The National Police Agency (NPA) is poised to urge Internet service providers to voluntarily block communications if an anonymous software system called "Tor" -- short for "The onion router" -- is found abused online.

An expert panel to the NPA, which was looking into measures to combat crimes abusing the Tor system, compiled a report on April 18 stating that blocking online communications at the discretion of site administrators will be effective in preventing such crimes.

The Tor system was utilized by citizens in pro-democracy movements in the Middle East to escape government suppression, while Wikileaks also recommends Tor to information providers.

The batteries are similar to those used on Boeing's 787 Dreamliner aircraft, all 50 of which have been taken out of commercial service worldwide since January following battery fires on two planes.

Boeing says overheating in one cell vented heat to neighbouring cells and caused them to overheat also, an effect known as thermal runaway. One battery caught fire in a jet on the ground at Boston Logan airport in the US while another melted down in flight, causing an emergency landing and evacuation in Japan.

A Chinese group which has made it its mission to take a bite out of Apple’s iTunes revenue share is at it again, launching a full web version of its iOS app store jam-packed with pirated content.

Its mission: to allow local fanbois to download and install pirated apps on their iDevices without jailbreaking them in a quick, easy and secure manner – which was bad news for both Apple and community of iOS developers.

The Boston Marathon bombings show that immigration reform could endanger the public, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said Tuesday, speculating that the attack might have been perpetrated by an immigrant. In fact, law enforcement authorities have not named any suspect so far.

King has a long history of controversial statements on immigrants and is one of the most outspoken House opponents of immigration reform.

Sometimes you wish Microsoft would let customers decide when to delete a feature. Reader Dan Baechlin depends on Windows Explorer's ability to retain the selection of multiple files after changing the sort order. The feature has been removed from the version of Explorer in Windows 7 and 8.

Ramesh Srinivasan devised a Registry tweak that disables the Full Row Select option in Windows 7 and 8 Explorer windows, and that has the side-effect of preserving multifile selections when re-sorting from Name to Size, Date modified, or some other category.

In a subscribers-only interview published Saturday in The Guardian, Google chairman Eric Schmidt called for increased regulation for non-military and non-law enforcement uses of drones.

"How would you feel if your neighbor went over and bought a commercial observation drone that they can launch from their backyard,” he said. “It just flies over your house all day. How would you feel about it?"

On Wednesday, Spanish security researcher Hugo Teso gave a presentation at the Hack in the Box conference in Amsterdam in which he claimed he had developed an Android app that could allow him take control of an airplane by feeding misinformation into its in-flight communications systems.

"Today's certified avionics systems are designed and built with high levels of redundancy and security," a company spokesman said. "The research by Hugo Teso involves testing with virtual aircraft in a lab environment, which is not analogous to certified aircraft and systems operating in regulated airspace."

Previous attempts to map the internet have been from within, using "sniffer" software to report the IP addresses of devices visited along a particular route, which, in theory, can then be translated into geographical locations. But this approach doesn't work, says Paul Barford at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "After 15 years nobody can show you a map of the internet," he says.

For example, Honolulu stands out in the Internet Atlas as an important hub because of its mid-Pacific location, used to link countries across the ocean. Damage there would have knock-on effects throughout the Pacific Rim.

In anticipation of having their Swedish domain name seized, this week the crew of The Pirate Bay took evasive action. In the early hours of Tuesday morning they switched to two Greenland-based domains, but already the plan is starting to unravel. The telecoms company in charge of the .GL TLD says it will now block the domains after deciding they will be used illegally.

“Tele-Post has today decided to block access to two domains operated by file-sharing network The Pirate Bay,” the company said in a statement received by TorrentFreak.

Last year, the ACLU sent a FOIA request to the IRS seeking records regarding whether it gets a warrant before reading people’s email, text messages and other private electronic communications.

The documents the ACLU obtained make clear that, before Warshak, it was the policy of the IRS to read people’s email without getting a warrant. Not only that, but the IRS believed that the Fourth Amendment did not apply to email at all.

The IRS should let the American public know whether it obtains warrants across the board when accessing people’s email. And even more important, the IRS should formally amend its policies to require its agents to obtain warrants when seeking the contents of emails, without regard to their age.