App developers are withdrawing their products for sale from the US versions of Apple's App Store and Google's Android Market for fear of being sued by companies which own software patents.

The growth of patent lawsuits over apps raises serious issues for all the emerging smartphone platforms, because none of the principal companies involved - Apple, Google or Microsoft - can guarantee to protect developers from them.

App developer Michael Lee Johnson, conscious of the need to be big on Google+ or be nobody, wondered what the best way to levitate his Google+ circles might be. He hit upon a fine idea: he placed an ad on Facebook. It was a simple thing that was headlined: "Add Michael to Google+."

You're not guessing what happened with the ad, are you? You know what happened, don't you? Facebook didn't, according to Johnson, merely erase this heinous horse of Troy from its pages. It reportedly banned all his other campaigns too.

Bernice Keebler had a simple complaint: Verizon billed her $4.19 for six "local calls" but wouldn't tell her where she'd called - not unless she got a lawyer and a subpoena.

In a decision released today by the PUC's communications office, Administrative Law Judge Mary D. Long proposed fining Verizon Pennsylvania $1,000 for failing in its duty to provide "adequate customer service".

Vrignaud, it seems, committed the foul of using more than 250 GB of data on Comcast two months in a row, triggering the company's overage policy that results in a year-long ban from using its services.

And all Comcast is saying is that he's kicked off - and under the terms of the ban, he can't even switch to a uncapped, higher-priced, lower-speed business connection.

Spokesman Charlie Douglas says the 250 GB limit, which it imposed in October 2008 after agreeing to not throttle peer-to-peer traffic, is intended to keep users like Vrignaud from impacting their neighbors.

"People should be careful if they have a terabyte of data to back-up," Douglas said. "They should manage their consumption carefully, and do it over time."

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said there were were 41% fewer websites at the end of 2010 than a year earlier.

Civil rights campaigners have long railed against China's web censors, who impose controls known as the Great Firewall of China.

A number of websites are routinely blocked, such as the BBC's Chinese language service, and social media sites like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter.

Last week, in a piece from our friends at GigaOM, Database Grandpoobah Mike Stonebraker announced that Facebook's continued dependance on MySQL was "a fate worse than death," insisting that the social network's only route to salvation is to "bite the bullet and rewrite everything."

Stonebraker's Facebook comments drew fire not only from a core database engineer at Mark Zuckerberg's social networking outfit, but also from the recognized kingpin of "cloud computing": Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels.

What is it with recording industry folks getting charged with actual theft these days? First we had folks from the Spanish music collection society SGAE charged with a complicated scheme to divert money from artists to themselves. Then we had the story of IFPI execs doing something similar. Now comes the news that a single employee at Warner Music, Andrew Robertson, whose job was "equipment buyer," may have stolen somewhere around $700,000 over a four year period.

"Total WordPress sites just passed '50 million' today!", wrote Wordpress core developer Andrew Nacin yesterday as he pointed readers to the ever-counting up Wordpress user clock.

The Wordpress stats page also provides other fascinating information, such as the fact that in the week ending 3 July its users enjoyed some 579,930,820 page views of 2,794,824 posts.

"Child pornography is great," the man said enthusiastically. "Politicians do not understand file sharing, but they understand child pornography, and they want to filter that to score points with the public. Once we get them to filter child pornography, we can get them to extend the block to file sharing."

The date was May 27, 2007, and the man was Johan Schlüter, head of the Danish Anti-Piracy Group (Antipiratgruppen).

"We must associate file sharing with child pornography. Because that's something the politicians understand, and something they want to filter off the Internet."

The copyright industry lobby is actively trying to hide egregious crimes against children, obviously not because they care about the children, but because the resulting censorship mechanism can be a benefit to their business if they manage to broaden the censorship in the next stage.

Israel had tracked the activists on social media sites like Facebook, compiled a blacklist of about 300 names and asked airlines to keep those on the list off flights to Israel.

"Lufthansa called me last night and said I would not be allowed to board their plane because Israel denied me entry," Beatt said.

An EasyJet spokesman in Geneva, Adrian Fuhrer, said 40 people were prevented from boarding the plane at the request of Israeli authorities.