Protests break out in some nation around the globe and one of the first things a media-shy government does - just after sending in riot police - is pull the plug on YouTube.

Scores of other media outlets have been blocked or partially blacked out in China, including broadcasts of CNN, the BBC World, and Google News.

The country's authorities routinely block sites such as Wikipedia, the BBC, and even live TV transmissions to hinder publication of stories on the Dalai Lama, Falun Gong, or even stories critical of leaders or governments that China is trying to build better relationships with.

On an Internet connection from a room in a Western-owned hotel, censorship is fairly light. Hundreds of images of the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989 pop up on Google Images, particularly images of "Tank Man." News stories, or at least headlines, on controversial subjects come up as well.

Searching for Tiananmen Square on Google's Chinese Image site with Chinese characters reveals no pictures of the riots in 14 pages of images.

The nation's four Internet provider organizations have agreed to forcibly cut the Internet connection of users found to repeatedly use Winny and other file-sharing programs to illegally copy gaming software and music, it was learned Friday.

Resorting to cutting off the Internet connection of copyright violators has been considered before but never resorted to over fears the practice might involve violations of privacy rights and the freedom of use of telecommunications.

A brief six-hour survey by a copyright organization monitoring the Internet found about 3.55 million examples of illegally copied gaming software, worth about 9.5 billion yen at regular software prices, and 610,000 examples of illegally copied music files, worth 440 million yen, that could be freely downloaded into personal computers using such software, the sources said.

China blocked YouTube today, after videos were posted showing the protests in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa on Friday, against the ongoing Chinese occupation.

On Saturday, the first images appeared online, along with video streamed foreign news reports, photos, and commentary. But today, any of China's 210 million Internet users who try to access the popular U.S based video site will only get a blank screen.

Chinese censors have been busy rushing around trying to remove the politically motivated comments wherever they are found.

Forget the conventional notion of human-like androids; researchers are investigating large swarms of up to 10,000 miniature robots which can work together to form a single, artificial life form.

As a part of an international collaboration dubbed the "Symbiotic Evolutionary Robot Organisms" project, or "Symbrion" for short, researchers from the University of York are developing an artificial immune system which can protect both the individual robots that form part of a swarm, as well as the larger, collective organism.

Should any faults be detected, individual robots will be able to share the information with others in the robotic swarm. The swarm as a whole will thus be capable of evolving in the face of new problems, just as a natural immune system is able to cope with unfamiliar pathogens.

P4P, which stands for Proactive network Provider Participation for P2P, ultimately aims to decrease backbone traffic and bring down network operation costs by enabling service providers to communicate information about network conditions to client applications for the purpose of facilitating improved P2P file transfer performance.

Ars spoke with Verizon senior technologist and P4P workgroup co-chair Doug Pasko, who tells us that Verizon observed download performance improvements of approximately 200 percent during tests conducted with Pando. The performance boost can climb as high as 600 percent in some cases.

Verizon condemns illegal filesharing and says that the new protocol is intended for adoption by legal commercial services, but also reiterates that - unlike AT&T - the company has no intention of policing its own network.

The Internet is the realm of beer swigging youths with a predilection for pornography, according to Poland’s former prime minister.

In an interview for his conservative party's website, the former PM who ruled Poland with his twin brother Lech, the president, put forward the view that Poles shouldn't be given the opportunity to vote online because the Internet attracts people who watch "pornography while sipping a bottle of beer".

Tim wrote about the pointless controversy around the site RateMyCop.com, which would allow people to rate police officers they had dealings with.

But, of course, many police officers didn't see it that way. However, what no one expected is that the site's registrar and host would step into the fight and take the site completely offline with no warning to its owner.

People at GoDaddy gave conflicting reports as to why the site was taken offline, first claiming it was taken offline for "suspicious activity" and later that he had surpassed a 3 terabyte bandwidth limit, which the owner of the site disputes, saying there weren't nearly enough page views for that to happen. Either way, he's now ditched GoDaddy and found a host that won't pull the site offline with no warning and no recourse.

Parents of two four-year-old boys in New York are suing officials after their sons were allegedly handcuffed for refusing to take a nap.

Then, a school safety officer allegedly entered the room, cuffed the boys' wrists - and told them they would never see their parents again.

Mr Agulnick said the families were seeking damages, adding: "Failure to comply with nap time is hardly an offence that warrants being handcuffed, or threatened, for that matter."

In the US, several universities have banned filesharing applications such as BitTorrent, mostly under pressure from the RIAA. A university in the Netherlands has taken a different approach. They use uTorrent to distribute software and OS updates across 6500 workstations, and end up saving a lot of time, money and resources by doing so.

Before they decided to use BitTorrent, more than 20 servers were needed to distribute 25.6 TBs of data to the desktops, and even then it could take up to 4 days to update them all. Now, with BitTorrent, this process has speeded up significantly, and all computers are updated with the latest software in less than 4 hours.

For the fourth year running, FBI director Robert Mueller said the agency reguilarly goes beyond its legal limits to collect information on people's emails and web wibbling.

In an interesting twist, Mueller tried to claim that this wasn't really the FBI's fault. The telcoms companies the snoops roped in on the cunning plan kept providing "too much information", he said.

Senate Judiciary chairman Patrick Leahy has a right moan about the state of affairs: "There has to be a better chain of command for this. You cannot just have an FBI agent who decides he'd like to obtain Americans' records, bank records or anything else and do it just because they want to."