While in most countries the photo sharing site's "SafeSearch" function can be turned off by users interested in seeing all the photos available on Flickr, that option has been axed in Germany due to "stricter legislation and penalties in that country", parent company Yahoo! said in a statement.

The limitations were introduced because German law requires websites to verify that visitors are old enough to see potentially sensitive content, such as erotic photos.

Users are now calling for boycotts. One group, Against Censorship at the Flick, even created a pool of images that German users are not allowed to see.

Dubber is a lecturer at the University of Central England who writes a great blog about the music industry focused on new strategies for the industry. Birch is the head of Revolver Records. The email conversation goes back and forth as Birch insists that Dubber's link to a Download Squad post was somehow inappropriate. The link is about someone fighting back against yet another bad lawsuit by the RIAA. Why is it inappropriate? That's hard to parse from Birch's rambling emails, but it appears to have something to do with giving support to people who hate the RIAA. In the end, after Dubber explains that criticism of actual events seems valid, and Birch responds that if Dubber doesn't take down his post, he's going to report Dubber to his university.

NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing, when it should be doing something about piracy instead.

"Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned," Cotton said. "If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year."

There are two obvious rejoinders to such a ridiculous statement. The first is that "hundreds of billions of dollars a year" is a myth. The MPAA's own cherry-picked study from Smith Barney in 2005 put their annual loss at less than $6 billion, and while the music and software industries also like to publish trumped-up claims, the figures are nowhere near hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

The second objection, of course, is that the traditional crimes Cotton describes often involve the destruction of people's lives along with property. Burglaries can result in homicide, as can fraud (ask the preacher's wife), while bank robbery is without a doubt a dangerous game. Those crimes also typically involve real property.

Measures moving through Congress, including a requirement for travelers in some countries to register travel plans online 48 hours before departure, have raised fears in Europe of disruptions in the trans-Atlantic flow of business and leisure travel.

Along with online registration, the updated program would require new and existing member countries to improve data-sharing; more rigorously report lost and stolen passports (not just blank passports); and guarantee they will repatriate nationals if those people are ordered out of the United States.

"It's really a 21st-century model," said James Carafano, a Heritage Foundation analyst who specializes in homeland security. "It'll all be done electronically and biometrically. And it really doesn't compromise your privacy."

Blur drummer Dave Rowntree told OUT-LAW that they should have realised in 1997 that their battle was already lost.

Rowntree advises digital rights advocacy group the Open Rights Group and has been a vocal opponent of the mainstream record industry's policies of chasing individual file sharers. When told that the last Blur album was leaked on to the internet he reportedly said "I'd rather it gushed".

Rowntree said that the major labels' policies of putting digital rights management (DRM) technology on music CDs to attempt to stop them being copied and shared backfired spectacularly.

"DRM was doomed to fail because the people who it was designed to stop, as in the counterfeiters or the mass file sharers or the people doing it for political reasons could easily bypass it," he said.

"But the people who were caught in the trap of DRM were the ordinary people who wanted to play their CDs on their computer as well as their CD recorder or who wanted to make a tape of it to put on in the car who were doing things that most people regardless of the law would regard as legitimate activities."

Auction website eBay has pulled its US advertising from search engine giant and adversary Google.

The move comes after Google angered eBay with a provocative decision to hold an event on the same evening as eBay's annual merchants' conference.

Google hoped to alert PayPal users who would have been in Boston attending the eBay Live annual seller event to its own service, according to market experts.

It could also have been seen as part of an effort to get eBay to accept Google Checkout, currently banned on the online auctioneer's site.

Terrorism is a real threat, and one that needs to be addressed by appropriate means. But allowing ourselves to be terrorized by wannabe terrorists and unrealistic plots -- and worse, allowing our essential freedoms to be lost by using them as an excuse -- is wrong.

The alleged plan, to blow up JFK's fuel tanks and a small segment of the 40-mile petroleum pipeline that supplies the airport, was ridiculous.

I don't think these nut jobs, with their movie-plot threats, even deserve the moniker "terrorist." But in this country, while you have to be competent to pull off a terrorist attack, you don't have to be competent to cause terror.

Following one of these abortive terror misadventures, the administration invariably jumps on the news to trumpet whatever ineffective "security" measure they're trying to push, whether it be national ID cards, wholesale National Security Agency eavesdropping or massive data mining. Never mind that in all these cases, what caught the bad guys was old-fashioned police work -- the kind of thing you'd see in decades-old spy movies.

Yahoo shareholders have rejected plans for the company to adopt a policy that opposes censorship on the internet.

Proposals to set up a human rights committee which would review its policies around the world, specifically China, were also heavily defeated.

Yahoo has been criticized by human rights groups since 2005 for its role in turning over some political dissidents' e-mails.

At the company's annual general meeting, the censorship proposal won only about 15% of support while only 4% backed the idea of a human rights committee.

Neither Yahoo nor any other company has released a list of websites that have been de-listed for their political and religious content.

The internet firms argue it is better to offer Chinese users some information than none at all.

A right-wing Hindu group has asked public Internet centres in India to partly block access to Orkut, and is making a software to monitor abusive communities on the popular social networking site operated by Google.

The student wing of the Shiv Sena party said many Indians use Orkut to bad-mouth religious groups and disturb communal harmony, and also spread misinformation about India.

"We are gently telling Internet cafe owners that it is their responsibility to see that surfers do not use their facility to carry out such hate campaigns," he said.

"Or else, we will have to do that job for them." Last week, dozens of Shiv Sena workers vandalised some Internet centres, saying they were not stopping their customers from accessing Orkut groups involved in sending hate messages.

The courts have for the first time found that the electronic trail briefly left in a computer server's RAM, or random access memory, by each visitor to a site is "stored information" and must be turned over as evidence during litigation, according to documents seen by CNET News.com.

This may be the first time that anyone has argued that information within RAM is electronically stored information and therefore subject to the rules of evidence, Chooljian said according to court records. Up to now, many Web sites that promised users anonymity, such as TorrentSpy, believed they need only to switch off their servers' logging function to avoid storing user data.

In one of the most hotly contested disputes so far in the case, the records show that the MPAA accused TorrentSpy of trying to conceal evidence when the search engine began directing visitors to the servers of an outside vendor.

The company's attorney, Ira Rothken, said Friday that it is unlikely TorrentSpy would continue operations in the United States if forced to turn over user data.