Anonymous, or Anon, is a movement made up of a number of nameless internet activists from around the world. For many, the 'hacktivist' group has become the face of the new cyber-war against oppressive governments and all-powerful corporates. Others say the group's actions are reckless.

Describing itself as "the freedom of speech, the freedom of information and the freedom of expression taken to a logical extreme," Anon says it breaks laws, but only for the greater good. Al Jazeera's Scott Heidler reports.

Ministers must do more to stop internet service providers (ISPs) snooping on private e-mails without consent, an ex-cyber security minister has said. Some ISPs have trialled software that intercepts and scans e-mails to target ads.

They are meant to ask permission first - but former Labour minister Lord West says it is too easy to flout the rules.

Mozilla and Google, reacting to US government pressure, will add Do Not Track tools to their popular web browsers Firefox and Chrome to make it more difficult for advertisers to collect data on users and to personalize ads.

The feature, developed at Stanford University, would include a "header," a small piece of information transmitted by your computer when you click on a website. It will tell advertisers that you do not want them to gather information about where you have been or what you've done on the web.

A reporter tagged in a Facebook image that mocked the Palestinian president said Saturday he faces trial for insulting a public figure, raising concerns about freedom of speech in the Western-backed Palestinian Authority.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange vowed Tuesday to step up his site's release of secret documents while he fights extradition to Sweden, as his lawyers argued that sending him to Stockholm could land him in Guantanamo Bay or even on U.S. death row.

Web attacks carried out in support of Wikileaks are being wound down as activists consider changing tactics.

Attacks against Amazon were called off late on 9 December and re-directed towards net payments firm Paypal. Analysis suggests the earlier attacks were made more effective by the involvement of hi-tech criminals.

With the help of their 1.8 petaflop supercomputer, Jaguar, researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee are sifting through internet traffic in search of suspicions patterns that will lead police to the perpetrators of child pornography.

In standard police work, checking a suspect's hard drive will show whether they have been downloading illegal content such as child pornography. But catching the criminals that produce such material in the first place is even more important, because they can often lead police to the children who are being abused. It is far from easy, since you can't necessarily tell who took the illicit images stored on a hard drive.

Advocacy groups have welcomed reports that the US government plans to boost the policing of online privacy with new laws and a new watchdog.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the Obama administration was set to unveil its new strategy in the coming weeks.

We entrust Google with our most private communications because we assume the company takes every precaution to safeguard our data. It doesn't. A Google engineer spied on four underage teens for months before the company was notified of the abuses.

Syrian authorities have been holding a 19-year-old blogger incommunicado for the past nine months, an international human rights group said Monday.

A Spanish team has designed a trial that allows men to step inside the body of a woman subjected to violence.

Two prominent lawyers in the fight against RIAA P2P lawsuits have taken their battle to the Supreme Court. Today, Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson and "Recording Industry vs. the People" blogger/lawyer Ray Beckerman joined with a few other law professors to ask the Supreme Court not to gut copyright law's "innocent infringer" defense.

Young people may one day have to change their names in order to escape their previous online activity, Google boss Eric Schmidt has warned.

When Adam Savage, host of the popular science program "MythBusters," posted a picture on Twitter of his automobile parked in front of his house, he let his fans know much more than that he drove a Toyota Land Cruiser.

Homeland Security has announced that body scanners will appear at virtually every major airport in the United States; however, not everyone is happy with what critics call a "virtual strip search," especially since a government agency has recently admitted to saving the images of …

Hidden inside Ashley Hayes-Beaty's computer, a tiny file helps gather personal details about her, all to be put up for sale for a tenth of a penny.The file consists of a single code— 4c812db292272995e5416a323e79bd37—that secretly identifies her as a 26-year-old female in Nashville, Tenn.

The code knows that her favorite movies include "The Princess Bride," "50 First Dates" and "10 Things I Hate About You." It knows she enjoys the "Sex and the City" series. It knows she browses entertainment news and likes to take quizzes.

The United Arab Emirates outlined plans Sunday to block BlackBerry e-mail, messaging and Web browsing services in a crackdown that could jeopardize efforts to establish the country as an international business hub.

Sometimes the Internet saves people from being sex trafficked. Good! But sometimes the Internet beats up on an 11-year-old girl, posting her address, phone number and making her cry. Bad. This is what happened to Jessi Slaughter.

Does that smart phone in your pocket contribute to rape and murder in the depths of Africa? Soon, you'll know: A new U.S. law requires companies to certify whether their products contain minerals from rebel-controlled mines in Congo and surrounding countries.

It's the coolest social networking tool in the world. But is the geo-location app Foursquare a stalker's dream? Just how easy it is to uncover the intimate details of a complete stranger's life?

The Qatari government has forced out the moderate leadership of a popular Islamic Web site and plans to reshape it into a more religiously conservative outlet, former employees of the site said Thursday.

British Columbia - Taser manufacturer challenges Braidwood report Lawyers for Taser International will be in B.C. Supreme Court on Monday to challenge the conclusions of the first Braidwood Taser inquiry, including the finding that the stun gun's electric shocks can be fatal.

Privacy could be enhanced if data was allowed to fade, suggests research. Dutch researcher Dr Harold van Heerde is looking into ways to gradually "degrade" the information that sites gather about visitors.

Slowly swapping details for more general information can help guard against accidental disclosure, he said.

Facebook looks likely to cave into pressure from users and simplify its privacy settings in the near future.

It follows criticisms of its privacy policy from US senators, the European Union and civil liberty groups.

An instant message transcript slipped to Business Insider shows 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg suggesting that users of the social network—fellow Harvard students at the time—were "dumb @!$%#s" for trusting him.

Business Insider previously posted evidence that the Facebook CEO used login data from his social network to hack into fellow students' email accounts; that evidence also included instant message transcripts. Its current story follows below.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has come up with fascinating and complicated solution to the broadband and Net neutrality problem. We break it down for you.

When caught between a rock and a hard place, try to find a third way. This is the primary lesson behind the Federal Communications Commission's decision to do some policy somersaults in order to solve a seemingly unsolvable problem: how to have some kind of "positive impact" on broadband, its proliferation in America, and Net neutrality.

Police raided the house of an editor for Gizmodo on Friday and seized computers and other equipment. The raid was part of an investigation into the leak of a prototype iPhone that the site obtained for a blockbuster story last week. Now, a legal expert has raised questions about the legality of the warrant used in the raid.

On Friday, officers from California's Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team in San Mateo, California, appeared at the home of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen while he was not there and broke open the front door.

The crisis in Darfur (Sudan) is still going on. Along the terrible things happening there are the destruction of villages, mass rape and genocide.

The Digital Due Process coalition is pushing Congress to modernize privacy laws in the United States. The coalition -- comprised of technology companies and special interest groups, including Microsoft, Google, EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), eBay, and others -- feels that existing privacy regulations do not adequately protect data in the digital era, and could stop businesses from embracing cloud computing.

It seems like vendors can't develop a new product or offer a new service these days without tacking the word "cloud" onto it. There are major players -- like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google -- backing the move to cloud-based services, and businesses are rushing to capitalize on the operational and financial benefits offered by cloud computing. However, businesses need to consider whether existing privacy law adequately protects data in the cloud.

"Technology is transforming our lives. It's also transforming the way non-profit groups police human rights abuses around the world.

In my Media Guardian column this Monday, I suggest that we need a bill of rights in cyberspace as a set of amendments to John Perry Barlow's 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.