Green light for Internet snooping

Despite substantial opposition, the government is proceeding with plans to compel communications service providers (CSPs) to retain electronic data beyond that required for commercial purposes, and make it available to the security services, police and other public authorities, says Computing.co.uk.

The UK Home Office admitted a tiny majority, just 53% of those consulted, back the approach, and a large minority, 38%, are opposed to any enhancement of surveillance powers. The plan will see CSPs retaining details of all e-mails, phone calls, texts and other electronic communications - but not their content.

The proposals are expected to cost £2 billion to implement over 10 years, with no indication of any payments to CSPs to offset costs.

The European Union has officially raised objection to Oracle's proposed $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, reports The Register.

According to a Sun Securities and Exchange Commission filing, the EU issued a "statement of objections" involving the merger and these objections were limited to concerns over Oracle acquiring MySQL.

"The statement of objections sets out the commission's preliminary assessment regarding, and is limited to, the combination of Sun's open source MySQL database product with Oracle's enterprise database products and its potential negative effects on competition in the market for database products," the filing says.

Twittering from court is prohibited, according to a federal judge in Georgia, who banned spectators from sending live updates from a criminal trial, reports CNet.

US district judge Clay Land in Georgia wrote that Rule 53 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure should be interpreted to ban Twitter.

Rule 53 says: "Except as otherwise provided by a statute or these rules, the court must not permit the taking of photographs in the courtroom during judicial proceedings, or the broadcasting of judicial proceedings from the courtroom."

Rupert Murdoch has said he will try to block Google from using news content from his companies, reports the BBC.

The billionaire told Sky News Australia he will explore ways to remove stories from Google's search indexes, including Google News. He believes search engines cannot legally use headlines and paragraphs of news stories as search results.

Murdoch's News Corp previously said it would start charging online customers across all its Web sites.