Music industry group the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) said the sites infringed copyright on a "significant scale".

Speaking of Thursday's decision, BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor said: "The growth of digital music in the UK is held back by a raft of illegal businesses commercially exploiting music online without permission.

"The UK has now handed the power over what we see on the internet to corporate lobbyists."

"THE first guy who uses a weapon to bring down a drone that's hovering over his house is going to become a folk hero in this country." So said commentator Charles Krauthammer on Fox News in May last year, after the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said that drones will soon be licensed for law enforcement and commercial surveillance work.

A shake-up of the law is needed, says Peter van Blyenburgh, head of drone trade body Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, based in Paris, France. He says small drones, like the $300 Parrot AR Drone, sold as a toy, could become a real neighbourhood nuisance, provoking risky shoot-downs.

She told BBC News that the mission planners wanted the crew to consist of an older couple whose relationship would be able to withstand the stress of living in a confined environment for two years.

The couple would receive extensive training and would be able to draw on psychological support from mission control throughout the mission.

The mission will be a straightforward flight to the Red Planet and return without landing. This greatly reduces the cost of the mission. The Mars Inspiration team believe that it is technically possible to launch such a mission in five years' time.

The Pirate Bay has opened two new gateways to its internal network in order to shield its current Internet provider, the Swedish Pirate Party, which had been threatened with legal action if it did not stop providing Internet access to the torrent search site by Tuesday.

The Swedish Pirate Party has had a hectic time since the legal threats arrived, said the party's leader Anna Troberg in a news release on Tuesday. Individuals that would be targeted by the Right's Alliance lawsuit discussed possible consequences of litigation with their families because they could have had a big impact on their lives, she said, adding that it has been "a tough emotional process" for everyone involved.

The Redmond, Wash.-based technology giant said on Twitter it is currently "aware of the issue," but did not detail what was causing the downtime. In another tweet, it was noted that it was not clear how long it would take to restore services but that "hacking is not suspected."

The Outlook.com issue comes only three days after the software company suffered an embarrassing outage to its Windows Azure storage service, caused by an expired security certificate.

In a blog post, Microsoft announced that "a small number" of its computers had recently been deliberately infected with malicious software.

In Friday's blog post, Microsoft spokesman Matt Thomlinson said: "This type of cyberattack is no surprise to Microsoft and other companies that must grapple with determined and persistent adversaries."

The default Firefox cookie policy will, beginning with release 22, more closely reflect user privacy preferences.

Content from a third-party origin only has cookie permissions if its origin already has at least one cookie set.

The patch will spend about 6 weeks each in the pre-alpha, alpha, and beta builds.

Microsoft's Windows Azure storage cloud is having worldwide problems with secure SSL storage, probably because Redmond let the HTTPS certificate expire.

The storage problems have severely impacted other key components of the Azure cloud, including some of the services Microsoft has previously used to differentiate itself from arch-rival Amazon Web services.

Today the Pirates announced that they have received a letter from the Swedish “Rights Alliance,” who are threatening legal action against the party and its representatives if they don’t stop servicing TPB within a week.

“Unfortunately, the fact that an activity is legal is not a guarantee that you will get a fair trial. This is precisely why the Pirate Party and is needed more than ever,” Troberg concludes.

As a result of an ongoing dispute between Google (YouTube's parent company) and GEMA, the primary German performance rights organization, a number of Russian YouTube videos have been blocked from within Germany. The reason? These videos contain background music playing from a Russian car radio.

“YouTube has no insight into what rights GEMA represents,” the Google subsidiary wrote. “Due to the legal and financial risks that result from these processes in the context of GEMA’s [published royalty fee structure], music videos are blocked in Germany.”