Google have jumped the gun on Microsoft who announced a porn mode facility for the next release of their Internet Explorer browser. Google have just released their new browser, Chrome, featuring similar functionality.

For times when you want to browse in stealth mode, for example, to plan surprises like gifts or birthdays, Google Chrome offers the incognito browsing mode. Webpages that you open and files downloaded while you are incognito won't be logged in your browsing and download histories; all new cookies are deleted after you close the incognito window. You can browse normally and in incognito mode at the same time by using separate windows.

Browsing in incognito mode only keeps Google Chrome from storing information about the websites you've visited. The websites you visit may still have records of your visit. Any files saved to your computer will still remain on your computer.

YouTube Comment Snob automatically hides any comments posted on the video-sharing website that fail to meet a range of good English guidelines.

The filter can be set to hide comments with misspelled words, swearing and excessive punctuation.

Comments that do not begin with a capital letter, or which are composed entirely of capital letters, can also be blocked. Users are able to personalise their censorship settings depending on the quality of posts they want to read

Malicious commenters - known as trolls – are the bane of many websites, but YouTube has become notorious for hosting to some of the most confrontational and ill-formed comment exchanges on the internet.

Discussions about even the most inconsequential videos regularly degenerate into profanity-strewn slanging matches, many with a xenophobic undercurrent.

YouTube Comment Snob has been created by an individual software designer called Christopher Finke and has no connection to the official YouTube site, which has a separate system that allows users to give a “thumbs down” to comments they disagree with.

The comment blocker, which is only available for people using the Firefox browser, has already earned rave reviews from YouTube regulars.

This is a wonderful idea, now all I need is a similar filter for the entire web, wrote Aletha on the popular Boing Boing blog.

After two years in evolution, the world’s first, intelligent, virtual sex toy has arrived in the form of the MX.

The initial, serial port, robotic toy design has come a long way since its inception and the MX, designed and created to synchronise with especially encoded adult DVD content, works on internet protocol (IP) networks (computers and television sets via set-top box services), Bluetooth (mobile telephones) and other compatible remote media systems.

The MX website explains: Virtual sex has been spoken of since Woody Allen’s 1973 film, Sleeper, introduced the world to a fictional electromechanical device known as the orgasmatron. Now, for the first time ever, this fictional concept has become a reality in the shape of the MX.

The MX is available in both male and female variants; the male version being a real-feel, jelly-flesh silicone sleeve and the female version resembling a superior quality vibrator. Both have been embedded with 100% user safe encoded software motherboard and trigger modules which mirror the accompanying, personally interactive, DVD content.

The MX has no wires and does not need to be attached to anything. The male MX sleeve is fitted with a removable device consisting of a series of six trigger point modules, four down the shaft and one on either said of the base, each controlled in accordance with the on screen action. For example, when the actress says she is going to lick the top of the viewer’s penis and does so, the relevant trigger point module will simulate that specific action, essentially meaning the MX will kinaesthetically replicate the visual and aural stimuli.

The female MX is similarly controlled, with each of the multiple functions of the vibrator triggered by the on screen action. For example, should the actor say he is going to rub the viewer’s clitoris and begins to do so, the related trigger point will vibrate accordingly.

A third MX design has been created especially for the gay market, meaning it is essentially also the world’s first sex toy which specifically caters for the active gay man. As with the other versions, the gay MX works in conjunction with gay adult video content.

The MX prototypes have now undergone vigorous and independent testing and the company is interested in speaking with toy manufacturers and distributors about partnership options.

Microsoft internet explorer version 8 will have a new feature the private browsing mode also known as the porn mode. This feature provides special privacy when browsing porn sites.

With the porn mode enabled users can surf porn sites without leaving any traces behind. The online history, personal information, cache all gets erased. The porn mode also alerts user when they are being tracked.

According to Microsoft internet explorer 8 features the most important component, privacy. The aim is to make internet explorer 8 a trustworthy browser.

Privacy browsing is not a new feature and already seen in the Apple safari browser since 2005. Firefox 3 browser also was supposed to feature the privacy component but was not implemented because of complex designing issues.

The final version of the internet explorer 8 is expected to be release by the end of 2008.

Yahoo have launched Fire Eagle which lets users manage information on where they are.

Hard privacy protection questions need to be asked, said Jeff Chester, director of The Centre for Digital Democracy: These services are all being sold to consumers as only providing real benefit. No one is talking about the fact they are about building and collecting more data ,not just about the content you like but where you go and where you are at the moment.

Fire Eagle, which has just been opened up to the public, helps manage location information for websites and for any device that has internet access.

This is a way for the user to take their location to the web, for every site on the web to become geo-aware and to respond to where users are, explained Tom Coates head of product at Yahoo's start-up project, Brickhouse.

So far more than 50 third-party developers have signed up to offer Fire Eagle to their users, including Pownce, a micro-blogging service, brightkite, a location based social network, and DOPPLR which links travellers.

Yahoo said the service gives users complete control over their information and over which applications have access to their location. Users can also control whether an application can track their exact location, their ZIP or postcode or just the city they are in. Every 45 days, the service will send users an email to reauthorize the sharing of their location with the enabled applications: We only store your current information and don't keep any historical logs. That information will stay there until you over ride it or change it.

Coates said as an added protection Fire Eagle lets you hide your location at times and even lie about where you are if you want to.

Some blogs note however that while users can purge information from Fire Eagle, this will not delete location data collected over time by authorised sites.

Greg Sterling of SearchEngineLand said the added benefits of location information offers great opportunities for advertisers: Advertisers have yet to catch up to the possibility this space offers and Fire Eagle makes it that more explicit for them so I think we will see more targeted adverts coming into being that can take advantage of a person's location.

Olympic visitors are going to find themselves faced with internet restrictions when they get back to their hotel room or local internet cafe, thanks to that handy dandy Great Firewall of China.

Lucky for them, the Chaos Computer Club has prepped a solution called the "Freedom Stick" which when plugged into a computer redirects its internet traffic over The Onion Router, a worldwide network of anonymous computers designed to hide your steps. Naturally, you can just download the software yourself, but the $30 USB dongle could come in handy if you're not on your own PC, or just want to leave behind material evidence of your indiscretion. The Freedom Stick will only be available through the duration of the Olympics, so get one while you can.

SurfRecon Inc have announced the release of SurfRecon 2008, a new rapid-image-analysis tool that is available to law enforcement, parents, business owners, and schools for the first time.

This highly-mobile tool was originally created to enable members of law enforcement to quickly find, categorize, report-on, and delete pornographic content from almost any computer system, including many devices or media that can be mounted to the computer system.

SurfRecon is currently being used by police, adult probation and parole officers, and federal agents worldwide. I was excited to finally have a tool I could use to quickly search computers in the homes of my probationers, said said Cole Christensen, Adult Probation and Parole Officer, Utah State Department of Corrections, And guess what? The first time I used it, I found pornographic content. Images I wouldn't have found normally.

And now the same technology is available to parents, community leaders, and business owners.

The SurfRecon application comes pre-installed on a thumb drive. Furthermore, the application is cross-platform compatible, capable of scanning almost any Windows, Macintosh, and Linux computer system--and many devices or media that can be attached to the computer, such as recordable DVDs and CDs, iPods, cell phones, thumb drives, external hard drives, etc.

Different from a filter or firewall, SurfRecon actively searches for pornographic content, leveraging a database containing millions of hash values or digital fingerprints. With nearly 100 million image hashes in the database and with another 4 million added per week, if a computer contains pornography, SurfRecon will find it, said Andrew Brandt, SurfRecon Director of Business Development.

Each hash value in the database is the equivalent of a digital fingerprint, which uniquely identifies an image. SurfRecon uses "digital fingerprints" to determine the exact nature of any image that it discovers on a computer system. It can then pre-categorize the images, making it easier for individuals to view the contents of a computer system.

A friend tried to send a email from a Wanadoo account (Now Orange I think) that mentioned 'cunt' [just a typical email, nothing that could be mistaken as spam]. He couldn't send
it without putting 'c*nt' in the header.

I just tried to send him an email also using the word 'cunt' and it was returned by Wanadoo unreceived....

As Youtomb discovered There is a tag available through the YouTube API the indicates the country (or countries in some cases) to which YouTube will restrict access to the video. These videos are not (necessarily) blocked by the country itself, but by Youtube.

Here’s what I’ve found blocked so far

(TH Thailand, FR France, CN China, GB Britain)

TH,www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1USDXkaJFM
TH,www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4RX2cIDa4E
PL TH DE FR,www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU9iT3vEdWo
TH,www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVbUx4TPkVs
TH,www.youtube.com/watch?v=70m1ncXQjXA
TH,www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dFjO4ZJNDE
PF TF YT GP DE RE FR GF MQ PM PL,www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt2Zsr9bwlE
CN,www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Roy0BFaUtc
CN,www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffw4-OMmchY
CN,www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzz9rZwFENA
CN,www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1oBcPtH5aU
CN,www.youtube.com/watch?v=liwgfyc1Im4
CN,www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeXZY4eVLlo
CN,www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnIuu73X8es
CN,www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmlDqPtHV-E
CN,www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPg1yvj7thA
CN,www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0D_oGgAGmI”
CN,www.youtube.com/watch?v=53QwPeImmAA”
CN,www.youtube.com/watch?v=XThGzqBYrh0
CN,www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FnwTj0OuFE
CN,www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdEULgZYxK8

I wondered if Youtube might start tagging videos of the protests in Tibet in order to have Youtube unblocked with the specific videos being blocked for users in China. But after running a few (definitely not comprehensive) Tibet related search terms all I found so far was that it appears that BBC videos are blocked for users in Great Britain:

GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEkyrDdepBc
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4637Ez3-as
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg8AYs56RAY
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GzyfTOACDs
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ew8oLFVVcc
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7R3J0NvfgE
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLg4aMDadYo
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4E1Rsaq3yc
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS_jvYTEhkQ
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLy6DkrjyHg
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUcIxq4hBuc
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1CTaq9sQM0
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=dviGSn5Wq0s
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T3LwA2mA4I
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8-eBuGsh-4
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS1FOSQCA3k
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR_NNGpWku4
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEQmJBINYj4
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=geJ9lRhSRdQ
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwRIzNyArRY
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPIKkf5w9TY
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NB91D-Da50
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUaX3Mw8qvg
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaJQip6bt7w
GB,www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7lDTuBhb2Y

Online shoppers in the UK will be able to pay direct from their online bank account rather than via a credit or debit card, thanks to a new service.

The POLi online bank payment platform aims to increase payment choice while reducing card-not-present fraud.

The technology behind POLi was developed by Australian firm Centricom Pty. According to merchants in Australia using POLi, the service now accounts for an average of 23% of their total online payment transactions.

Centricom teamed up with UK-based online payment firm Neteller last August to launch a joint venture to roll out POLi in Europe, starting with its launch in the UK last week. The service, distributed through Neteller’s payment processing arm Netbanx, supports transfers from all major UK high street banks. Netbanx is in the process of recruiting merchants to POLi.

Merchants would offer a "pay-by-POLi" option. Clicking on the link prompts users to select and then log into their online banking accounts where payments are made and authorised. Once users log-in they will see the merchant's details and the amount of the purchase. Merchants need only store transaction ID numbers and dispatch details, without a requirement to store information on a customer's online bank account.

POLi pricing is based on volume of transactions, rather than a percentage of sales charged to merchants by credit card firms. As a result, costs to merchants and consumers alike ought to be lower.

YouTomb, a project of the MIT Free Culture group that studies takedown notices by the video-sharing website YouTube, has identified a mechanism used by Google to restrict video content in specific countries. This appears to be the method YouTube is using to filter videos on behalf of governments and private actors that request it.

A growing number of countries have instituted mostly short-lived blocks against YouTube for containing culturally or politically sensitive content, including Brazil, China, Morocco, Syria, Thailand and Turkey. On February 22, 2008, Pakistani ISPs were ordered to partially block YouTube reportedly in reaction to a video making fun of the Prophet Muhammad, and ended up disrupting access to the entire site for users around the world for up to a few hours. In some cases, YouTube has blocked the identified offending video(s) in that country in order to have the block lifted.

...Read full article

If you happened to be searching for a video at YouTube.com Sunday afternoon, there's a good chance your browser told you it was unable to locate the entire Web site. Turns out, much of the world was blocked from getting to YouTube for part of the weekend due to a censorship order passed by the government of Pakistan, which was apparently upset that YouTube refused to remove digital images many consider blasphemous to Islam.

According to wire reports, Pakistan ordered all in-country Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to YouTube.com, complaining that the site contained controversial sketches of the Prophet Mohammed which were republished by Danish newspapers earlier this month. The people running the country's ISPs obliged, but evidently someone at Pakistan Telecom - the primary upstream provider for most of the ISPs in Pakistan - forgot to flip the switch that prevented those blocking instructions from propagating out to the rest of the Internet.

So, what happened? From everything I've read and heard, the YouTube situation appears to have been due to an innocent, if inept, mix-up, which allowed Pakistan's ISPs to effectively announce to the world that its Internet addresses were the authoritative home of YouTube.com, and for about an hour or so, most of the rest of the world's ISPs incorporated those updated directions as gospel.

In a country where the government more or less can tell resident ISPs what to do, blocking citizens from visiting certain sites is simple: The ISPs simply tell their customers that if they're looking for a censored site, they either receive an empty page or are redirected to wherever the ISP or government deems as an appropriate substitute destination.

Some experts are crying foul, saying this was an deliberate act of defiance or assertiveness by the nascent Pakistani government. But most seem to agree this was little more than a screw-up. Still, a nation state or other adversary could stir up diplomatic trouble by toying with this sort of trust built into the Internet. What would our government make of it, say, if all of a sudden all traffic destined for .gov domains wound up in China or North Korea?

Marc Sachs, director of the SANS Internet Storm Center said for now the checks and balances in the system today are that the same trust that allows network providers to abuse the system can be revoked. In this latest case with Youtube, network operators affected by the bogus update simply discarded the errant directions from Pakistan and in all likelihood told their own routers to ignore any further updates from Pakistan, at least for the time being, Sachs said.

Citing recent major changes in the marketplace, Toshiba has ended its development, manufacturing and marketing of HD DVD players and recorders.

It's official; the Sony-championed Blu-ray format has won the war as the market choice for hi-definition content delivery.

Adult content producers have struggled over hi-def deployment issues plagued by speculation over which of the rival next-generation DVD replacement formats would become the dominant player in the marketplace.

While Blu-ray has its advantages, questions over licensing and duplication have helped HD DVD become popular within adult circles.

According to a current XBIZ poll, 47% of hi-def releases are in the HD DVD format, while Blu-ray distribution accounts for 39%. 14% are available in both formats.

We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called 'next-generation format war' and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop, Atsutoshi Nishida, president and CEO of Toshiba Corporation, said. While we are disappointed for the company and more importantly, for the consumer, the real mass market opportunity for high definition content remains untapped and Toshiba is both able and determined to use our talent, technology and intellectual property to make digital convergence a reality.

According to a company statement, Toshiba will continue to provide full product support and service for its HD DVD products.

HD DVD player and recorder shipments to retail outlets are scheduled to end in March, with volume production of HD DVD disk drives dwindling within the same timeframe – although limited production of PC drives may continue to meet customer requirements.

Psiphon, an Internet censorship evading software project developed by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab has been deemed the world’s most original, significant and exemplary Net and Digital Initiative by a panel of French and international government, media and business experts. P

siphon was chosen first among 100 technology projects from around the world that were nominated for the Netxplorateur of the Year Grand Prix award.

Psiphon aims to restore the original promise the Internet once held out as a forum for free expression and access to information, said Professor Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab and the psiphon project. We are honoured to receive such a prestigious award. Internet censorship has become a major global problem, with dozens of governments blocking access to news, human rights, and political opposition websites as well as new media of self expression, such as blogs and streaming video.

Psiphon works by leveraging the Internet and social networks of trust that span censored and uncensored jurisdictions. Those with friends, family or colleagues in censored countries download the small psiphon application on their home computers and then give the unique connection information to their psiphon node to those living behind firewalled jurisdictions. Instead of attempting to access banned content directly, users of psiphon connect to the psiphon nodes over an encrypted channel and use them to surf the Web instead. As each psiphon node is private, encrypted, and separate from each other, the system as a whole is virtually impossible for authorities to discover and block.

While the psiphon software is free and open source, the Citizen Lab's developers have recently launched a start-up company, called Psiphon Inc., to provide professional services for businesses, media, and organizations that face increasingly difficult challenges operating in a carved up Internet environment.

The Indian Supreme Court will hear on February 15 an application seeking directions to the Union of India for blocking access to a website promoting pre-natal gender identification kits from abroad.

The Voluntary Health Association of Punjab is petitioning to seek strict implementation of the Pre-Conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition on Sex Selection) Act, 1994.

The application said that a website promoting sale of gender identification kits was reported in the media.

The website, according to the applicant, says the test seeks to identify the presence of male or female foetal genetic materials in the mother’s blood. The website provided the methods by which the test was conducted, the process of ordering the test kit, safeguards to be taken, etc.

Since the website was accessible anywhere in the country, a blanket blocking of this website was essential to prevent the misuse of technology and violation of the law, the application said and sought a direction in this regard.

It's easy to restrict access to mature games on the Nintendo Wii and Xbox select a passcode, and then enter the rating of the games you want kids to be able to play.

Unfortunately, if you have a PlayStation 3, you're going to have a much more awkward time. The PS3 uses a mysterious and seemingly arbitrary system of parental control "levels." You can set the PS3's parental controls from level 1 to 11, and neither the menu nor Sony's support site offer much context for what the levels mean. The lower the level, the PlayStation 3 site says, the greater the restrictions on games. Unfortunately, actually figuring out which games will be blocked by which level will require a bit of trial and error. 

The PS3 obfuscates DVD parental controls, too; while the Xbox 360 lets you choose the MPAA ratings of the DVDs you want to play, the PS3 again offers an inexplicable gradient of levels. Blu-ray discs aren't quite as awkward, but they could certainly be better; instead of levels or MPAA ratings, you can enter the age of the user to restrict Blu-ray playback.

According to GamerDad, level 5 under game parental controls should limit the system to T-rated titles, and level 3 under DVD parental controls should limit it to PG-13 movies. It's not the most certain system and you might have to nudge the levels up or down an increment or two to make sure the right titles get blocked and the right titles play, but it's at least a start.