Google's Matt Cutts, in charge of much of the search giant's antispam efforts, tweeted over the past week that Google plans to take a closer look at the practice of "cloaking," or presenting one look to a Googlebot crawling one's site while presenting another look to users.

Still, it's rare for Cutts and Google to announce this type of algorithmic shift so publicly, which implies they're giving Webmasters a warning shot in order to reexamine their sites before the ranking changes go into effect, and that rankings may be a little fluid as it rolls out.

Russia has accused Western nations of exerting "unacceptable" pressure over the trial of jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Khodorkovsky, once seen as a threat to former President Vladimir Putin, was convicted of embezzlement.

One of them, Vadim Klyuvgant, condemned "an unjust verdict by a court that is not free", saying it was "shameful for the country".

The proportion of antibiotics sold in the United States each year that go to animals turns out to be not 70 percent, but rather 80 percent. Here's CLF's Ralph Loglisci, who got the confirmatory numbers from the FDA.

Most of the drugs used in animal agriculture and in human medicine are functionally identical. That's one reason why the overuse of antibiotics in animals is such a concern: When organisms become resistant on the farm to drugs used on livestock, they are becoming resistant to the exact same drugs used in humans.

There has been a well-publicised surge of cases in the UK during December with swine flu appearing to be the dominant of the three strains circulating.

The rates being seen elsewhere in Europe are not as high as in the UK, but the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said there was evidence that the winter flu epidemics were "starting".

The bankers' trade association has written to Cambridge University asking for the MPhil thesis of one of our research students, Omar Choudary, to be taken offline. They complain it contains too much detail of our No-PIN attack on Chip-and-PIN and thus "breaches the boundary of responsible disclosure"; they also complain about Omar's post on the subject to this blog.

The bankers also fret that "future research, which may potentially be more damaging, may also be published in this level of detail".

Some note the recent strategy of pressuring payment methods to cut off funding from websites they accuse of duping consumers into paying for pirated content as a more recent change in strategy in the organizations strategy to fight piracy.

"Megaupload is a legitimate business operating within the boundaries of the law. In five years of operation we have not been sued by a single content owner. If the RIAA or MPAA would have legal grounds they would have taken us to court by now."

Manning's supporters say that he is in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day; this could be construed as a form of torture. This month visitors reported that his mental and physical health was deteriorating.

He was charged in July with leaking classified material including video posted by WikiLeaks of a 2007 US attack in Baghdad by a Apache helicopter that killed a Reuters news photographer and his driver.

Senior American military commanders in Afghanistan are pushing for an expanded campaign of Special Operations ground raids across the border into Pakistan's tribal areas.

The decision to expand American military activity in Pakistan, which would almost certainly have to be approved by President Obama himself, would amount to the opening of a new front in the nine-year-old war, which has grown increasingly unpopular among Americans.

The officials who described the proposal and the intelligence operations declined to be identified by name discussing classified information.

I was in the middle of writing a blog post about how great the Kindle 3 and Connectify work together (which I will post in the next day or two), but started having a problem with my Kindle crashing randomly.

It didn't seem to make a lot of sense that a leather cover would crash an electronic device, so I got curious and started to look closely at my Kindle's case.

Once a bit of paint has rubbed off the hooks, power starts flowing through the cover, leading to brownouts.

The British government wants to gag WikiLeaks, and is drawing up Orwellian plans to exploit fears over the effect of online smut on children to achieve that aim.

Vaizey declared his position on the issue in Parliament in late November. "We are talking about preventing children from having access to inappropriate content, and how we can work with ISPs to make it that little bit more difficult for them to do so," he said.

"This is a very serious matter," he said. "I think it is very important that it's the ISPs that come up with solutions to protect children.