The Blogetery platform, which hosted over 70,000 bloggers, is believed to have contained a link to terrorist material and a hit-list from Al-Qaeda posted on the site.

The parent company BurstNet said that bomb making instructions had also been posted their.

The company received a notice regarding this from law enforcement officials. Blogetery.com shut down their platform without any notice to their users.

BurstNet has said that “The posted material, in addition to potentially inciting dangerous activities, specifically violated the BurstNet acceptable use policy.”

CNET.com reports that Burstnet received news about this material from the FBI on the 9th of July. The material is believed to have contained the names of various Americans on the Al-Qaeda hit-list. There were also messages from Osama Bin laden and other terrorist leaders.

While BurstNet has said they received a ‘Voluntary Emergency Disclosure of Information’ notice from the FBI, the FBI has not confirmed this. They did however clarify that they have not ordered for any site to be shut down as that can only be done by a judge.

While BurstNet claims this is not the first time their platform has been misused, several theories are floating around regarding the reason for the closure, including the possible presence of child pornography.

Another online service IPBFree.com was also shut down one week after Blogotery.com.

According to sources, the Blogotery server is connected to an online magazine ‘Inspire’ which is believed to be a recruiting platform for terrorists and contained an article ‘Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of You Mom.’

The sudden closure has obviously displeased users.

Users who wished to conduct searches for the search term ‘Holy See’ were directed to a site with the domain name ‘www.pedofilo.com’ much to their consternation.

The term ‘pedofilo’ is Italian for Paedophile, as seems to be quite obvious. However reports from Italy have claimed that the actual IP address of the site is not in Italy as may be expected but in Mexico. It is also believed that the site is actually a religious site contrary to expectations.

This action of Google Bombing has taken place soon after news reports alleging several incidents of child abuse by certain people who work for the Church were made public. The Vatican has also prescribed a new set of rules with which these offenders will be taken to task.

The Google Bombing incident was first noticed by at the Vatican itself and they contacted Google about it.

A spokesperson for Google Italy however said, “I cannot confirm if it is an attack because I have not had any more precise information from the US engineers to understand the nature of the problem.”

It would be quite embarrassing for Google to have to admit to this being a case of Google Bombing as they had claimed to have solved that particular problem, quite a while ago.

It now comes to light, that the problem still continues to exist. This was revealed by the advocacy group, Consumer Watchdog. John Simpson of Consumer Watchdog told the BBC that “We think the Google Wi-Spy effort is one of the biggest wire tapping scandals in US history.”

Consumer Watchdog retraced the same route as Street View cars and found that the homes of several people including some high profile politicians were having open home networks, through which a lot of important and private information could leak out.

The Consumer Watchdog, in turn has come under fire from the Computer and Communication Industry Association (CCIA) for conducting an experiment which itself could be dangerous.

However the Consumer Watchdog wants Mr. Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google to be made to testify under oath about this issue.

Google has issued a statement saying, “as we’ve said before, it was a mistake for us to include code in our software that collected payload data, but we believe we did nothing illegal. We’re continuing to work with the relevant authorities to answer their questions and concerns”.

While such statements sound good and may help Google to buy some time, they certainly need to act fast to rectify this problem even if it eventually means discontinuing the feature entirely, before the data ‘unwittingly’ collected lands into the wrong hands and creates major problems.

After all, mapping areas and roads is okay, but “tapping” into what people are doing is not, and we all expect Google to behave responsibly.

The popular singer now has 11,109,469 fans, while the U.S. President has also crossed the 10 million threshold and now has 10,018,956 fans.

11 million+ people Like Lady Gaga on Facebook

Lady Gaga has more fans than the U.S. President on twitter too.Gaga’s 4.9 million Twitter followers make her the 3rd most popular Twitter user, compared to Obama’s 4.5 million, which rank him 5th, after Ellen DeGeneres.

While Lady Gaga is the first living person to have achieved this record on Facebook, she is at the sixth position in the general category, after, Texas Hold’em Poker, Michael Jackson, Mafia Wars, Facebook and the U.S.  television show Family Guy.

Of these, Texas Hold’em Poker has the largest fan following by far, with over 20 million fans on Facebook. Lady Gaga has a long way to go, if she wants to be at the top of the list.

Former deputy PM and member of the U.K. Labour Party, John Prescott, has been urging and instigating his followers on Twitter and supporters to click on Google pay per click ads from their opponents.

Prescott isn’t actually encouraging users to click on ads posted by the Conservative Party rather than on links to his own party. Instead he wants users to click on these ads in order to cost the Conservative Party money and make them bleed through their search engine marketing budget faster.

The logic behind this is simply that the Conservative Party pays for every click their ad receives. They could end up wasting their entire daily budget paying for clicks from Labour supporters and their ads would then stop showing.

In other words, John Prescott is encouraging his supporters to commit Click Fraud.

Click fraud was a major cause for concern for PPC advertisers in 2006, when a number of unscrupulous businesses hired rings of click fraudsters to keep clicking on their competitors’ ads till the competitors’ campaigns ran out of their daily budget, which would then mean that the competitors’ ads would stop showing for the given search term.

The Labour MP’s advice to his followers, may just boomerang on him, as the ultimate aim of any political party is to pass on their message and ideology to voters, which is precisely what is likely to happen when supporters of any party click on ads of the Conservative party and visit their site.

Moreover, voters would most likely tend not to look favourably upon a politician who encourages them to commit fraud, albeit online.

Left to right: Peter Fleischer, David Drummond and the incriminating video

Peter Fleischer, David Drummond and George De Los Reyes were accused of defamation and violation of privacy. A fourth employee, Arvind Desikan, the product manager, has been acquitted.

The judge, Oscar Magi, has absolved them of defamation, but has convicted the three for violation of privacy. Each of them has received a suspended six month sentence.

Needless to say, executives at Google are enraged by this sentence, which they consider to be arbitrary and frivolous. David Drummond, the Chief Legal Officer says, “I intend to vigourously appeal this dangerous ruling. It sets a chilling precedent.”

Google further clarifies that Google and its employees had nothing to do with the harassment of the teenager, the filming or uploading of the video. If the consent of the teenager concerned was to be taken, it was the responsibility of those who uploaded the video to do so.

Google withdrew the video as soon as it was brought to their notice. They also cooperated with the authorities to identify the people who made and uploaded the video. Their responsibility ended there.

As far as censorship is concerned, it is not possible for Google to screen every video that is uploaded on their site, before it is available for public viewing, simply because of the sheer volumes involved.

If this sentence is allowed to run unquestioned, then Google claims that most sites will be liable for some violations of law. Under such circumstances, many sites may be forced to shut down, and the losers will be the general public, which derives many benefits from the services provided by the internet.

Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, has proposed that any information submitted by unknown users should first be sent to trustworthy editors for confirmation or ‘Flagged Revisions’ before it is posted for general viewing on the online encyclopedia.

False information could have been prevented from appearing by locking certain articles to prevent edits, or by preventing unknown editors from editing. But, as Cade Metz points out, both these options are contrary to the principles on which Wikipedia is based.

The reason for the debate on the introduction of flagged revisions is that it defeats the whole purpose of Wikipedia, which has so far allowed all users to make changes to articles as they see fit – a principle that has made Wikipedia so popular.

Jimmy Wales says that if flagged revisions had been introduced, such false reports would definitely have been prevented. He claims that during a survey of Wikipedia users, 60% were in favour of this scheme. However he admits that while such an editorial system is already in use for all articles in the German version of Wikipedia, it has resulted in a delay of 3 weeks before publication, which is clearly unacceptable. The delay for the English version should be no more than 1 week and preferably even less as only some of the articles will be edited.

Those in favour of the scheme have applauded the move as being “in the best interests of the project”.

On the other hand, those opposed to this proposal have protested strongly saying that even the false reports had been removed in just 5 minutes, which is very impressive, and hence the flagged revisions that will delay the articles greatly should not be introduced.

DMOZ started off and grew tremendously in popularity on the same principle. Power corrupts, though, and DMOZ was no exception to this and neither will Wikipedia be.

It is very likely that once editors get even greater powers to police and filter content they will start forming cartels and abusing this power to ensure that only the content and opinions that they want will appears on Wikipedia. Reports in the past have already alleged formation of cartels by groups of active editors who almost immediately overwrite changes that go against their thinking.

Users have been asked to suggest other alternatives to this proposal. T3 magazine reports that a vote held in the next fortnight will decide how things will proceed.

Citizen Lab has come across a database, which has thousands of words, that are considered to be politically sensitive. Whenever a Skype message contains any of these words, it gets automatically blocked. The database on which these words are stored also stores the personal information of the users, including their IP address, username and phone number. The database is insecure and hence is publicly available, which is a blatant breach of security for the users.

According to Citizen Lab, there is a surveillance system in place, which selects and stores messages transmitted through online telephones, and text messages. The messages that get deleted may contain some commonly used words such as democracy, Taiwan, Tibet, Voice of America, milk powder, Olympic games, earthquake, Tiananmen and SARS. The database reportedly contains over 1,50,000 messages, and it is possible to identify all the senders and recipients by entering just a username.

The internet service provider Skype, which runs its services in China in a joint venture with the Chinese company TOM online, under the name TOM-Skype, says that they are aware of the filtering of data by the Chinese authorities, but are concerned by reports about the resultant breach of security.

Citizen Lab has enquired whether or not Tom online and Skype are cooperating with the Chinese authorities and if so to what extent.

President of Skype, Josh Silverman has said that it is common knowledge that that Tom Online follows procedures to meet the local laws and regulations, such as monitoring and blocking messages containing certain words, which the Chinese government disapproves of. However according to policy these messages are to be deleted. They will have to investigate to know if the policy has been changed to allow storage of these messages and why.

Barack Obama and John McCain are now making good use of the wide reach of the Web 2.0 sites and also search and social networking sites to reach out to their electorate.

Barack Obama had announced that while he had decided on who his Vice President would be, he would only declare that name via email and SMS. This was a great idea, as it meant that he would be able to collect a huge database of email addresses and mobile phone numbers, which would then become an excellent means to reach out to the common man.

This is also a clear indication that the methods of communication used by the White House are likely to change in times to come.

Already several sites are available through which ordinary U.S. citizens and non-U.S. citizens as well can gain information about various subjects such as laws and legislation, discuss policy matters, learn about where the tax payers’ money is being spent and so on.

Even the Libertarian Presidential candidate, Bob Barr, went online on August 21, to talk to the public about his policies and answer their questions to him.

One of the major disadvantages of online campaigning, however, is the ease with which politicians and campaigners can use dirty tricks and spread malicious gossip about their opponents. While this is nothing new in politics, the use of the Internet, will make it easier to spread such false information, while making it more difficult to catch the culprits.

Protests erupted in Lhasa the capital of Tibet, against the Chinese government. The Chinese government blocked the popular video-sharing website YouTube to restrict the public from getting information on the protests. Soon after, access to other sites such as Yahoo!, Google News, the Guardian UK, The Times Online and the BBC was either completely cut off or selectively filtered.

The Chinese government usually encourages the use of the Internet for educational and business purposes, but has placed online filters to regularly block access to any foreign material that they feel is inappropriate or objectionable. Chinese websites such as youku.com, tudou.com and 56.com have not published any information about the protests in Tibet as theses sites are expected to enforce self-censorship.

Chinese users trying to access YouTube, just found a blank screen. The government has made no official statement about this move. Interestingly, today YouTube has almost as many videos depicting opposition to the Tibetan protests as it has of protesters against the Chinese government.

Video on YouTube showing protests in Tibet

This is the second time in less than a month that an Eastern government has blocked access to YouTube. In the last week of February, the government of Pakistan had ordered the national ISP to block access to YouTube, leading to the site going down worldwide due to a propogation error.

While the Internet allows individuals from all over the world to share their thoughts and experiences, it also allows more and more people in the world to become aware of the plight of others. Stamping out free speech by banning video sharing sites and newspapers might cocoon the citizens of China temporarily, but in the long run, the Chinese government will end up hurting its own credibility in the West.