I've been a staunch advocate of NOT joining Facebook or Twitter or the other social networks to protect my privacy and to not voluntarily give all my personal information away to corporate America, or even the Government.

Is the payoff worth the potential trade-off for generating potential customers for your business and guiding them to your primary website?

Twitter users took to their accounts to tell the world that the e-mail program wasn't connecting. It appeared that both the consumer version for "gmail.com" accounts wasn't working, as well as corporate e-mail systems that use Gmail as their e-mail platform.

Search Engine Journal's Danny Sullivan is reporting that Google Drive, the company's cloud-storage service, is causing its Chrome browser to crash.

The proposal, co-signed by Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates, added to fears in some Western countries of a stalemate midway through a 12-day conference in Dubai to rewrite a longstanding treaty on international communications.

This could allow governments to render websites within their borders inaccessible, even via proxy servers or other countries. It also could allow for multinational pacts in which countries could terminate access to websites at each others' request.

Beginning in a few weeks, the nation’s major internet service providers will roll out an initiative — backed by Obama and pushed by Hollywood and the record labels – to disrupt and possibly terminate internet access for online copyright scofflaws without the involvement of cops or courts.

“It doesn’t mean you give up on litigation,” said Chris Dodd, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, speaking at an industry gathering here Thursday. “It doesn’t mean you give up on legislation.”

Due to its free nature (and it’s $10 for as many as you want), Co.CC was abused and used for scams and spamming and was even de-listed by Google at one point although they did re-enable it. Getting back to the article on hand a few days ago Co.CC seems to have removed its DNS records which ultimately has stops its own site from working and every sub domain it provided.

Could have been disabled due to an attack and yet to come up, could have exchanged ownership and yet to come back online, could the owner no longer want to run the service or did the folks behind .cc wanted it gone.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that it commissioned a study on the way in which search results related to President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are displayed on Google. The study found that when users search for "Obama" or "Romney," Google displays standard results. Other related searches, however, are treated differently.

Those who had already searched for "Obama" found that their results were customized to relate in some way to the president. Searches on those topics yielded no such customizations for Romney seekers.

Dangerous website flaws have been discovered in PayPal that grant attackers access to customer credit card data, account balances and purchase histories.

One of the holes was publicly disclosed after a failed effort in July to responsibly disclose them under PayPal's bug bounty program.

“Communication is paramount. Researchers are often not doing it for the financial reward (you can make more on the black market selling these), but out of a sense of trying to better the landscape around them. Without a personal level of communication, companies often interpret well intended reports as malicious, and researchers lose the drive to participate when they do not see actionable results,” Smith said.

France may introduce a law to make Google pay to republish news snippets if it doesn't strike a deal with French news publishers before the end of the year, the office of French President François Hollande said.

In August, the German cabinet backed a proposal to extend copyright protection to news article snippets republished by search engines. If the law comes into force, publishers could be allowed to charge Google and other search engines for republishing parts of their articles.

Connection woes hit popular services across the Internet. So far, though, it's unclear if they are related.

A mysterious rash of outages struck the Internet today, crippling major services for hours at a time. It isn't clear whether they're related.

Andy Smith, an internet security chief at the Cabinet Office, said people should only give accurate details to trusted sites such as government ones.

"When you put information on the internet do not use your real name, your real date of birth," he told a Parliament and the Internet Conference in Portcullis House, Westminster.