After legal threats from the music industry the UK Pirate Party saw no other option than to shut down their Pirate Bay proxy service. However, as is usually the case with censorship, the Internet has found a way to route around it.

Pirate parties in Argentina and Luxembourg have been closely following their colleagues in the UK and as result have decided to spring into action. The parties have now started their own Pirate Bay proxies, sending a clear message to the copyright lobby.

Proof of the ineffectiveness of Pirate Bay blockades was previously highlighted by several Dutch and UK Internet providers, who claimed that BitTorrent traffic didn’t decline after the blockades were implemented.

NRA spokesman Wayne LaPierre stood up at a press conference this morning and announced the real culprit behind mass shooting in our country: videogames.

Their preferred answers include: more armed guards in schools (a measure that didn’t prevent the tragedy at Columbine), the creation of a national database of the mentally ill, and nebulously addressing the “moral failings of the media” and the games, movies and other media that LaPierre deemed “the filthiest form of pornography.”

"[Police are] going to be in SWAT gear and have AR-15s around their neck," Stovall said. "If you're out walking, we're going to stop you, ask why you're out walking, check for your ID."

"They may not be doing anything but walking their dog," he said. "But they're going to have to prove it."

"This fear is what's given us the reason to do this. Once I have stats and people saying they're scared, we can do this," he said. "It allows us to do what we're fixing to do."

"Will there be people who buck us? There may be. But we have a right to be doing what we're doing. We have a zero-tolerance. We are prepared to throw your hind-end in jail, OK? We're not going to take a lot of flack."

The average webpage is now 1.2 megabytes and around 60 percent of that rather large payload comes from images. That’s a lot of data, whether you’re handling images responsively or just trying to speed up a desktop site.

And in fact there’s already a way to solve this problem with HTTP headers, namely the Accepts header, which tells the server which image formats the browser supports. Based on that information the server could then “re-encode, recompress, resize, strip unnecessary metadata and deliver the optimal format.”

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) has introduced one of Congress' first pieces of legislation related to the tragedy in Newtown, Conn.: a bill to study the impact of violent video games on children.

Other lawmakers, such as Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), have also expressed support for scrutinizing the content of video games.

Under the new policy, Facebook claims the perpetual right to license all public Instagram photos to companies or any other organization, including for advertising purposes, which would effectively transform the Web site into the world's largest stock photo agency.

If Instagram users continue to upload photos after January 16, 2013, and subsequently delete their account after the deadline, they may have granted Facebook an irrevocable right to sell those images in perpetuity.

Reginald Braithwaite, an author and software developer, posted a tongue-in-cheek "translation" of the new Instagram policy today: "You are not our customers, you are the cattle we drive to market and auction off to the highest bidder. Enjoy your feed and keep producing the milk."

"This decree is binding," said Weichert, who added that it is unacceptable that a U.S. portal like Facebook keeps violating German data protection law. To ensure users' rights and comply with data protection law in general, the real name obligation must be immediately abandoned by Facebook, the ULD said.

"We believe the orders are without merit, a waste of German taxpayers' money and we will fight it vigorously," a Facebook spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. It is the role of individual services to determine their own policies about anonymity within the governing law, she added.

You may remember iiNet, the Australian ISP that Hollywood attacked (with support of US State Department officials) after they decided that it was too small to fight back, but big enough that people would notice. They guessed incorrectly, and iiNet not only fought back by taking a strong pro-consumer view, but won in convincing fashion.

Late last week it walked away from the discussions after Hollywood folks kept demanding a system similar to the US's in which ISPs would send along notices to people they accused of infringement.

Vic Gundotra, formerly Senior Vice President of Social (and now, of Engineering) at Google, and head of the company’s social networking service Google+, hasn’t posted anything on Twitter since July 2011.

Sullivan gets Gundotra to say that Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page is who the senior Google executive effectively considers to be ‘his boss’, after which the former quips about now knowing who asked Gundotra not to tweet.

An automatic block would mean users would have to actively request that pornographic content was made available by their ISP.

Mrs Perry, the Conservative MP for Devizes in Wiltshire, led the campaign and handed over a petition to Downing Street containing more than 115,000 names.

She chaired the cross-party Independent Parliamentary Inquiry on Online Child Protection which concluded in April that government and ISPs needed to do more to keep children safe online.