While Facebook going down is a good thing as far as office productivity goes, it's clear that some addicts aren't happy: police in California got so tired of getting calls about the outage that the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's public information office was forced to take to Twitter to tell off people for wasting police time.

In June the firm's servers took a dive, reported as the longest in its history, although service was resumed reasonably quickly.

After consulting focus groups of Internet customers, government researchers have come to a conclusion that should surprise no one: people don't want data caps on home Internet service.

GigaOm surveyed 15 ISPs last November and found that eight capped data, at least for some customers. Those ISPs with data caps include Comcast, AT&T, CenturyLink, Cox, Charter, Suddenlink, MediaCom, and CableOne.

Gomez did not try to profit from the paper. He also wasn't acting as some sort of indiscriminate distributor of infringing works. But under Colombian law, none of that matters.

Colombia gave the US copyright industry everything it wanted in order to secure this free trade agreement… and then it just kept going.

Just as in the US, plenty of useful information is locked up and inaccessible to anyone unable to afford the frequently exorbitant fees charged by various gatekeepers. Copyright's original intent -- "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" -- isn't served by this behavior.

Nederkoon pays for Internet service that promises 75Mbps downstream and 35Mbps upstream through his FiOS connection. However, his Netflix video streams were limping along at just 375kbps (0.375mbps), equivalent to 0.5 percent of the speed he's paying for.

After connecting to VyprVPN, his Netflix connection suddenly ramped up to 3000kbps, the fastest the streaming service allows and around 10 times faster than he was getting when connecting directly with Verizon.

President Barack Obama's administration claims that any company with operations in the United States must comply with valid warrants for data, even if the content is stored overseas.

"Congress has not authorized the issuance of warrants that reach outside US territory,” Microsoft’s attorneys wrote. “The government cannot seek and a court cannot issue a warrant allowing federal agents to break down the doors of Microsoft’s Dublin facility."

"Upon notification and review of the evidence, Vitalwerks took immediate corrective action allowing Microsoft to identify victims of this malware."

The dispute underscored the fine line between finely tuned botnet takedowns and reckless seizures that disrupt legitimate users in the name of security on the Internet.

Preserving the confidentiality of the planned takedown may have played a role in No-IP claims that Microsoft officials never contacted it ahead of time about the abuse of its service.

Microsoft aimed to filter out malicious traffic and allow legitimate users to access their systems through the dynamics DNS service. Instead, a technical glitch on Microsoft's part resulted in millions of users being disconnected from their systems, according to No-IP.

"We would like to give you an update and announce that ALL of the 23 domains that were seized by Microsoft on June 30 are now back in our control," the firm stated in a blog post. "Please realize that it may take up to 24 hours for the DNS to fully propagate, but everything should be fully functioning within the next day."

Australian consumer advocacy group Choice has welcomed an announcement by New Zealand Internet service provider Slingshot of a service that makes it easier to access overseas streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and BBC iPlayer.

Australians have been paying 54 per cent more than people in the US for the top 10 new release movies in Apple’s iTunes store, the consumer group stated in a submission to the government's Competition Policy Review.

Rightscorp, a prominent piracy monitoring firm that works with Warner Bros. and other copyright holders, claims that 140 U.S. ISPs are actively disconnecting repeat copyright infringers.

By introducing disconnections Rightcorp hopes to claim more settlements to increase the company’s revenue stream. They offer participating ISPs a tool to keep track of the number of warnings each customer receives, and the providers are encouraged to reconnect the subscribers if the outstanding bills have been paid.

In a blogpost, Microsoft lawyer Richard Boscovich said it had taken the action against domain administration firm No-IP.com for its "roles in creating, controlling, and assisting in infecting millions of computers with malicious software".

Microsoft had taken the legal step of making itself the controller of the 23 domains because No-IP had not done enough to police them, wrote Mr Boscovich. A federal court in Nevada granted Microsoft the right to take over the No-IP domains.

"Millions of innocent users are experiencing outages to their services because of Microsoft's attempt to remediate hostnames associated with a few bad actors," wrote No-IP in a statement posted on its site.