A top-secret surveillance program gives the National Security Agency surreptitious access to customer information held by Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, Google, Facebook, and other Internet companies, according to a pair of new reports.

This afternoon's disclosure of PRISM follows another report yesterday that revealed the existence of another top-secret NSA program that vacuums up records of millions of phone calls made inside the United States.

Some of the companies named in the pair of news reports responded this afternoon with statements indicating they did not provide direct server access, or PRISM was not as described.

A Georgia school bus driver is so upset when a 6th-grader tells him that he was 40 cents short for lunch, and therefore hungry, that he posts about it online.

Cook felt "in my heart of hearts" that the child told him the truth. He says he was fired, a fact that the school doesn't deny. School officials told the Times-Georgian that he was fired for making derogatory statements about the school.

If, as the school contends, the incident never happened, will the child be disciplined for lying and causing so much controversy? Will he be expelled, even?

Hoping that further cost cuts will right its heeling ship, social-gaming company Zynga said Monday it is cutting 18 percent of its workforce and closing various offices.

The San Francisco-based company has been struggling to revive the momentum that propelled it to the forefront of Web-based social games, after newer titles have failed to get the same traction as digital-livestock diversion FarmVille did out of the gate.

The company's stock has been struggling alongside its games since it went public at the end of 2011, when shares closed below its $10 IPO price and have yet to recover. They're currently worth about $3.41 each.

Arthur Budovsky, a Costa Rican citizen of Ukrainian origin, and the founder of the currency system, was arrested in Spain last Friday, while others were arrested in Costa Rica and New York. Police in Costa Rica also raided three homes and five businesses linked to Liberty Reserve, according to the Associated Press. The digital currency’s site went offline last week, with its front page replaced by a notice saying that the domain had been seized by the United States Global Illicit Financial Team.

Liberty Reserve required only a valid email address to open an account and initiate transactions. It charged a 1 percent fee for each transaction and, for an additional 75 cents, offered to hide a user’s account number in transactions.

Despite heavy budget cuts and layoffs, the RIAA hasn't yet realized that singing the same old debunked song isn't a winner. It's claiming that the DMCA's safe harbors are broken and need to be fixed.

Brad Buckles, wrote the latest misleading screed against the safe harbors. The short version is basically: everyone else needs to prop up our business models by randomly taking down content that might, possibly be infringing.

I'd also imagine it matters quite a bit to tons of musicians who are not a part of the RIAA machine, who now use the internet to have a better career than they ever had under the old system.

Google Project Hosting announced changes to the Download service on Wednesday, offering only 'increasing misuse of the service and a desire to keep our community safe and secure' by way of explanation.

Google Drive is recommended as an alternative, but this will likely have to be done manually by project maintainers since the ability to create and manage downloads won't be part of the Project Hosting tools.

During a keynote speech at Interop, Barrett said: "Our intention is to really obliterate, within a certain number of years, both passwords and PINs and see the whole internet — including internally in enterprises — obliterate user IDs and passwords and PINs from the face of the planet."

These devices could be USB keys, fingerprint sensors or embedded hardware, and require some user interaction, such as swiping a card, stroking their finger over a sensor or scanning their eyes.

Even if it accomplished nothing else, the Middle Eastern governments’ crackdowns on communications during the Arab Spring movement two years ago demonstrated how much governments, in general, and repressive governments, in particular, hate encryption—particularly in the hands of private citizens.

So now we come to the FBI and other U.S. law-enforcement agencies that are trying to read the text messages, chats and the email of people they think are bad guys. The feds say that they’re doing this to fight crime and terrorism. And they say they have a right to get information if they have a legally obtained wiretap order.

In other words, if you can’t provide the feds with a back door to your system, the government will keep piling on fines until you go out of business.

"This service doesn't work with some modern browsers and operating systems," the DWP notes. "We are considering how best to provide this service in future. You may want to claim in another way."

For the few of you out there wanting to claim benefits online who manage to dig out some old Windows machine from a basement or loft running an old enough version of IE or Firefox, there are further obstacles to getting any money out of the government.

On April 30, 1993, CERN published a statement -- on the Web, no less! -- that made the technology behind the World Wide Web available on a royalty-free basis.

To mark this anniversary, the researchers announced today that they are beginning a project to restore the first website and "preserve the digital assets that are associated with the birth of the web."