The Mormon Church has instructed its lawyers to gag the Internet over WikiLeaks' release of the 1968 and 1999 versions of its confidential handbook for Church leaders. Apart from attacking WikiLeaks, legal demands were sent to Jimmy Wales of the WikiMedia foundation for a WikiNews article merely linking to the material, and scribd.com has also been censored. WikiLeaks has (of course) refused to remove the documents.

Pretty soon, cops won't just be packing stun guns. They'll be carrying electrically-charged riot shields, zapping their unruly without unholstering their weapons.

Taser is demoing all kinds of gear this week -- from shock-inducing shotgun rounds to "area denial" zappers that can fry groups of people at once.

The peel-and-stick zapping film will be available towards the end of the year, the company says.

A cow was left unhurt in Switzerland after a head-on collision with a car which left the vehicle destroyed.

The animal rolled on to the bonnet of the car and was catapulted over the roof but then immediately got to its feet.

"I couldn't believe it when I saw it just standing there and looking at me afterwards. I thought it should have been dead. Instead it just mooed at me."

If you work from a Chinese Internet cafe – which is still where the vast majority of Chinese Internet activity happens, since so few people have connected computers in their own homes – you experience all of these blocking mechanisms as a matter of course.

As a matter of course I fire up my VPN at the start of any online session, not just for security but because otherwise I'll be blocked the first time I try a Wikipedia or Technorati link.

The idea is that if you're never quite sure when, why and how hard the boom might be lowered on you, you start controlling yourself, rather than being limited strictly by what the government is able to control directly.

A recently-discovered flaw in Gmail is capable of turning Google's e-mail service into a highly effective spam machine.

An e-mail from johdoe@awinnerisyou.com (or the corresponding IP address block) may be automatically blocked by any given e-mail service, while an e-mail from a trusted, authenticated source such as Gmail is automatically allowed through the gateway.

E-mail sent to Yahoo and Hotmail from a blacklisted IP didn't even necessarily reach the account's spam box, while forged e-mail sent via Gmail always arrived in the intended account's inbox.