A hostage drama in the Philippines on August 23, 2010 tested the patience and tolerance of the Philippine government, particularly newly installed President Benigno Noynoy Aquino III.

The hostage crisis and the alleged mishandling of the entire situation was seen by almost everyone which illicited various reactions. The question is, where will they air their grievances and disappointments? Where else but to use the world's most popular social networking site to date - Facebook.

President Aquino created his Facebook page to promote transparency, but now angry netizens and President Aquino detractors are flooding the page with negative comments, strong language and insults.

And because of the barrage of negative posts, President Benigno Aquino or whoever is in-charge of this page censored his Facebook page after users ignored an appeal to stop bashing the Philippine government.

His Facebook account is followed by 1.9 million readers.

US supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor has said the court is likely to have to rule on the issue of balancing national security and freedom of speech due to WikiLeaks posting a cache of US military records about the Afghan war.

Sotomayor said the incident, which has been condemned by the Pentagon, was likely to provoke legislation in Congress that would require judicial scrutiny.

Her comments came in response to a question about security and free speech by a student at Denver university. The judge said she could not answer because that question is very likely to come before me. She said the incident, and others, are going to provoke legislation that's already being discussed in Congress, and so some of it is going to come up before [the supreme court].

Sotomayor said the balance between national security and free speech is a constant struggle in this society, between our security needs and our first amendment rights, and one that has existed throughout our history.

An ad, which depicted a marijuana leaf, began running on Aug. 7. Just over a week later, Facebook pulled it, saying the image violated its policy against promoting smoking.

Organizers at Just Say Now, a bipartisan coalition fighting to legalize and regulate marijuana just like alcohol, said they spent roughly $5,000 on the ads, which received about 38 million views in the week they ran.

Michael Whitney, the group's online campaign director, said Facebook's move is akin to striking a candidate's face from his posters while he's running for office. Marijuana legalization is on the ballot this November in Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon and South Dakota.

We are talking about free political speech, Whitney said. We aren't encouraging people to do anything illegal.

Facebook said they have no problem with Just Say Now advertising on its pages as long as it uses a different image, Andrew Noyes, the manager of Facebook's public policy communications, said in an e-mail to The New York Times.

The image of a marijuana leaf is classified with all smoking products and therefore is not acceptable under our policies, he said, adding that Facebook does not permit images of drugs, drug paraphernalia or tobacco in any advertisements.

Just Say Now began its campaign earlier this month, arguing that legalizing marijuana would reduce crime at the border and could yield an additional $40 billion in revenue annually.

A software company is developing revolutionary software which provides the ability to identify people from photographs posted on the internet.

Face.com has produced technology that can identify individuals on social networking sites and online galleries by comparing their image against a known picture of them.

It means detailed profiles of individuals can be built up purely from online photographs and critics have said it could lead to exploitation by employers.

The software works be creating an algorithim of the face - a measurement of the arrangement of features including the eyes, nose and mouth.

The company says it is 90 per cent accurate when scanning typical images which appear on social networking sites.

Face.com has previously limited the availability of the software over concerns about invasion of privacy. But it has now released the Photo Finder software to developers building applications allowing people to search for anyone on the internet.

Gil Hirsch, chief executive of Face.com, told The Sunday Times: We have launched a service that allows developers to take our facial recognition technology and apply it immediately to their own applications. The technology is already being used by 5,000 developers. You can basically search for people in any photo. You could search for family members on Flickr, in newspapers, or in videos on YouTube - but it would take a lot of processing power.

A novel use of encryption by whistle-blowing website Wikileaks could challenge the legal system for years to come, according to an influential observer of the hacking community.

Emmanuel Goldstein, editor of 2600 The Hacker Quarterly magazine, made his comments in reference to an encrypted file recently posted on the Wikileaks site.

Some suspect the file - as yet unopened - contains further sensitive material. It has been reposted around the web and is available for anyone to download.

Wikileaks recently published 76,000 secret US military logs detailing military actions in Afghanistan; an act the US authorities described as highly irresponsible. The website now says it will release 15,000 further sensitive documents, once it has completed a review aimed at minimising the risk that the release could put people's lives in danger.

The release of the logs has led many to wonder what action the US might take against Wikileaks. Now it seems the site may be using encryption as insurance against legal and other threats to the information it holds.

The insurance.aes256 file has been posted alongside the already published leaked war logs and can be downloaded by anyone. Leaked video of July 2007 helicopter attack in Baghdad Some have speculated that the insurance file is another video

From the file name, it is believed that it has been encrypted using the AES256 algorithm - described as extremely strong by Professor Whitfield Diffie, of the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway University, London. Prof Diffie believes that AES256, which he says has been extensively studied could prove too tough even for US intelligence agencies to break.

While no-one knows what the insurance file contains, this has not prevented the contents becoming a matter of considerable speculation. Some suspect that the file contains a further leaked US military video, others that it is another tranche of US military logs - perhaps this time from Iraq. Or it could just be an imaginative bluff.

Facebook Places, which will launch in the US only at first, will allow users to check in at a location

Facebook app Facebook Places is a location based service allowing users to share their location. The new tool is bound to spark criticism from data privacy campaigners.

The feature allows users to check in at locations which will then be shared with their friends and Facebook network but it is likely to raise concerns over safety. Users will also be able to browse shops, clubs and nearby venues to see which friends are nearby, leading to concerns it could put individual's security at risk.

What we see with Facebook is a massive learning curve. Every time they make a change, consumers scramble to figure out the privacy settings, said Rainey Reitman, spokeswoman for Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in the US. Location data is tied to people's safety – if people know where you are, they know where you're not. Your location data is some of the most sensitive data we have. I expect we'll see from the get-go people who don't understand how to control the privacy settings.

The service will launch in the US only at first. Reitman said users should be particularly judicious about who they accept as friends, and be aware that even information shared with an intimate network could be copied and pasted elsewhere. Don't post anything online you wouldn't want to get out publicly to anyone.

Yang said protections include notifying a user as soon as they are tagged at a place, and offering a complete opt-out of places tags. Users under 18 can only share location with their immediate friends network and their real-time location will only be seen by friends at the same location.

Critics will note that once a user decides to check in at a location, the primary location setting is switched on by default, which means any places tags automatically being shared with immediate friends. But the service does offer a range of protections and controls including the option to detag locations, notifications if friends add your location and the option to disable Places entirely.

Widespread smartphone take-up has allowed location services such as Foursquare and Gowalla to flourish. Facebook has been watching the development of these services, which are setting up a steady stream of promotions and prizes with venues and retailers to reward loyal customers who check in regularly.

Initially available as an update to Facebook's app for Apple iPhone, updated apps for BlackBerry, Android and other handsets are expected in the next few months. A version will also launch for the UK.

Facebook, the social networking site, has pledged to develop new security measures to combat a growing surge in cyber bullying and abuse by strangers.

Engineers at Facebook are reportedly working on new systems to fight the trend of trolling, where anonymous online users bombard victims with offensive messages or abuse.

Reports have claimed a growing number of tribute pages had been targeted including those in memory of the Cumbria shootings victims and soldiers who died in Afghanistan.

At present users can only manually delete abusive messages. But in efforts to combat the growing trend, Facebook officials said they were working on new systems that automatically delete abuse.

Administrators of such sites will also be given new advice on how to cope with trolls and be given access to the new tools.

A Facebook spokesman said that: Users who send lots of messages to non-friends, for example, or whose friend requests are rejected at a high rate, are marked as suspect. We've built extensive grey lists that prevent users from signing up with names commonly associated with fake accounts.

Through the reporting process our team is also able to identify additional accounts using the same IP address so it is possible in certain situations to proactively remove multiple fake accounts.

GoTopLess.org is calling for a public protest after an image at the organization's Facebook page depicting the Statue of Liberty with bare breasts was removed by Facebook staff. The disputed image was a photo of a painting by GoTopless member Donna Grabow.

The incident began when GoTopLess president Nadine Gary received an e-mail from Facebook staff on July 18 explaining the reason for the photo's removal. It read, in part:

You uploaded a picture to 'NEW YORK National Go Topless Day: A March for Women's Equal Rights! AUG 22 that violates our Terms of Use, and this picture has been removed. Facebook does not allow photos that attack an individual or group, or that contain nudity, drug use, violence, or other violations of the Terms of Use.

Brigitte Boisselier said:

I'm asking all my friends on Facebook and those who believe in equal rights for men and women to post the picture that was taken down, Boisselier said. Some frustrated individuals can't see a nipple without freaking out or feeling offended, but we've already had enough discrimination against the female body. I'm asking all women on Facebook to stand for equal topless rights by posting this photo to their own pages. And I'm also asking all men who can appreciate a female body without feeling guilty to do the same.

The female chest is beautiful and children shouldn't be told it's sinful to look at it. That sort of repression causes frustration and guilt that they will experience as adults, which is such a ridiculous waste. Bare female breasts are seen on all European beaches at this time of year, but as far as I know, incidence of rape and other sexually violent incidents is lower in Europe than in America.

Artist Grabow agrees that Facebook's action was discriminatory and wrong.

Censorship of this painting denies freedom of speech and expression and reflects American prudishness, she said. What's funny is that the Statue of Liberty was a gift from the French government, and all the French people I know smile when they see this feminized painting. In fact, Europeans just laugh when they learn that Facebook is censoring innocent images like this one. After all, images of nude statues are displayed everywhere else without protest, including in school books.

Wikileaks has been urged by human rights groups to censor previously secret files on the Afghanistan war to protect civilians who have worked alongside the US and other foreign forces from reprisals.

The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Amnesty International and three other groups have sent a series of emails to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange calling for the names of Afghan civilians to be removed from the 77,000 classified military documents published by the online whistle-blower last month, and from any documents disclosed in the future.

Nader Nadery, of the commission said: There was no consideration about civilian lives, noting a rise in assassinations of Afghan civilians seen as government collaborators.

The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, the Open Society Institute and the International Crisis Group have also been involved in exchanges about the released documents.

A WikiLeaks spokesman said the group had requested help from NATO to check the files prior to publication to ensure the lives of civilians were not put at risk: For this reason, we conveyed a request to the White House prior to the publication, asking that the International Security Assistance Force provide us with reviewers, he said. That request remains open. However, the Pentagon has stated that it is not interested in 'harm minimization' and has not contacted us, directly, or indirectly to discuss this offer.

Apple has been accused of censoring its iBookstore chart after the top ten list became dominated by pornographic short stories.

One day the best-selling ebook was Blonde and Wet: The Complete Story, a pornographic novella by author Carl East, whose downloadable books filled three places in the top ten list.

But the next day the list had suddenly changed and was topped by The Perfect Murder, a whodunnit novella.

Apple's apparent coyness at the literary tastes of its readership may be a reflection of sensibilities in the US.

Carl East, a 54-year-old amateur author from Hull, has been shocked by the success of his pornographic fiction. He has written more than 70 titles, including the Confessions of a Nymphomaniac series, which sell for as little as 49p each.

Three of his short books were at first, second and seventh in the top ten before they were apparently pulled by Apple.

'Experts' have said that it is likely that East's books are so popular on the iPad because people can download them without the embarrassment of buying a book in a conventional shop.

An Apple spokesperson said the firm had no comment to make.

Blogetery.com, a little-known WordPress platform used by more than 70,000 blogs, was shut down by its Web hosting company more than a week ago and nobody seems willing to say why or who is responsible.

BurstNet, the Web-hosting company, informed Blogetery's operator that service was terminated at the request of some law enforcement agency but wouldn't say which one. As for the reason, BurstNet hasn't made that clear either. In an e-mail to Blogetery's operator, BurstNet managers did say that they had little choice but to terminate service.

Please note that this was not a typical case in which suspension and notification would be the norm, BurstNet wrote to Blogetery's operator. This was a critical matter brought to our attention by law enforcement officials. We had to immediately remove the server.

Initially commentators suspected that perhaps file sharing issues were behind the take down but this was denied.  In an interview, a BurstNet spokesman declined to identify the law enforcement agency that ordered Blogetery shut down or provide the reason but did say that it had nothing to do with copyright violations.

BurstNet hinted at something more serious in a forum article from webhostingtalk.com.

In repose to a refund request and a dump of Blogetery data, BurstNet wrote: [This] should be the least of his concerns. Simply put: We cannot give him his data nor can we provide any other details. By stating this, most would recognize that something serious is afoot.

Update: Inspire

20th July 2010. Based on article from news.cnet.com

More details are surfacing about why Blogetery.com, a blogging platform that claimed to service more than 70,000 blogs, was mysteriously booted from the Internet by its Web-hosting company.

The site was shut down after FBI agents informed executives of Burst.net, Blogetery's Web host, late on July 9 that links to al-Qaeda materials were found on Blogetery's servers, Joe Marr, chief technology officer for Burst.net, told CNET. Sources close to the investigation say that included in those materials were the names of American citizens targeted for assassination by al-Qaeda. Messages from Osama bin Laden and other leaders of the terrorist organization, as well as bomb-making tips, were also allegedly found on the server.

A source with knowledge of the investigation said that the material allegedly found on Blogetery's server is connected to an online magazine called Inspire, which debuted recently. Numerous news outlets reported over the past weekend that Inspire is designed to help recruit new members to al-Qaeda. According to Fox News, the title of one article was Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.

Citing intelligence sources, Fox reported that Khan is Web savvy and his magazine represents al-Qaeda's most ambitious terrorist recruitment tool to date.

Coca-Cola has been forced to pull an internet campaign after parents accused the company of using hardcore pornographic references to target children on Facebook.

A Facebook promotion for Dr Pepper, part of the Coca-Cola drinks range, posted a reference to a notorious pornographic film on the wall of an underage girl.

As part of the promotion, users allowed the company to hijack their Facebook status box, posting apparently embarrassing messages under their names.

More than 160,000 people signed up for the hoax statuses, which included: Lost my special blankie. How will I go sleepies? and What's wrong with peeing in the shower?

But the marketing drive backfired when a parent complained that her 14-year-old daughter's hijacked status claimed that she had watched a hardcore pornographic film which is notorious for the obscene practices it depicts. The status referred to the film by name, and the mother said she was particularly distressed after finding that her daughter had subsequently searched for it on the internet.

[The reference is to 'Two Girls One Cup' which is an extreme scat thing. It seems quite well known in the social networking world, more as a foil for reaction than any hint of the real thing. Eg there are YouTube videos of people watching the unseen porn video and reacting nauseously. This information seems to have been omitted from the newspaper articles on the story].

Rickman wrote on the parents' networking site Mumsnet: I am absolutely fizzing with rage and disgust, and want a full apology and explanation. Other Mumsnet users reacted furiously to news of the disgusting promotion, and praised  Rickman for bringing it to light.

Coca-Cola has since apologised and announced an investigation into its promotion procedures. Executives said they had approved the offending message without realising its true meaning.

Sydney jeweller Victoria Buckley has lashed out at Midwest American puritanism on Facebook after the social networking site threatened action against her for having pictures of nude porcelain dolls on her fan page.

The dolls are pictured posing with the jeweller's products and feature in posters that form part of Buckley's visual merchandising displays in her George Street store windows.

Buckley was bombarded by warnings from Facebook, which said the pictures of the dolls constituted inappropriate content and breached the site's terms of service. The high-end porcelain figures show little more than nipples.

The frustrated Buckley told Jeweller: It just takes one click from one Midwest American puritan and the whole [online marketing campaign] gets taken down. Facebook has removed the offending images from her fan page, but Buckley has posted them on a new Facebook group called Save Ophelia - exquisite doll censored by Facebook.

Buckley told Jeweller: I don't care if they close this group down but I do care if they close my fan page down.

On the Save Ophelia page, she says: I feel I have a right to photograph my jewellery with Ophelia [the doll] as I see fit. Facebook disagrees with this, because, even if hundreds of people appreciate what you do, it only takes ONE complaint to have the whole thing taken down.

Update: Facebook Apologies

12th July 2010. Based on article from smh.com.au

A Sydney jeweller has castigated Facebook for its opaque and arbitrary moderation system after the site apologised for censoring her images of a nude porcelain doll posing with her works.

The social networking site admitted that it had made a mistake in removing Victoria Buckley's photos, after last week sending her several warning notices for publishing inappropriate content and erasing both censored and uncensored versions of the image from Facebook.

We've investigated this further and determined that we made a mistake in removing these photos, Facebook said in a statement: Our User Operations team reviews thousands of reported photos a day and may occasionally remove something that doesn't actually violate our policies. This is what happened here. And while we believe the doll would benefit from clothing to protect her fair skin, we apologise for the mistake and encourage Victoria Buckley Jewellery to upload these photos again if they so choose.

France and the Netherlands have called for international guidelines to prevent private firms from exporting high-tech equipment that could be used for Internet censorship.

Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen said there must be concrete measures taken to ensure that the Internet remains a universal forum and singled out Iran for blocking access to anti-government websites.

We must support cyber-dissidents in the same way that we supported political dissidents, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told a meeting in Paris attended by some 20 countries including the United States and Japan.

France and the Netherlands plan to hold a ministerial-level meeting in October to flesh out the guidelines for firms who sell technology that could be used to suppress democracy.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi has accused German engineering giant Siemens and Finnish telecoms firm Nokia of supplying Iran with technology to help it suppress dissent. The firms have denied the charges.

Jean-Francois Julliard, from the media rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF, accused French phone equipment provider Alcatel of selling bugging equipment to Myanmar. He also singled out networking giant Cisco for allegedly selling encoders to China.

Anyone looking for the website SpinProfiles – uncovering the dark corners of PR and raising questions about lobbying – will have had a harder time finding it recently. And why? Because it was virtually shut down by its web firm, 1&1 Internet.

And why did that happen? Because it posted what has become a controversial profile of Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, rightwing thinktanker and son of the famed journalist Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens didn't like it. More than that, he didn't like the location. SpinProfiles and sister site Spinwatch are run by Professor David Miller, who also has a site called Neocon Europe. Hitchens says that his profile appeared on that site in pretty unsavoury company, and thus he didn't want to be featured on any website owned by Prof Miller.

He asked for the profile to be taken down – but here's the thing: he doesn't say anything in it was defamatory, and furthermore he says he never sought to have the site shut down. 1&1 took it upon themselves to remove the site after Spinwatch refused to remove my profile, Hitchens told us.

1&1 says it acted within the agreed rules following complaints to protect its legal position. But the upshot is that a site came down because someone featured there raised an objection. Even the complainant didn't ask for that.

So much for the brave new world.

Reply: Spinwatch must offer right of reply

15th July 2010. See article from guardian.co.uk by Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens

David Miller's Spinwatch websites exploit free speech and those profiled, as I was, should be able to disassociate themselves

On Cif last week, David Miller wrote a piece complaining that I had his website, SpinProfiles, shut down. As his article argues, he does indeed have the right to free speech, but this is not a one-way street, and the people who his projects target have a right to object to witch-hunts and harassment.

...Read the full article

Lebanon's president, Michel Sleiman, may have more than 60,000 Facebook fans, but it took the opinions of just three people for things to get unfriendly. The three  were arrested for allegedly defaming the president on the social networking website.

There is currently no specific law governing the publication of online content in Lebanon. People can – and do – say what they want across a variety of networking sites. However, it is a crime to criticise the president of the republic, as his position supposedly represents the entire country. Knock Sleiman and you knock Lebanon.

The barbs, some of which were reposted on Sleiman's official page, were not particularly caustic. You're worth my foot, as one commenter wrote, is hardly a fierce indictment of Sleiman's presidency. Similarly, you're like a snake; all you do is from under the table, should not ruffle a man hardened by a career spent in the Lebanese army. If these are the worst jibes he has to endure, Sleiman can consider his political life charmed. The accusation that Sleiman was the king of racism and sectarianism probably grated harder.

The three young men have now been charged but released on bail.

The arrests are the first to be linked to online comments and while it was a state prosecutor who initiated the judicial proceedings, the president has been kept abreast of all developments. Sleiman, who after all has the power of pardon, said he could not allow such comments to go unpunished, labelling them an abuse of freedom.

Elaine Miller says she can't understand how the image of a woman's panty-clad ass can be considered offensive, but Facebook pulled the photo and sent her a warning.

I don't think much of censorship, says Miller, a leatherdyke who hosts a variety of BDSM events for queen women in Vancouver.

Miller says Facebook pulled the photo announcing a Bride of Pride play party, then sent her an online warning explaining how she had violated the site's terms of use.

Facebook does not allow photos that attack an individual or group or that contain nudity, drug use, violence or other violations of terms of use, the message informed her.

This policy is enforced in order to ensure Facebook remains a safe, secure and trusted environment for all users, including the many children who use the site, the message added.

When asked to explain why this particular photo was removed, a Facebook spokesperson told Xtra: We literally have dozens of content standards, and respond to user reports of inappropriate content. We have a policy against nudity and in such cases, have removed photos that have been flagged to us by Facebook users. The particular photo in question exposes the naked buttocks of a female and violates our terms for appropriate content. When flagged, all reports are closely reviewed and action is taken if photos are deemed offensive.

Chatroulette has been on the rise since earlier this year, when it suddenly became an international phenomenon. It has been the source of numerous viral videos, but it's also been the source of voyeuristic male masturbators. Currently the company is looking for investors in Russia and the U.S.

However, it looks like the service lost some of its steam in the month of May. According to web analytics firm comScore, U.S. traffic dropped nearly 7% from 1.564 million visitors in April to 1.327 million in May.

While Chatroulette's decline doesn't surprise us, it has to be troubling to Andrey Ternovskiy, Charoulette's 17-year-old founder. He seems to be taking action though, reportedly working on software to weed out the penises that have plagued Chatroulette's reputation.

What is Chatroulette really about, though? Is Chatroulette a social utility for people to meet each other through video? Is it an entertainment tool for groups of friends? Or is it just an anonymous network where anything goes?

These are important questions for Ternovskiy to answer before a turnaround becomes possible. Legitimizing the service by weeding out the genitalia may make it more viable to investors, but it could potentially accelerate its decline, not reverse it. It all depends on how people want to use the service.

Visitors to porn sites are at serious risk of being exploited by cyber criminals, a study has suggested.

It found that many sites harboured malware or used shady practices to squeeze money out of their visitors.

By creating their own porn sites researchers found that many consumers were vulnerable to known bugs and vulnerabilities.

Competition among porn sites makes the online adult industry ripe for abuse by hi-tech criminals.

They have almost inadvertently created a whole ecosystem that's easy to abuse for cyber crime on a large scale, said Dr Gilbert Wondracek, a computer security expert from the International Secure System Lab, which led the study. Hidden danger

Dr Wondracek said the team embarked on the study to find out the truth of the widely held view that porn sites are dangerous to visit

,,,Read the full article

ISPA, the Internet Service Providers’ Association, has announced the finalists for the 2010 Internet Hero and Internet Villain awards.

The highly-prized Internet Hero award is bestowed upon an organisation or individual who has made a significant contribution to the Internet industry in the past year, whilst the dreaded title of Internet Villain recognises those that ISPA feels have had a negative impact upon the sector.

The winners of the two special awards will be selected from the finalists based on votes by members of the ISPA Council. They will be announced, along with the winners of the twelve other ISPA awards, at a glittering awards ceremony hosted at the London Marriott Hotel, Grosvenor Square on Thursday 8th July.

Internet Hero – sponsored by Eclipse Internet

• Bridget Fox - For organising a grass roots challenge to the Digital Economy Bill
• Data.gov.uk - for showing the value of datasets and how the public can utilise government information
• Tom Watson MP, and all those who showed up to vote against the DE Bill, for their informed opposition to the Bill
• Zip It, Block It, Flag It campaign - for focusing on internet safety for parents and young children
• 38 Degrees Campaign - for mobilising public opposition to the Digital Economy Bill

Internet Villain

• ACS Law - for their aggressive, heavy-handed approach to targeting alleged copyright infringement via P2P networks
• The European Commission and the Council of Ministers - for conducting ACTA negotiations in a secretive manner and for failing to engage with stakeholders on an issue that is of vital importance for Europe's digital economy
• Lord Clement-Jones - for introducing amendment 120a to the Digital Economy Bill without sufficient research or understanding of the consequences
• Lord Mandelson - for ignoring principles of better regulation to amend an open consultation following lobbying from an interest group
• UK Parliament - for allowing the Digital Economy Bill to pass through the Commons without proper debate

Karl Maddocks does not approve of traditional nudists. The 25-year-old from Manchester believes that they have too many rules.

You shouldn't need to fill out application forms and pay fees to clubs, he argues. Just go to the beach and get your kit off.

As a reaction, two years ago Maddocks created Skinbook, a website that claims to be the world's largest nudist social network. Thousands of people have flocked to the site that has many of the same features and functions as Facebook — except everyone on it is naked.

Skinbook sees itself as a safe haven for those intrigued about stripping off in public, but without having to meet the strict regulations of many nudist clubs. It does have some rules though. Blank profiles are not accepted, or overtly sexual chatter. The site claims to have had 150,000 applicants but only 10% make the grade.

The site has quickly gained popularity and is beginning to approach the same size as the country's largest nudist organisation, British Naturism, thought to have about 13,000 members.

Now the site is having its own conference on July 19 in Brighton. Naked spas and beach barbecues will feature along with discussion of the future of the site.

An Irish Labour MEP has called for intervention and regulation by the EU for websites like Facebook, which she believes are addictive and hazardous to mental health.

The minister, Nessa Childers, who is also a psychotherapist, said that since the Lisbon Treaty has been ratified, the EU now has increased powers to legislate when there is a threat to public health in Europe.

She claimed that millions of Europeans are at risk of becoming addicted to these kinds of websites, particularly Facebook, which has over 400,000 Irish users alone.

Childers said that visiting Facebook causes intermittent reinforcement, which means that connecting with virtual friends, receiving notices and messages, etc. gives users an unpredictable high, similar to gambling and makes them feel the need to expand to fill an increasingly empty internal world creating a vicious circle. In other words, people are living virtual lives instead of real ones, using social networking to escape the pains and struggles of everyday existence.

Childers said that as a psychotherapist she has seen an increase in addiction to internet pornography, which has ruined lives, and that action is needed at international level from the EU to properly take on the disturbing trend of addiction to sites such as Facebook which are responsible for all sorts of problematic behaviour.

Childers failed to mention exactly what kind of regulations are needed though.

The Netherlands and France are taking the initiative to develop an international code of conduct for the freedom of traffic on the Internet, the Dutch foreign ministry has said in a statement.

The foreign ministers from both countries met in Rotterdam and expressed concern over a recent rise in Internet censorship.

A pilot group is due to meet in the coming weeks in Paris, and will bring together governments, rights organisations and web-based businesses all working to protect freedom on the Internet, the French foreign ministry said.

Severed heads, mangled corpses, aborted babies. It's the kind of content that would give most people nightmares, but to members of an underground gore subculture it's a dish suitable for daily consumption.

The websites they frequent feature countless images and videos depicting real-life stomach-churning violence. Many of the images come from Mexico, where photos such as these are seen as acceptable journalistic material and are frequently published in magazines and newspapers. But while the origins of those photos can be explained easily, others cannot.

The websites deal in images taken at crime scenes, inside autopsy rooms, at the wreckage of car accidents and other places only authority figures are allowed. So who is leaking the images?

To learn more about the trade and the origins of the images, ninemsn interviewed the editor of the website, a woman who goes by the screenname JohannaXn

...Read full article

Clusty used to be a pretty good search engine. Now it has fallen into the hands of nutters.

How many people will read the small print and realise their searches are randomly being censored on political / religious / moral grounds? It doesn't leave much, does it?

About the Buy Out

Based on article from pandia.com

The metasearch engines – search engines that combine data from several search engines – are not as popular as they used to be in the 1990's. But they can still add something new to your search experience, especially as regards user interface and the way they present results.

One of our favorite metasearch engines have been Clusty, owned and developed by Vivisimo. As the name implies, Clusty has been especially good at clustering search results in meaningful groups or topics of result listings. Vivisimo has now sold Clusty to a Florida based company named Yippy for US$5.6 million. The name change has already taken place. Clusty is no more. Yippy has taken its place.

Clusty.com attracts approximately 100,000 unique visitors and supports millions of search queries per month.

About Yippy

Previous Clusty users may be shocked at the new Yippy approach to searches. Yippy explain their philosphy:

Based on article from clusty.com

Censorship

Yippy.com may censor search results, web domains and IP addresses. That is, Yippy may remove from its output, in an ad-hoc manner, all but not limited to the following:

• Politically-oriented propaganda or agendas
• Pornographic Material
• Gambling content
• Sexual products or sites that sell same
• Anti-Semitic views or opinions
• Anti-Christian views or opinions
• Anti-Conservative views or opinions
• Anti-Sovereign USA views or opinions
• Sites deemed inappropriate for children

Oh, we should say that we are a very far-out group of people. Everyone is a certified genius here and we work together for our goals for the love of it all. Good vs. Don't be Evil ... We are too smart to sell out to Porn, Gambling and other things that infect our society for profit. Good always wins, and conservative values will bring us our victory in the market place.

Summing it up !!!

God controls all creative thought it's what you do with it that defines who you are.

Are you Good or Evil?

Google has begun rolling out an encrypted version of its search engine in an effort to protect Internet users from having their searches sniffed by Governments, ISPs and others on their network. The new version of Google is SSL encrypted and located at https://www.google.com.

SSL search means that an encrypted connection is created between your browser and Google's servers. When you perform a search, your search terms and whatever results come back from them will only be visible to you. Anyone who might be sniffing packets on your network (such as, say, Google!) won't be able to see what you're looking up.

Google says it's only in beta for now. The reasoning for the beta tag is because SSL only covers the core search technology for the time being, and not for for searches such as Google Maps or Google Images.

Also, since SSL connections require additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server, your experience with search over SSL might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience, Google wrote in a blog post.

Australia has been utterly captivated over the past week, but not by the old motherland's general election or the hoopla over its own federal budget. The biggest story has concerned nothing but a couple of tweets.

It started with Australia's annual television awards (the unfortunately named Logies), which inspired comedian and the Age newspaper columnist, Catherine Deveny, to let fly on Twitter. When Steve Irwin's 11-year-old daughter hit the red carpet, Deveny observed: I do so hope Bindi Irwin gets laid. On seeing fellow comedian Rove McManus, who lost his wife to cancer in 2006, she tweeted: Rove and [new wife] Tasma look so cute … hope she doesn't die, too.

It took two days of public outrage before the Age sacked Deveny, setting the Twitter and blogospheres further aflutter. Even a week after the story broke, Deveny's response on a rival website clocked over 900 comments from crowing anti-Devenyists and aggrieved free speech supporters.

...Read full article

In a misguided effort to manage the roiling discontent about Facebook's privacy bait and switch tactics, Vice President for Public Policy Elliot Schrage volunteered to take questions from New York Times readers.

ITworld forbids me from using the words I'd normally employ to describe what came out of Schrage. Suffice it to say it was the most egregious display of corporate doublespeak this side of Microsoft.

If you needed another reason not to trust Facebook, Schrage provided several. Here's bald-faced lie #1. A reader asked why not make everything on Facebook opt in – in other words, it's private unless the user decides to make it public. Here's Schrage's answer:

Everything is opt-in on Facebook. Participating in the service is a choice. We want people to continue to choose Facebook every day. Adding information — uploading photos or posting status updates or like a Page — are also all opt-in. Please don't share if you're not comfortable.

It's true that nobody's putting a gun to your head to join Facebook or post your naked cell photos pics (not yet, anyway). But once you do, most of your personal information – your biography, interests, posts, friends, families, relationships, location, education, and more -- are shared with everyone by default. You have to go in and change the settings to make them private.

That's not opt-in model, that's an opt-out model. Either Schrage doesn't understand the difference (which would be bad) or understands it but hopes you don't (which is worse).

...Read the full article

Founder Jimmy Wales has poured fuel on the Wikimedia pornography row, by encouraging admins to delete images that appeal solely to prurient interests.

The comments come Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sagner reported the Wikimedia Foundation to the FBI for serving up depictions of child sexual molestation on its servers.

The report brought a scathing response from the Foundation, which claimed we don't have material we would deem to be illegal. If we did, we would remove it. The organisation denied hearing from the authorities.

However, Wales has now waded into the argument by encouraging immediate deletion of pornographic content, calling for a large-scale cleanup project of the site: Wikimedia Commons admins who wish to remove from the project all images that are of little or no educational value but which appeal solely to prurient interests have my full support. I am stating here my public support for admins who are prepared to enforce quality standards and get rid of a large quantity of what can only be characterised as 'trolling' images of people's personal pornography collections..

In a separate post he claimed Wikimedia would be making a formal statement on the issue in the next few days.

Update: Jimmy Wales prevented from vandalising his own website

13th May 2010. Based on article from news.bbc.co.uk

Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales, has given up some of his site privileges following protests by contributors angered that he deleted images without consultation.

Wales had previously urged the removal of pornographic content from the user-generated site. This followed a complaint about child pornography to the FBI from another Wikipedia co-founder and the subsequent haranguing from the nutters of Fox News.

In early April, the estranged co-founder, Larry Sanger, reported Wikimedia Commons to the FBI, alleging that the organisation was knowingly distributing child pornography.

Last week, administrators of Wikimedia Commons, a media file store widely used for Wikipedia articles, deleted hundreds of images. Some images deemed by the Wikipedia community to have educational merit have since been reinstated.

Pressure on the organisation had increased after Fox News reported the story, contacting a number of high-profile corporate donors to the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and related sites. Continue reading the main story

Wales has faced criticism from the band of volunteers who help to maintain the site, some of whom argued that the decision to delete was undemocratic and taken too quickly. They also expressed concerns that valid material might be deleted accidentally.