Following braindead efforts to block specialized browsers, even though they access Hulu content just like regular browsers, combined with blocking anonymous proxies, even those used for perfectly legitimate reasons, Hulu is apparently now cracking down on sites that embed a lot of its videos -- yes, despite having embed functionality specifically allowed.

Many sites apparently are still embedding lots of Hulu shows, and Hulu has simply decided to tell those sites to stop.

Experts said the findings provided an explanation for the "hygiene hypothesis", which holds that exposure to germs during early childhood primes the body against allergies.

Many believe our obsession with cleanliness is to blame for the recent boom in allergies in developed countries.

A spokeswoman for Allergy UK said there was a growing body of evidence that exposure to germs was a good thing.

In addition to connecting to a Lithuanian master command channel, it also changes the root password for the device, making it harder for owners trying to regain control. Infected iPhones are also tagged with a unique ID number.

One would think people who are smart and energetic enough to jailbreak a smartphone would know about the perils of SSH and default root passwords, but the success of these worms suggests otherwise.

Now Microsoft is sacrificing the integrity of Bing searches so as to cozy up to State Security in Beijing. In effect, it has chosen become part of the Communist Party's propaganda apparatus.

Search "Tiananmen" and you'll find out about the army firing on pro-democracy protesters in 1989. Search Dalai Lama, Falun Gong and you also get credible results.

But conduct the search with the simplified characters used in mainland China, then you get sanitized pro-Communist results. This is especially true of image searches. Magic! No Tiananmen Square massacre. The Dalai Lama becomes an oppressor. Falun Gong believers are villains, not victims.

As pointed out by Mathew Ingram, just days after making the case for paying for news, The Times has been accused of publishing an article that it copied without permission from a blog.

Yes, just as Rupert Murdoch is calling aggregators (sites that simply summarize and link to stories) parasites (even as he owns a bunch of aggregators himself), one of his papers didn't aggregate, it flat out copied, without permission, a blog post that was written by Edgar Wright as a tribute to Edward Woodward, who recently passed away.

All applications are designed to run in a web browser and all the user's data is stored on Google's servers.

Any documents and files created on the computer were automatically synced and saved on Google's servers, said Matthew Papakipos, an engineer working on the system.

A complex HTML e-mail will in all likelihood still look very different when viewed in Outlook and Gmail. Images do not display properly, tables become larger or have unexpectedly thicker borders, hyperlinks in image maps are in the wrong location or missing entirely; quite frankly, it's embarrassing.

Although HTML 5 and Flash on mobile devices has some exciting potential for the future of e-mail, it's nice to know that you can always fall back on plain text to make sure e-mail does what it was designed to do: get your message delivered.

Sifting through minefields to remove these hidden threats is currently a dangerous, tedious, and expensive process, however scientists at the University of Edinburgh recently announced that they have engineered a strain of bacteria that glows green in the presence of explosives, making mine detection a snap.

Within a few hours the bacteria strain begins to glow green wherever traces of explosive chemicals are present.

As part of the conference an anti-Internet censorship group was disrupted by a gang of UN officials who demanded removal of a poster that mentioned Internet firewalls in China.

The poster was thrown on the floor and protesters were told to remove it because of the reference to China and Tibet. They refused, so security guards came and removed it.

Deibert has filed a complaint against the censorship of the event and sent it to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

From Nov 10th to Nov 13th the Brazilian Government hosted a public hacking contest to test the robustness of its voting machines.

All attempts (aside from a minor one which would not compromise the overall results) failed, and observations from the participants and neutral observers will be taken into account to improve the process even further.