The launch in Brussels drew in 48 countries pledging to unite their efforts against paedophile networks.

"We're laying the foundation for a more effective international legal framework, to shut down exploitative online enterprises," he told a joint news conference in Brussels.

In its base $1,299 configuration, the 21.5-inch iMac comes with no SSD and no build-to-order storage add-ons; even the $1,499 model only has the option to add a 128GB SSD as part of Fusion Drive, which marries the SSD to the system's 1TB spinning hard disk drive to create a single volume. No SSD-only option exists, nor is there a way to add a standalone SSD.

A scouring of the logic board reveals no spare SATA ports anywhere. The SATA connector used for the iMac's 2.5-inch hard disk drive appears to be the only one present inside the computer.

Several UK Internet providers are blocking Pirate Bay’s perfectly legal promotion platform for independent artists. The Promo Bay website is currently being blocked by BT, Virgin Media, BE and possibly several other providers.

The website is entirely dedicated to promoting the work of independent musicians, filmmakers and other content creators.

The paper, published on 29 November in the journal Science, shows that melting Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have added 11.1mm (0.43") to global sea levels since 1992.

"The rate of ice loss from Greenland has increased almost five-fold since the mid-1990s" said NASA's Erik Ivins, co-author on the study. "In contrast, while the regional changes in Antarctic ice over time are sometimes quite striking, the overall balance has remained fairly constant—at least within the certainty of the satellite measurements we have to hand."

Just after noon Damascus time on Thursday, the government-owned Syrian Telecommunications Establishment essentially deleted the whole country from the Internet's routing tables, blocking all inbound and outbound network traffic. Rather than the result of terrorist attacks, as the government claimed on state television, the blackout was a well-rehearsed and deliberate act intended to deny connection to Syria's citizens and the opposition forces currently trying to topple the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad.

That means that citizens trying to circumvent the blackout—whether the government admits to it being under their control or not—may place themselves at even greater risk of surveillance and detection. As the pressure on the Assad regime builds, that risk may be more than most citizens—no matter what their status or wealth—are willing to take on.

The German parliament is set to discuss a controversial online copyright bill that is meant to allow news publishers to charge search engines such as Google for reproducing short snippets from their articles.

The draft law proposes that publishers could charge a search engine for republishing snippets of articles, or eventually allow them to sue search engines like Google for copyright infringement.

The search engine "obviously" tries to use its own users for lobbying interests "under the pretext of a so-called project for the freedom of the Internet", wrote Günter Krings and Ansgar Heveling, politicians of the CDU and CSU conservative parties.

Oracle will break the promises it made to European regulators on MySQL nearly three years ago, according to the open-source database's co-creator Monty Widenius. In fact, he says, it has already broken a few.

He also accused Oracle of obfuscating on security and bug fixes, as it has not released all-important test cases for MySQL 5.5.27.

He claimed that Oracle has already ceased to co-operate with the community on the development roadmap, with the giant only focusing on “one or two” areas for change – storage engine and replication.

The United States government has agreed to defer its controversial prosecution of UK college student Richard O'Dwyer on copyright infringement charges, allowing the UK government to drop the extradition proceedings against him.

"All he'll have to do is fly over to America and appear in court and pay a fine, and then they will basically delay the prosecution forever," said the Guardian's James Ball. "It's a little bit like having it hanging over you, but as long as he doesn't come across them again, he's fine, he clear. That's really good news for him."

Once the lawyers prosecuting these cases can get names of people who they can level their accusations against, they know at least a percentage are going to pay up. It's telling that the sweet spot for mass-copyright suits is pornography; it strongly suggests a strategy of deterring defendants from fighting cases by embarrassing them.

The ISPs have vast legal resources, and being brought directly into the legal fight may actually encourage them to fight against copyright trolling even harder. That's especially true since the practice has been generally disfavored by judges thus far.

According to the researchers this may have been caused by the loss of word-of-mouth promotion by people who used the popular file-hosting site to share movies.

Comparing box office revenues before and after the Megaupload raids shows that overall box office revenues went down. The effects are small, but consistent across different sample designs when taking into account factors such as inflation, Internet penetration and the popularity of Megaupload in each country.

The researchers therefore believe that their findings may support the notion that piracy can act as promotion. Those who pirate movies may talk about them to friends, who unlike them do pay for movie tickets.