An Egyptian administrative court ordered Google's YouTube suspended for a month as a penalty for broadcasting the controversial film "Innocence of Muslims," which mocks the prophet Muhammad.

The video is currently available on YouTube, with the warning: "The following content has been identified by the YouTube community as being potentially offensive or inappropriate. Viewer discretion is advised."

Adobe issued an emergency update to its Flash Player to fix two zero-day threats, the company announced yesterday. The updates affect all versions of Flash on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.

The Icelandic Film and Movie organization SMAIS is known for its tough anti-piracy stance. In an attempt to engage a debate and address a recent report which accused SMAIS of not paying for software themselves, the group joined Facebook. However, the discussion on the social networking site quickly turned into a flame war.

What certainly didn’t help was that SMAIS itself never paid for the film and game rating software they purchased from the Dutch company NICAM back in 2007.

During the anti-spam law debates in 2009, copyright lobby groups promoted amendments that would have allowed for expansive surveillance of user computers. Coming on the heels of the Sony rootkit scandal, the government ultimately rejected those proposals (the Liberals had plans to propose such amendments but backed down), leaving in place an important provision that requires express consent prior to the installation of computer software.

The Canadian Chamber of Commerce and other business groups want to ensure that the anti-spam law does not block their ability to secretly install spyware on personal computers for a wide range of purposes. In doing so, these groups are proposing to turn the law upside down by shifting from protecting consumers to protecting businesses.

Kids as young as five should be taught how to stay safe online, with tips and advice coming from their mates as well as teachers, a UK children's charity has said.

The charity's phone-in helpline ChildLine said that compared to just one year ago, a whopping 70 per cent more boys had called in about seeing porn online, some of them as young as 11 years old. Sexting and hardcore pornography is now so normal for many teenagers that focus groups described it as "mundane".

According to the French publication, Numerama, Hadopi (the agency in charge of stamping out infringement in France), has published an opinion in which it suggests that content creators give the French National Library (Bibliothèque Nationale de France or BNF) works without any DRM on them.

That said, the report also then appears to fret about the BNF leaking these unprotected works out into the world. The suggestion seems to be that (wait for it...) the BNF then create its own DRM to lock up the unprotected works that it needs to keep them from getting locked up.

For the second time in a month, Apple has silently blocked the latest version of Java 7 from running on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or higher via its XProtect antimalware tool.

The update to XProtect will continue to block Java on Macs until Oracle releases Update 12, whenever that occurs. In the meantime, one fix proposed by a couple of Mac forums users is to delete the XProtect source file that lists the blacklisted Java, then turning off automatic updates to the safe downloads list.

A sophisticated cyberattack targeted The Washington Post in an operation that resembled intrusions against other major American news organizations and that company officials suspect was the work of Chinese hackers, people familiar with the incident said.

Chinese government hackers “want to know who the sources are, who in China is talking to the media. . . . They want to understand how the media is portraying them — what they’re planning and what’s coming.”

TorrentFreak has received reports from people whose perfectly legal files were locked in their Mega accounts for alleged copyright violations. In all cases this happened after these users published links to the files elsewhere on the Internet.

The censored content includes copyrighted music and movies, but also free to share software such as Ubuntu and copies of Kim Dotcom’s very own music.

To test how quickly a file is removed by Mega we decided to post some previously uploaded legal content to Mega-search.me ourselves.

Quite shockingly, the files were pulled down by Mega in a matter of minutes, claiming they had received copyright infringement notices for each of them.

I Get This Call Every Day is the brainchild of Brampton native David S. Gallant, a “numb meat Popsicle,” as he rather imaginatively styles his day job as a customer service representative who fields taxpayers’ calls.

National Revenue Minister Gail Shea is not amused. Her communications director, Clarke Olsen, sent an email to the Star Tuesday stating, “The Minister considers this type of conduct offensive and completely unacceptable. The Minister has asked the Commissioner (of Revenue, Andrew Treusch) to investigate and take any and all necessary corrective action. The Minister has asked the CRA to investigate urgently to ensure no confidential taxpayer information was compromised.”