Federal prosecutors have accused it of costing copyright holders more than $500m (£320m) in lost revenue.

The US Justice Department said that Megaupload's two co-founders Kim Dotcom, formerly known as Kim Schmitz, and Mathias Ortmann were arrested in Auckland, New Zealand along with two other employees of the business at the request of US officials.

A federal court in Virginia ordered that 18 domain names associated with the Hong Kong-based firm be seized.

The Justice Department said that more than 20 search warrants had been executed in nine countries, and that approximately $50m in assets had been seized.

The Wikipedia encyclopedia and blogging service WordPress are among the highest profile pages to remove material.

Google is showing solidarity by placing a black box over its logo when US-based users visit its site.

The news recommendation site Reddit, the online magazine Boing Boing, the software download service Tucows and the German hackers' group the Chaos Computer Congress also removed access to their content.

We know (well at least we figured we knew), that the game key can be used on three systems. That's fair, the first activation is used on my personal game rig. The second we installed on the AMD Radeon graphics test PC and the 3rd on our NVIDIA graphics test PC.

For the NVIDIA setup I take out the GTX 580, and insert a GTX 590. When I now startup the game 'BAM', again an activation is required. Once again I fill out the key and now Ubisoft is thanking me with the message that I ran out of activations.

Their reply goes like this: 'Sorry to disappoint you - the game is indeed restricted to 3 hardware changes and there simply is no way to bypass that. We also do not have 7 copies of the game for you'.

We have been contacted by bluebyte over the weekend, the company that developed the Anno series. Our key has been pretty much unlocked allowing us to properly work on this article.

Several reports surfaced earlier this month that hackers had managed to access the source code for certain Symantec products. Symantec identified the products as Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) 11.0 and Symantec Antivirus 10.2 but said the attack did not affect any current Norton consumer products.

Rob Rachwald, director of security strategy at Imperva, told CNET's Lance Whitney that the incident was "embarrassing on Symantec's part" but not likely to "keep the Symantec folks awake too late at night, and certainly not their customers."

“So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery,” he posted on his recently-started Twitter account. “Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying.”

The statement said that the White House couldn’t support the current legislation as it would interfere with the use of the DNS architecture which underlies most current internet use.

"According to at least two or three sources, a Tibetan layperson set themselves on fire this morning in Ngaba town. As police put out the flames, they beat him severely," said Kate Saunders, of the International Campaign for Tibet, a London-based group.

This prompted local people to try to recover the body, prompting clashes with police, the activists say.

The Chinese authorities say their policies have brought a better standard of living to many Tibetans.

China is reluctant to allow journalists access to sensitive Tibetan areas and information about what is happening on the ground is difficult to verify.

A 23-year-old student is facing extradition to the US, and possibly five years in a federal prison, after the British courts ruled he should face charges of copyright infringement for linking to websites hosting pirated content.

O’Dwyer gave evidence that TVShack “worked exactly like the Google search engine… (it)…. directed users through the use of searches to websites… at no point was there any infringing material, such as movies or programmes on my server. It just directed users to other websites by providing the link”.

O’Dwyer is being extradited under controversial laws agreed by Tony Blair in the wake of the September 11 attacks – then billed as essential to the war on terrorism - which are currently being used to try and extradite Gary McKinnon on hacking charges.

ICANN has started to accept applications for new generic top level domains, which will include words for brands, and non-Latin characters.

ICANN has faced a number of criticisms of the application process, including that the fee, at $185,000 (£120,000), may be too high for applicants from smaller organisations, charities, and developing countries.

Some organisations have called ICANN's ability to provide efficient internet governance of thousands of new TLDs into doubt.

Have you wondered what $1.2 billion in airport security gets you? The TSA has compiled its own "Top 10 Good Catches of 2011".

Not a single terrorist on the list. Mostly forgetful, and entirely innocent, people. Note that they fail to point out that the firearms and knives would have been just as easily caught by pre-9/11 screening procedures. And that the C4 -- their #1 "good catch" -- was on the return flight; they missed it the first time.

TSA confiscates a butter knife from an airline pilot. TSA confiscates a teenage girl's purse with an embroidered handgun design. TSA confiscates a 4-inch plastic rifle from a GI Joe action doll on the grounds that it’s a "replica weapon." TSA confiscates a liquid-filled baby rattle from airline pilot’s infant daughter. TSA confiscates a plastic "Star Wars" lightsaber from a toddler.

More and more US schools have police patrolling the corridors. Pupils are being arrested for throwing paper planes and failing to pick up crumbs from the canteen floor.

The charge on the police docket was "disrupting class". But that's not how 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes saw her arrest for spraying two bursts of perfume on her neck in class because other children were bullying her with taunts of "you smell".

In 2010, the police gave close to 300,000 "Class C misdemeanour" tickets to children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school, which result in fines, community service and even prison time.

In one notorious instance in California, a school security officer broke the arm of a girl he was arresting for failing to clear up crumbs after dropping cake in the school canteen. In another incident, University of Florida campus police tasered a student for pressing Senator John Kerry with an awkward question at a debate after he had been told to shut up.