Designed by telecommunications giant British Telecom (BT), "Cleanfeed" was used to filter out child abuse imagery, and it did so with great success.

In 2007, Home Office minister Vernon Coaker ordered all U.K. ISPs to subscribe to Cleanfeed to prevent access to scenes of sexual abuse and "criminally obscene" content.

In April 2011, the High Court in London ruled BT must block access to file-sharing site Newzbin2 at ISP level -- using none other than the Cleanfeed system. It was widely seen as a "test case" building up to forcing bigger file-sharing sites off the British Web.

Almost exactly a year later, six of the U.K.'s largest broadband providers were told by the same High Court to impose a block on their customers from accessing magnet-link sharing site The Pirate Bay.

After banning the word "jailbreak" from its app store and music library, Apple today reversed course and again permits the term - slang for hacking into a device to download unauthorized content -- to appear on iTunes and its App Store.

Apple maintains it forces sales of company-approved content through its proprietary stores to enhance security and reduce piracy. And while jailbreaking is legal, it violates the terms of use and voids the warranty on iDevices.

The Court has forbidden the Dutch Pirate Party from linking to, operating or listing websites that allow the public to circumvent a local Pirate Bay blockade. The political party is further ordered to shutdown its reverse proxy indefinitely and block Pirate Bay domains and IP-addresses from its generic proxy.

The Court specifically ruled that the Party’s reverse proxy has to remain offline. It was further ordered that Pirate Bay domains and IP-addresses have to be filtered from the Pirate Party’s generic proxy. In addition the Pirate Party can’t link to other websites that allow the public to bypass the blockade.

"On Friday, at the request of the TSA, I was removed from the witness list," Schneier wrote on his blog. "The excuse was that I am involved in a lawsuit against the TSA, trying to get them to suspend their full-body scanner program. But it's pretty clear that the TSA is afraid of public testimony on the topic, and especially of being challenged in front of Congress. They want to control the story, and it's easier for them to do that if I'm not sitting next to them pointing out all the holes in their position. Unfortunately, the committee went along with them."

When users try to send an instant message to a friend with a link from The Pirate Bay, Windows Live Messenger displays a warning, saying that the link is "blocked because it was reported as unsafe."

Microsoft's apparent decision to block The Pirate Bay might conjure up privacy fears among those who don't necessarily want the software giant limiting what they can and cannot do on the service.

According to TorrentFreak, however, The Pirate Bay appears to be the only major downloading site affected. Other prominent sites, according to the blog, can still be accessed via links in Windows Live Messenger.

The forces of Puritanism struck another blow yesterday. Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, sent out an email to all authors, publishers, and agents

Paypal, Smashwords’ payment processor, has issued an ultimatum. Someone at Paypal is grossed out by certain types of erotica sold via Smashwords, so those ebooks have to be pulled or Paypal will drop Smashwords as a customer. And the ebooks have to be pulled by Monday, or else.

In the weeks leading up to Facebook's massive $100 billion initial public offering, the company's founder Mark Zuckerberg reportedly told Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and the other banks involved in the action to stop leaking information to the media.

Zuckerberg, who earns only $1 in salary from Facebook but retains a $28 billion stake in his social network, was reportedly unhappy that the banks leaked details about his company's Wall Street debut.

Google has quietly announced changes to its Blogger free-blogging platform that will enable the blocking of content only in countries where censorship is required.

“Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law,” Google wrote.

Whether it's copyright trolls wanting to censor filesharing web sites to extract high prices for their content or the UK Prime Minister wanting to shut down social networks during times of unrest, web site blocking is oppressive by its very nature. In addition, it won't be effective.

Worse still, attempting to block web sites gets you some pretty dodgy friends. At the same event, it was mentioned that the Government's plans to block social media during times of popular unrest had drawn applause from certain countries that you "wouldn't want to get into bed with".

So the government is going to block web sites? It can try, but it will be fighting a losing battle. Censorship of the internet is oppressively draconian and simply will not work, so even to attempt it is pointless.

Judge Dawson of the Nevada US District Court ordered Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to delist the offending web sites from their search engines, and also told Facebook, Twitter and Google to remove the links from their social networks, according to the BBC.

The judge also ordered domain name company Godaddy to take control of the web site domains and block them from being accessed.