends, the incident never happened, will the child be disciplined for lying and causing so much controversy? Will he be expelled, even?

Today, 4 June, is the 24th anniversary of what China calls the “counterrevolutionary riot” in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

China doesn't announce which sites will be undergoing maintenance that conveniently coincides with the anniversary, so it's not possible to know which publishers will decide to opt for a bit of downtime today.

Hoping that further cost cuts will right its heeling ship, social-gaming company Zynga said Monday it is cutting 18 percent of its workforce and closing various offices.

The San Francisco-based company has been struggling to revive the momentum that propelled it to the forefront of Web-based social games, after newer titles have failed to get the same traction as digital-livestock diversion FarmVille did out of the gate.

The company's stock has been struggling alongside its games since it went public at the end of 2011, when shares closed below its $10 IPO price and have yet to recover. They're currently worth about $3.41 each.

Pigeons -- the rats of the winged world -- have shown an aptitude for using touchscreens to carry out an intelligence test, according to psychology research from the University of Iowa.

When the birds pecked the correct button on the screen, the virtual bowl would move a bit closer. After continually pecking at the button connected to the virtual food, the birds would be rewarded with a real edible treat.

The authorities in Iraq say they have uncovered an al-Qaeda plot to use chemical weapons, as well as to smuggle them to Europe and North America.

As the defence ministry spokesman spoke on Iraqi TV, footage was shown of four men with black hoods on their heads, our correspondent adds. Three of them were wearing bright yellow jumpsuits and a fourth was in a brown jumpsuit.

The High Court judge used some fairly strong language to describe the way in which the search and arrest warrants were issued (and how the subsequent SWAT-style raid on Kim Dotcom’s mansion was handled). “This has given rise to a miscarriage of justice,” Chief Justice Helen Winkelmann wrote in her decision.

Justice Winkelmann quoted from her own previous decision in which she found the warrants invalid, and she has now ruled that “in respect of items containing only relevant material, [clones of the seized data] must be provided to the plaintiffs before a clone is provided to the United States.”

The update, which Microsoft is showing off in a preview today, remains touch-forward, while making more concessions to keyboard and mouse users.

The most fundamentally important new features are the revisions to Search and SkyDrive. The one that will get the most attention, however, is the Start button that now uses the Windows logo and remains visible at all times in the taskbar if you’re working in desktop mode.