The three were beaten with fists, knees and rifles, hooded and subjected to mock executions by members of Libya's army and secret police.

Koraltan said: "I cannot describe how bad it was. Most of them [other detainees] were hooded and handcuffed really tightly, all with swollen hands and broken ribs. They were in agony. They were screaming."

A distributed denial-of-service attack that affected thousands of customers at Codero and other hosting providers appeared to come from within China and to be launched at a Chinese site that is critical of communism or its Domain Name System provider, Codero said today.

"We were receiving more than 1.5 million packets per second in the attack. It paralyzed our core routers, and our upstream providers were unable to pinpoint where the target IPs were," he said.

A couple of days ago, Sony released its first official statement regarding PlayStation 3 hacking stating that it will ban all hacked consoles from the PlayStation Network and Qriocity service.

A newly released hack claims that it is able to unban banned consoles and ban other consoles even if they are unmodified.

Four Libyan towns which forces loyal to Colonel Gaddafi claimed to have retaken remain under rebel control, witnesses say.

Some of the day's heaviest fighting was reported in Misrata, where a local doctor told the BBC the situation became "very bad" after pro-Gaddafi forces with tanks and armoured cars went into the city centre and opened fire.

The UN Security Council approved sanctions last week imposing asset freezes and travel bans on Col Gaddafi and his family and aides.

A federal magistrate is granting Sony the right to acquire the internet IP addresses of anybody who has visited PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz's website from January of 2009 to the present.

A YouTube subpoena, also approved, seeks information connected to the "geohot" account that displayed a video of the hack being used: "Jailbroken PS3 3.55 with Homebrew." The subpoena demands data to identify who watched the video and "documents reproducing all records or usernames and IP addresses that have posted or published comments in response to the video."

Sony has threatened to sue anybody who posts the hacking tools or the encryption key. It is seeking unspecified damages from Hotz.

ICE has now arrested someone and charged him with criminal copyright infringement, such that he's now facing five years in jail (as well as fines). This is interesting, because when that domain was seized, we had noted that channelsurfing did not appear to host any content itself, but merely embedded content from other sites.

There's simply no such thing as criminal contributory infringement, so if that's the claim, then it would appear that ICE (yet again) is simply making up what it wants the law to be, rather than what the law actually says.

CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports that the new charges for the first time formally accuse Manning of aiding the enemy.

The charge of aiding the enemy under the Uniform Code of Military Justice is a capital offense, but the Army's prosecution team has notified the Manning defense team that it will not recommend the death penalty to the two-star general who is in charge of proceeding with legal action.

As was expected, former Senator Chris Dodd has now confirmed that he is a blatant liar and willing to sell out his principles for about a million bucks a year. Just months ago, he announced that he would not, under any condition, take a lobbying job. And here it is, just a month or so after he left the Senate and he's confirmed that he's taken the top job at the MPAA, an organization, who just a week ago admitted its number one priority was lobbying the government.

They removed the drive from the PC and connected a 'write blocker', a piece of hardware designed to isolate the drive and stop any purging of its contents. Incredibly, after leaving this attached for only 20 minutes, almost 19 percent of its files had been wiped for good, a process the researchers put down the ability of SSDs to initiate certain routines independent of a computer.

The firmware built into many and possibly all of these drives allows them to destroy data simply by being powered on, even when not connected to a PC or under the apparent control of an operating system.

As well as missing e-mails, many reported that their contacts had also disappeared.

In a statement, Google said: "This is affecting less than .08% of our Gmail user base, and we've already fixed the problem for some individuals."

He told BBC News that although service was being restored, many users were angry about the way the outage had been handled.