Digitude was founded in 2010 and raised $50 million from Altitude Capital Partners, with aims to “acquire, aggregate, and license key technology areas within the consumer electronics and related technology fields in a patent consortium” — in other words, it buys up patents and then sues other companies until they settle and agree to pay licensing fees.

Apple appears to have transferred its patents to the patent troll Digitude, though it first routed them through a shell company that shares the same office as Digitude’s lead investor and Chairman. Further evidence of the relationship between Apple and Digitude can be found on the ITC’s own website, where a list of files relevant to the lawsuit can be found.

If Apple were deliberately aiding Digitude, Samuels says “it would be horrifying — the patent troll problem is completely out of control. Apple has every legal right to sue over its patents, but it should be the one to do it”.

Only the UK has said it will not join. Prime Minister David Cameron said he had to protect key British interests, including its financial markets.

The UK effectively used its veto to block an attempt, led by the French and Germans, to get all 27 EU states to support changes to the union's treaties.

"We were offered a treaty that didn't have proper safeguards for Britain, and I decided it was not right to sign that treaty," he told the BBC.

Less than 12 hours after opening, the Obama administration’s “virtual embassy” in Iran was blocked by Tehran’s digital gatekeepers on Wednesday.

White House spokesman Jay Carney condemned the blockage in a statement Wednesday evening, saying the Iranian government had “again demonstrated its commitment to build an electronic curtain of surveillance and censorship around its people.”

So far, there are reports that the vulnerability is being exploited in limited, targeted attacks against Adobe Reader 9.x on Windows. However, the bug also affects Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.4.6 and earlier 9.x versions for UNIX and Macintosh computers, as well as Adobe Reader X (10.1.1) and Acrobat X (10.1.1) and earlier 10.x versions on Windows and Mac.

Patches for Windows and Mac users of Adobe Reader X and Acrobat X will come on the next quarterly update, scheduled for Jan. 10, 2012. The fix for Adobe Reader 9.x for UNIX will come Jan. 12 as well.

The payments company, according to a Regretsy blog post, first froze the account due to a supposed misuse of the “Donate” payment button. The blog was told that it had to be a nonprofit in order to use the button. It isn’t, so it then attempted to collect money for toys by using a regular payment button and allowed the buyers to send purchased gifts to the 200 children.

After what the blog post calls “a very long and jaw-dropping conversation with an incredibly condescending representative,” this approach was also shut down. PayPal required that unprocessed orders be refunded — and then kept all of the transaction fees.

PayPal’s site doesn’t clearly ban the actions that Regretsy says got its account shut down. That doesn’t help the payment service’s case. Nor does the fact that Regretsy included in its blog posts damning snippets from what it says were conversations with PayPal’s customer representatives. (For example: “You can use the donate button to raise money for a sick cat, but not poor people.”)

Traditional big media firms have contributed more than $5 million to the sponsors of the Stop Online Piracy Act, with California Democratic Reps. Howard Berman and Adam Schiff as the top recipients.

Earlier this month we noted that Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, the bill's sponsor in the House, has received nearly $400,000 from the TV, music and movies industry during his career, including some recent timely donations from broadcasting and television groups that are lobbying for the bill.

With 68% of the vote counted, the Central Election Commission said United Russia had 49.9% of the vote, down from 64% in 2007.

"We have received thousands of calls from regional offices, confirming massive violations and fraud," said Communist Party deputy head Ivan Melnikov on the party website.

Prime Minister Putin has accused foreign powers of meddling in election preparations, while Duma members have questioned why a foreign-funded organisation is allowed to monitor Russian elections.

"This facility had been submerged in some six feet of water since October 15, the estate was pumped dry on November 17, main power was restored on November 26 and production restarted November 30," according to a statement.

For the industry as a whole, WD expects that hard drive shipments in the December quarter will be limited to approximately 120 million units, including units that were in inventory at the beginning of the quarter. Demand for the December quarter is in the range of 170 million to 180 million units.

Whether it's copyright trolls wanting to censor filesharing web sites to extract high prices for their content or the UK Prime Minister wanting to shut down social networks during times of unrest, web site blocking is oppressive by its very nature. In addition, it won't be effective.

Worse still, attempting to block web sites gets you some pretty dodgy friends. At the same event, it was mentioned that the Government's plans to block social media during times of popular unrest had drawn applause from certain countries that you "wouldn't want to get into bed with".

So the government is going to block web sites? It can try, but it will be fighting a losing battle. Censorship of the internet is oppressively draconian and simply will not work, so even to attempt it is pointless.

Internet Explorer's desktop market share, which has been in a near-constant free-fall since 2003, held steady in November. Meanwhile, Chrome has moved to within striking distance of Firefox, with Mozilla's browser likely to lose its second place spot within the next few months.

Firefox's users are having a much harder time of things. Mozilla's failure to provide a robust automatic update process and refusal to force extensions to use a fixed, consistent programmatic interface means that upgrading requires manual intervention, and stands a good chance of breaking extensions. As a result, its rapid releases aren't showing the same clean cut overs and high adoption that Chrome achieves.