President Barack Obama said on Wednesday that disappointment over the outcome of the Copenhagen climate change summit was justified, hardening a widespread verdict that the conference had been a failure.

"At a point where there was about to be complete breakdown, and the prime minister of India was heading to the airport and the Chinese representatives were essentially skipping negotiations, and everybody's screaming, what did happen was, cooler heads prevailed," Obama said.

The World Trade Organization has ruled that China's practice of funneling media imports to state-owned companies-which facilitates the country's long tradition of censorship-violates international trade laws.

The WTO has given China one year to get its act together and bring its import policies in line with international trade laws. If not, the US can ask the WTO to bring commercial sanctions against China.

The company still stands behind its controversial methods for "managing" network traffic, but claims that it wants to "avoid a potentially lengthy and distracting legal dispute that would serve no useful purpose."

Angry customers argued that Comcast had violated its own Terms of Service as well as various consumer protection laws by representing itself as offering the fastest Internet connection-P2P or not.

A net prankster has taken advantage of Conroy's failure to reserve his own domain name by registering stephenconroy.com.au and turning it into an anti-censorship protest site.

Conroy announced this week that he would be pressing ahead with plans to force ISPs to block a secret blacklist of "refused classification" (RC) websites for all Australian internet users.

The photo has been assembled from 600 shots clicked by a 21-megapixel Canon 5D Mark II camera and a 70-200mm lens, set to 200mm. The camera was mounted on a special robotic device that turned it tiny increments every few hours. The resulting data from the camera was about 40-gigabytes.

The photo measures 192,000 x 96,000 pixels, or 18.4 billion pixels altogether.

While the Open Source video player VLC has been doing well among Windows and Linux fans, it seems that Apple won't list the player on its downloads site.

The VideoLAN Foundation said that the Macolytes have "greatly exaggerated" the situation, but admitted that the current graphical interface "is not being maintained at this time."

The Italian government has proposed introducing new restrictions on the Internet after a Facebook fan page for the man who allegedly attacked Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Sunday drew almost 100,000 users in under 48 hours.

Members of his own party, however, were quick to warn against any curtailment of Internet freedom, suggesting that current laws already provide sufficient protection against the criminal use of the Web.

Haber decried the emphasis on the $9.99 price point for e-books. "The $9.99 price point is not a money-maker," he said. "Certain bestsellers are sold at that price for retail, competitive reasons. But you need to have a range. You could go from $10 to $20 even to $100 for an e-book."

Haber went on to defend the of DRM, which he doesn't see going away for awhile. "You need an orderly process to sell books and DRM makes that possible, mainly because it allows content creators and distributors to make money from that content."

Australia intends to introduce filters which will ban access to websites containing criminal content.

A seven month trial in conjunction with ISPs found the technology behind the filter to be 100% effective.

Mr Conroy said the filters included optional extras such as a ban on gambling sites which ISPs could choose to implement in exchange for a grant.

If you browse the Screwfix catalogue, you'll see there's recently been a flood of new lithium-ion-powered garden and workshop tools - they're rapidly taking over from NiCd and NiMH thanks to lighter weight, longer life and lack of the pernicious "memory effect".

66% premium on laptop batteries would be annoying enough - perhaps not enough to power a full-blown rant - but I also have a few power and garden tools made by Ryobi from its excellent ONE+ range, which are also powered by lithium-ion batteries.