Microsoft's Web site disappeared from our Internet radar this morning. The site may have been struck down by attacks by virus writers who threatened to target Microsoft in the way SCO was targeted last week.

According to Netcraft here, Microsoft.com went down at midnight London time. Microsofties are currently beaving away to repair the damage, we understand, though no statement is yet forthcoming from the Vole concerning what the reasons for the outage are.

The BBC has a piece by Bill Thompson suggesting that "control" of the internet should move away from corporate groups(ICANN and the Web Consortium) and to governments. We previously had an article on ICANN and the UN World Summit on the Information Society. One quote: "We allow images of consensual sex in our cinemas, but not images of bestiality or child abuse. Why should the net be any different?" My personal answer: because the internet should not be another TV or cinema, it should be a free, user-as-peer and user-controllable media; a "reversible" media, as Baudrillard would put it; not user-as-consumer.

Figures from mail filtering firm MessageLabs show that the number of copies of the virus being caught everyday are swiftly diminishing.

Despite the slowdown Mydoom has already become the fastest spreading virus ever and looks set to challenge the Sobig.F program for the most active virus of all time.

The virus did not rely on technical tricks to spread so far and wide, instead it played on the gullibility of users to open the e-mail message bearing it and click on the infected attachment.

Hollywood attorneys tried to persuade a three-judge panel to overturn a lower court's ruling that the Grokster and Morpheus file-sharing services are not responsible for copyright violations committed by people who use their software to illegally trade music and movies. But a skeptical 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel pressed the lawyers to defend their contention that file-sharing services should be stripped of the protections afforded technological innovation by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Judge Sidney R. Thomas, regarded as among the most technologically astute of the 9th Circuit judges, noted that users of the file-swapping networks could continue to trade files, even if Morpheus and Grokster were shut down immediately.

Meanwhile, Carey Ramos, a New York attorney representing songwriters, received a stern rebuke from Noonan to "curtail that use of abusive language," when he began to heatedly criticize the services as "trafficking in pirated goods."

The Pentagon canceled its so-called LifeLog project, an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person's entire existence.

Run by Darpa, the Defense Department's research arm, LifeLog aimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, the magazines read, the plane tickets bought, the e-mail sent and received. Out of this seemingly endless ocean of information, computer scientists would plot distinctive routes in the data, mapping relationships, memories, events and experiences.

Private-sector research in this area is proceeding. At Microsoft, for example, minicomputer pioneer Gordon Bell's program, MyLifeBits, continues to develop ways to sort and store memories.

David Karger, Shrobe's colleague at MIT, thinks such efforts will still go on at Darpa, too.

"I am sure that such research will continue to be funded under some other title," wrote Karger in an e-mail. "I can't imagine Darpa 'dropping out' of such a key research area."

Are P2P companies responsible for the law-breaking actions of their users? That's the question lawyers from the content industry and file-sharing software suppliers Grokster and Morpheus went to court yesterday to argue.

In court, the content industry's advocates argued before the Tribunal that Grokster and Morpheus should be forced to incorporate technology that blocks the sharing of copyright material - essentially to turn them into copyright police.

Grokster's attorney, Michael Page, noted that if the two companies are held liable for illegal file-shares, so too would ISPs, CD and DVD burner manufacturers and other software suppliers, too.

Can inkjet printing technologies of the near future democratize manufacturing, similar to the way Gutenberg's press democratized knowledge five hundred years ago? A decade from now, will we literally print out working computers, televisions, MP3-playing t-shirts?

Creating a 3D object with computer-controlled fabricators is an extension of the same methods that enable a cathode-ray tube to paint two-dimensional displays on screens by turning on and off the right pixels at the right time – except a 3D printer will have to work in layers, turning on and off the deposition or removal of physical substances at specific 3D coordinates. Lasers that harden a semifluid polymer, or which etch hardened plastics have been used successfully on small (but not micro-scale small) objects.

Z Corporation, a startup in Burlington, Massachusetts, markets an "affordable 3D printing system" that uses a spray nozzle adapted from an HP inkjet printer to spray a liquid that binds powdered solid substances into the desired shape.

Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new English words, and trained robotic cockroaches. Technically.

"His first patent was for a Device for the Autonomous Generation of Useful Information," the official name of the Creativity Machine, Miller said. "His second patent was for the Self-Training Neural Network Object. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One. Think about that. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One!"

On Christmas Eve 1989, Thaler typed the lyrics to some of his favorite Christmas carols into a neural network. Once he'd taught the network the songs, he unleashed the Grim Reaper. As the reaper slashed away connections, the network's digital life began to flash before its eyes. The program randomly spit out perfectly remembered carols as the killer application severed the first connections. But as its wounds grew deeper, and the network faded toward black, it began to hallucinate.

"Its last dying gasp was, 'All men go to good earth in one eternal silent night,'" Thaler said.

The MyDoom Internet worm claimed its first scalp Sunday, paralyzing the Web site of American software firm SCO Group with a massive data blitz.

The speed and severity of the attack surprised security officials. "It was spectacularly successful," said Mikko Hypponen, research manager at Finnish anti-virus firm F-Secure.

The MyDoom attack trigger was set for 1609 GMT Sunday. But with so many computer clocks incorrectly set, the infected machines began firing off data requests at SCO.com hours earlier, Hypponen said. "It will only get worse for SCO as time goes on," he added.

SCO is not alone. Microsoft Corp has been targeted by a second variant of MyDoom, dubbed MyDoom.B. That attack is timed to kick off Tuesday.

Technology sold by Microsoft to the Chinese government has been used by Beijing to censor the internet, and resulted in the jailing of its political opponents.

An Amnesty International report has cited Microsoft among a clutch of leading computer firms heavily criticised for helping to fuel 'a dramatic rise in the number of people detained or sentenced for internet-related offences'.

China is the world's most aggressive censor of the internet. Websites are banned for using words such as 'Taiwan', 'Tibet', 'democracy', 'dissident' and 'human rights'. Amnesty has recorded dozens of cases of political opponents jailed for circulating material offensive to the Chinese government.

Microsoft told The Observer: 'We are focused on delivering the best technology to people throughout the world. However, how that technology is used is with the individual and ultimately not in the company's control.'