The government wants internet service providers (ISPs) to filter legal pornography and other adult subjects "by default".

The government said by the end of next year, 20 million homes - 95% of all homes in Britain with an existing internet connection - will be required to choose whether to switch on a whole home family friendly internet filter.

Prime Minister David Cameron said: "As a dad, it is very simple: I want to know my children are protected when they go onto the internet.

The Network tells the story of TOLO TV, the first independent television network created in Afghanistan to fill the media void created by 30 years of war, repression and censorship. Since businessman Saad Mohseni first launched TOLO TV in 2004, the network has transformed from a nine-person operation to a staff of 900, filming and broadcasting everything from news reporting and travel shows to singing competitions and soap operas.

Chinese web users have criticised Apple after the company pulled an iPhone app which enabled users to bypass firewalls and access restricted internet sites.

Another user wrote: "Apple is determined to have a share of the huge cake which is the Chinese internet market. Without strict self-censorship, it cannot enter the Chinese market."

Another app, which enables users to access books banned in China, was also withdrawn.

The north african country of Sudan was almost completely cut off from the internet on Wednesday, as its government might have severed connections in the midst of rioting in the country and the nation's capital of Khartoum.

"From a technical standpoint, the fact that it involved multiple distinct internet service providers at the same time is consistent with a centrally coordinated action. However, it is impossible to tell solely from connectivity data whether this was government directed or a catastrophic technical failure."

Baraa Shiban, a respected human rights activist who works in Yemen as a project co-ordinator for the London-based legal charity Reprieve and was travelling to London to speak at an event, said he was held for an hour on Monday night and questioned about his work and political views.

He was detained under schedule 7 to the Terrorism Act, the same legislation used last month at Heathrow to detain David Miranda, the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who has written about mass internet surveillance by the US National Security Agency and Britain's GCHQ.

Prosecutors, who had asked for almost two years in prison, said Dixon crossed the line between free speech protected under the First Amendment and criminal conduct when he told some clients to conceal what he taught them while undergoing government polygraphs.

Phillips said the real-world consequences of Dixon’s actions were significant. Dixon trained 70 to 100 people who paid him $1,000 for a day’s work, including federal contractors seeking to keep top-secret security clearances, Phillips said.

Government entities are irony-proof, especially those most humorless of government entities -- the censors. Case in point: the Finnish Supreme Administrative Court has decided that the Finnish police did nothing wrong when it added an anti-censorship site to its blacklist.

A completely legal site, one that pointed out errors in the NBI's block list, was shut down for the children.

In a statement, a spokesman for the deputy prime minister gave the first official confirmation that the cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, made the request to the Guardian.

A spokesman for Clegg made clear that Heywood was acting on the authority of both the prime minister and his deputy.

Rusbridger told officials that the Guardian would continue to report from the leaked documents because it had backup copies in the US and in Brazil. Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who received the documents from the US whistleblower Edward Snowden, lives in Rio de Janeiro.

I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back." There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. "You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more."

And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents.

Radio Times is a well-known UK TV and radio listings magazine; another major site affected was the citizen science project Zooniverse. As an Open Rights Group (ORG) post explains, the specific Radio Times address that was blocked was radiotimes.com, while www.radiotimes.com continued to function

As ORG surmised, the problem arose from a UK court decision handed down last month that allowed the Football Association Premier League Limited to block FirstRow Sports, a site for live-streaming sports events.