Google has decided to stop censoring search results in China, after discovering that someone based in that country had attempted to hack into the e-mail accounts of human rights activists.

Shortly after Google disclosed the hack, Adobe posted its own announcement disclosing that it became aware on Jan. 2 that it had been targeted in a "sophisticated, coordinated attack against corporate network systems managed by Adobe and other companies."

Depending on the personality you choose--"Wild Wendy" or "Frigid Farrah" for instance--Roxxxy may purr a metallic, "That gets me hot!" after you introduce a topic like soccer.

Another possible detraction--some of her voices sound more like Stephen Hawking's vocal synthesizer than that of a hot human female.

Roxxxy may be just a stiff chatterbox for now. But who knows what a few actuators and makeup would do?

Around the three-minute mark, he says: "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time."

Gosh, it's hard to keep up with these pesky social norms. They change so very, very quickly. Two years ago, Zuckerberg told ReadWriteWeb that privacy controls were "the vector around which Facebook operates."

Best Buy is apparently dropping some of its "optimization" services, and will instead provide the "Best Buy Software Installer," a new tool that the company says will "radically simplify how you set up and customize your new PC or upgrade an existing one."

The document also states that, because these computers will have less trialware installed by manufacturers, and Windows 7 actually works, selling optimization is suddenly much harder.

Spain has proposed a new anti-piracy law that would let intellectual property police play a speedier game of whack-a-mole with websites serving illegal downloads of music and films.

Under a fast-track judicial process the website's owner would be summoned at the time of the initial complaint and given four days to appeal.

Spain's original version of the plan, unveiled to widespread criticism in November, would have allowed the IP commission to shutter websites without any judicial authorization.

You see, dear readers, the very official Olympic rules dictate that athletes are only allowed to have video cameras outside of specific areas. The USOC is apparently honestly concerned Cisco's statement gives the impression that Olympic athletes would actually be filming themselves in the midst of their own competition.

We're not updating that one, we just thought it was sort of funny because it showed how serious the business of Olympic-level sponsorship is.

A report financed by the French government recommends that Google, MSN, Yahoo, and other big advertising companies--as well as Internet service providers--be taxed, with revenue set to help fund the music and publishing sectors.

The government of French President Nicolas Sarkozy has promised to defend French culture and has helped implement some of the world's strongest antipiracy and pro-copyright laws.

"The music industry is in the worst situation--worse than the publishing industry," he told Liberation. "They are in great danger. So we must act quickly."

A report in the Royal Society's Biology Letters journal describes how a female cane toad inflates its body to prevent an amorous male from mating with it.

In their experiments, the scientists found that male toads were less able to maintain this grip if the female inflated its body.

"Our work now shows that females can actually manipulate the outcome of male-male competition by inflating at the right moment."

Hollywood and its high-tech partners are deeply concerned that their customers will rebel against some of the limitations taking shape as video moves away from physical discs.

Under the proposed system, proof of digital purchases would be stored online in a so-called rights locker, and consumers would be permitted to play the movies they bought or rented on any DECE-compatible device.

Back in 2008, he did say that he mostly agreed with McGuinness that somehow ISPs were to blame for all of this. Then, in early 2009, there was an amusing interview where he basically said that piracy is bad, but he couldn't really speak out against it because he was too rich, and people would point that out.

In the past, the "young, fledgling songwriter" couldn't live off ticket or t-shirt sales either. He had to hope that he got the lucky golden ticket from a record label and that they didn't then crush his spirit and originality before discarding him as an unrecouped has-been.