File-sharing site The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK internet service providers, the High Court has ruled.

"Its operators line their pockets by commercially exploiting music and other creative works without paying a penny to the people who created them."

"We should keep blocking them - they are stealing music illegally."

When most think of Apple's primary manufacturing partner Foxconn, they think of China. However, Foxconn has sites in other countries, including their recently opened Brazilian factory, which builds the iPad, and which is now giving them headaches.

The complaints range from overcrowded buses to poor food and lack of water. If the issues are not resolved by May 3, the employees have threatened to strike.

A representative for the employees was hopeful that a resolution to the issues could be reached without resorting to a strike.

Mission-critical routers used to control electric substations and other critical infrastructure are being updated to remove a previously undocumented backdoor that could allow vandals to hijack the devices, manufacturer RuggedCom said late Friday.

The previously secret account uses the login ID of "factory" and a password that's recovered by plugging the MAC, or media access control, address of the targeted device into a simple Perl script.

RuggedCom devices are frequently installed in electric substations, traffic control cabinets, and other locations where dust, extreme heat and cold, and other difficult environmental conditions take a toll on hardware.

“Big Hy” — his handle among many loyal customers — would almost certainly be cast as Hollywood Enemy No. 1 but for a few details. He is actually Hyman Strachman, a 92-year-old, 5-foot-5 World War II veteran trying to stay busy after the death of his wife. And he has sent every one of his copied DVDs, almost 4,000 boxes of them to date, free to American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He has not kept an official count but estimates that he topped 80,000 discs a year during his heyday in 2007 and 2008, making his total more than 300,000 since he began in 2004.

Jobs was outraged over Android's similarities to iOS. He branded HTC thieves and said he was "willing to go to thermonuclear war" against Google over what he called "grand theft Android." Now, CEO Tim Cook seems to have picked up Jobs' outraged-victim torch, saying in Apple's earnings call this week that the rest of the tech industry is drafting off Apple's innovations and failing to "invent their own stuff."

When Apple detailed the new features in the then-forthcoming iOS 5, the mobile OS was obviously playing catch-up with features inspired by (if not actually lifted from) other mobile platforms: pull-down notifications (Android), iMessage (BlackBerry Messenger), and on-screen notifications (Windows Mobile and others).

Yet there stands Cook, and Jobs before him, bristling with outrage over Android, full of fury and loss-aversion over the alleged rip-off of multi-touch and the iPhone interface. And yet both cheerfully ignore the fact that Apple's patented multi-touch technology was mostly acquired in 2005, in the form of a company called FingerWorks -- not invented at all.

Irritated by the anonymous release of documents to the press this year, Pope Benedict has named Cardinal Julian Herranz, 82, to lead a three-man team which will haul in staffers for questioning and rifle through files until they catch the perpetrators of what has been dubbed "Vatileaks".

A short statement printed on Thursday on the front page of the Vatican's daily newspaper warned the team had a full "pontifical mandate" to "shed complete light" on the whistle blowers, who have lifted the lid on alleged theft and false accounting.

The service will allow users to upload and access videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and other documents.

"It will also create another stream of more focused and potential ad revenue for Google around the content of personal files on Google Drive.

Users will be able search by keyword and filter by file type, owner or activity. Drive will also recognise text in scanned documents using optical character recognition (OCR) technology.

"If you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip to Drive, the next time you search for Grand Canyon, photos of it will pop up," said Mr Pichai.

Moving forward, Firefox (on Windows) will automatically (and silently) update, and — praise be — the Find function is now a lot better at centering the page on any matches.

The ability to silently update very closely mirrors Chrome, and really it’s a surprise that Mozilla has taken so long to introduce this key feature, after switching to the six-week rapid release cycle almost a year ago, with Firefox 5.

When you install Firefox 12, Windows UAC will ask you to approve Firefox Software Updater — and after that, you should never see an update dialog ever again.

In other news, the latest Nightly version of Firefox 14 has removed favicons from the address bar; the icon will now simply display a globe, or a padlock if the site is SSL-secured — just like Chrome.

The US wanted access to more data with fewer restrictions than the EU felt was fair. However, it appears that after the US pulled out its big gun over this -- threatening to stop allowing EU citizens to visit the US without first obtaining a visa -- the Parliament caved and agreed to the deal.

"This Agreement is contrary to European Treaties and privacy laws and does not meet the minimum criteria set by Parliament itself. Diplomatic relations with the United States appear to be more important than the fundamental rights of our own EU citizens."

A US-based Chinese-language website that has reported extensively on the Bo Xilai scandal in China says it was crippled for several hours by a concerted hacking attack.

It is not clear who launched the attacks, but the manager of Boxun.com, Watson Meng, was quoted as saying he believed they were ordered by China's security services.

It has published a stream of reports and allegations about the fate of Bo Xilai, the politician at the centre of China's biggest political scandal in years.