Judge Dawson of the Nevada US District Court ordered Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to delist the offending web sites from their search engines, and also told Facebook, Twitter and Google to remove the links from their social networks, according to the BBC.

The judge also ordered domain name company Godaddy to take control of the web site domains and block them from being accessed.

In a study published in the January Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Hopkins and colleagues tracked several years’ worth of throwing behaviors in captive chimpanzees. (“If I was going to get s–t thrown at me, I was going to get something out of it,” said Hopkins.)

“They get a pile of something to throw, and usually the person tries to run. The chimp learns, ‘If I can do this, I can have some control over the world outside my cage.’”

The quarterly staff survey solicited 1,600 responses, with plenty of criticism, including one person who said he planned to cash out and leave after the initial public offering.

As the discord increases, the situation may jeopardize the company’s ability to retain top talent at a time when Silicon Valley start-ups are fiercely jockeying for the best executives and engineers.

But the heavy focus on metrics, in this already competitive industry, has also fostered an uncompromising culture, one where employees are constantly measured and game designers are pushed to meet aggressive deadlines.

The move came after Syria refused to allow 500 Arab League monitors into the country to assess the situation on the ground.

The league also voted to impose a ban on commercial flights between Syria and member states. A date for the ban to enter into force will be agreed within the next week.

"When civilians are killed in Syria and the Syrian regime increases its cruelty to innocent people, it should not be expected for Turkey and the Arab League to be silent," said Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, according to the state Anatolia news agency.

The country's Information and Communications Technology minister, Anudith Nakornthap, said that if such users "share" or "like" articles on Facebook that are considered to insult the Thai royal family, they could face sentences of between three and 15 years in jail – as laid out in Thailand's Computer Crimes Act.

In October, a UN human rights expert called on Thailand to amend laws that impose such jail terms on “whoever defames, insults or threatens” the Thai royal family.

Terrorist suspect Jose Pimentel had a blog on Blogger, owned by Google. Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) wants Google to add a "terrorist" flag so readers can label terrorist content.

Unfortunately, Lieberman doesn't define what he considers "terrorist content" or whether deleting posts with such content is within the purview of Blogger or the First Amendment. Google, not surprisingly, has yet to comment.

A European court has ruled that record labels and film studios can't use the courts to instruct a broadband company to track or try to block a customer.

Record labels, film studios, and other owners of copyrighted music, movies, or media have in recent years tried to steer government and courts toward making ISPs responsible for piracy. They argue that ISPs should keep an eye on what their customers are doing online, and if they spot a customer illegally accessing copyrighted material, courts should order the ISP to boot the customer off the Internet.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and state regulators say druggies can use the single ingredient in his "Polar Pure" water purifier -- iodine -- to make crystal meth.

Special Agent Richard Camps, a San Jose-based state narcotics task force commander, said he received reports of suspicious buyers.

"Weird-looking people, 'Beavis and Butt-Head'-types, were coming into camping stores and buying everything they had on the shelves," Camps said. "Then they would take off into the mountains and try to cook meth with it." The DEA reported agents found Polar Pure at a meth lab they dismantled in Tennessee two years ago.

Amazon's cloud service Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offers virtual computer capacity, and developers at Tor are calling on people to sign up to the Amazon service and run a bridge.

The Tor Project allows people to route their online communications anonymously and is used by activists as well as others seeking anonymity. It has been used in countries with oppressive political regimes.

Ever since the days of Napster, the recording industry and movie industry have treated the Internet as a place on the map marked “Here be dragons.” For the last decade, Hollywood and big music have spent time not innovating, but trying to get the U.S. Congress to help them tame the Internet.

GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram wrote that the bill gives the government and private companies “unprecedented powers to remove websites on the flimsiest of grounds.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation called the bill “a dangerous wish list.” The nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington said SOPA would cause “broad collateral damage to freedom of expression and privacy.”

SOPA targets search engines, Internet service providers, ad networks and payment networks precisely because those components are so central to the functioning of the Internet.