India will seek to block the internet's newly-formed red-light district after a global agency governing the web approved .xxx suffix for pornography websites last week, a senior government official said.

"India along with many other countries from the Middle East and Indonesia opposed the grant of the domain in the first place, and we would proceed to block the whole domain, as it goes against the IT Act and Indian laws," said a senior official at the ministry of IT.

Not content to censor a book that combines literary criticism and fiction by including JRR Tolkien as a character, the Tolkien estate has shut down Adam Rakunas, who makes and gives away buttons that have the word Tolkien on them.

The professional descendants making millions off a long-dead writer have become a serious impediment to living, working writers -- and readers.

The online payment provider PayPal has frozen the account of Courage to Resist, which in collaboration with the Bradley Manning Support Network is currently raising funds in support of U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning.

"We've been in discussions with PayPal for weeks, and by their own admission there's no legal obligation for them to close down our account," noted Loraine Reitman of the Bradley Manning Support Network.

"They said they would not unrestrict our account unless we authorized PayPal to withdraw funds from our organization's checking account by default."

Hungary is introducing on Saturday a controversial media law that critics say will turn the clock back and re-introduce totalitarian rule in the former Communist nation.

The legislation has been compared by the opposition to the way the press had been treated during Hungary's Communist era and under other totalitarian regimes.

The group's Chief Representative to the EU, Olivier Basille, said the legislation is the worst media law of all European Union countries, including Italy, where the prime minister attempted to sue international media.

The British government wants to gag WikiLeaks, and is drawing up Orwellian plans to exploit fears over the effect of online smut on children to achieve that aim.

Vaizey declared his position on the issue in Parliament in late November. "We are talking about preventing children from having access to inappropriate content, and how we can work with ISPs to make it that little bit more difficult for them to do so," he said.

"This is a very serious matter," he said. "I think it is very important that it's the ISPs that come up with solutions to protect children.

Julian Assange came in third, behind the Tea Party, the chaotic but influential agglomeration of US right wingers.

Time said the Facebook founder deserved its award "for connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives".

It's been amusing seeing all of the attempts by US politicians to get Wikileaks blocked. As of this posting, the site has now listed over 500 mirror sites and the number keeps growing. And that's just mirrors of the site itself. The actual documents are being copied and offered up from a lot more places. Trying to shut down something like Wikileaks only gets it more attention...

PayPal said its payment service cannot be used for activities "that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity".

In a statement, US-based PayPal said donations could no longer be made to Wikileaks because of "a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy"

Senator Joseph Lieberman and other lawmakers on Thursday introduced legislation that would make it a federal crime for anyone to publish the name of a U.S. intelligence source, in a direct swipe at the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks.

Leaking such information in the first place is already a crime, so the measure is aimed squarely at publishers.

But on Thursday a German politician admitted that he'd passed confidential information to U.S. diplomats, after a WikiLeaks cable describing an anonymous, well-placed U.S. informant in Germany set off a mole-hunt within that country's Free Democratic Party.

Without any need for COICA, ICE has just seized the domain of a BitTorrent meta-search engine along with those belonging to other music linking sites and several others which appear to be connected to physical counterfeit goods.

When a site has no tracker, carries no torrents, lists no copyright works unless someone searches for them and responds just like Google, accusing it of infringement becomes somewhat of a minefield - unless you're ICE Homeland Security Investigations that is.