Although they are not the first papers to erect pay barriers around their content, the papers are going a step further by making most of their site invisible to Google's Web crawler. Except for their homepages, no stories will show up on Google.

The British papers are the first within the News Corp. fold to jump off the search bandwagon.

BP says it has begun pumping mud into a breached Gulf of Mexico oil well to try to stem the flow of oil caused by a rig explosion last month.

If the oil flow is successfully capped, engineers will follow up with cement to seal the well permanently.

There is a risk a weak spot in the blowout preventer that sits on top of the well could breach under the pressure, causing a brand new leak at the site 50 miles (80km) off the Louisiana coast.

Mountain View has released a browser add-on that opts you out of Google Analytics, the traffic monitoring service now used by 71 per cent of the top domains on the interwebs.

According to a study from the University of California, Berkeley, Google Analytics was used on 71 per cent of roughly 400,000 top domains as of March 2009.

The Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on is available for Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Google Chrome 4.x and higher, and Mozilla Firefox 3.5 and higher.

Eircom will from today begin a process that will lead to cutting off the broadband service of customers found to be repeatedly sharing music online illegally.

It is understood that, during the pilot phase, Eircom has agreed to process about 50 IP addresses a week. Irma is using a third-party firm, Dtecnet, to identify Eircom customers who are sharing, and not simply downloading, a specific list of its members' copyrighted works on peer-to-peer networks.

Google May 21 began adding SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption for its search engine, a direct response to the company's accidental collection of users' personal information in countries all over the world.

Privacy advocates have been calling for Google to SSL-enable its search for years; the WiFi privacy gaffe accelerated Google's plans to offer SSL for search.

The company turned on HTTPS as the primary setting for Gmail one day after revealing that the Gmail accounts of users had been accessed in a Chinese cyber-attack.

Sixty percent of respondents to a Sophos poll say they are considering quitting Facebook due to privacy fears.

Of roughly 1,600 people surveyed, 60 percent said it is either "highly likely" or "possible" that they will leave Facebook due to concerns over privacy. Just 24 percent said they either wouldn't leave or it is "not likely." The remaining 16 percent of the respondents had already left the site.

Earlier in 2010, Sophos conducted a survey of businesses that rated Facebook ahead of Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace as the riskiest social networking site.

Facebook has been giving advertisers data that they can use to discover users' names and locations, contrary to its privacy policy.

Advertisers were getting reports whenever users clicked on their ads, as is typical across the web. However, Facebook and MySpace's reports contained the URL of the user's profile page, which often included their real name or user name.

Major changes to its privacy settings are expected after it decided to publish users' private information, and IM transcripts showed CEO Mark Zuckerberg calling those same users "dumb fucks" for trusting him with their data.

The blocking of YouTube comes a day after a Pakistani court blocked Facebook amid a growing row over a competition on the social networking website to design cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

"There are so many insults to the Prophet on the internet and that's why we felt we had to bring this case," he said.

A Boing Boing reader found the email for Hurt Locker producer, Nicolas Chartier, who already has something of a reputation for... well... aggressive emailing, and received quite a response.

Chartier calls him a moron and a thief and wishes his whole family ends up in jail. I guess when you have someone like that in charge, it's no wonder that they think filing tens of thousands of lawsuits against fans is a sensible position.

The producers of the movie, including Voltage Pictures, are being sued by a soldier, who claims that the movie was actually "his" story.

Even without cookies, popular browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox give websites enough information to get a unique picture of their visitors about 94 percent of the time, according to research compiled over the past few months by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

This means that most Internet users are a lot less anonymous than they believe, Eckersley said. 'Even if you turn off cookies and you use a proxy to hide your IP address, you could still be tracked,' he said.