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SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and PIPA, the Protect Intellectual Property Act, were meant to crack down on the illegal sharing of digital media. The bills were drafted on request of the content industry, Hollywood studios and major record labels. 

The US government says it must be able to fight against piracy and cyber attacks. And that means imposing more restrictions online. But proposed legislation could seriously curb freedom of speech and privacy, threatening the internet as we know it.

Can and should the internet be controlled? Who gets that power? How far will the US government go to gain power over the web? And will this mean the end of a free and global internet?

An inquest heard last week that the gifted student had bought a drug over the internet that is used for lethal injections on America’s Death Row, and taken her own life.

What has been described by the coroner as a “matter of public concern”, though, is that she found a dark side of the internet that gave vent to such feelings, and offered tips on suicide and the drugs that would kill her.

Teenage party invitations now come with links to internet drugs sites.

Amazon 'used neo-Nazi guards to keep immigrant workforce under control' in Germany Internet giant investigates abuse claims by foreign workers in its German warehouses Tony Paterson Berlin

Amazon is at the centre of a deepening scandal in Germany as the online shopping giant faced claims that it employed security guards with neo-Nazi connections to intimidate its foreign workers. Germany’s ARD television channel made the allegations in a documentary about Amazon’s treatment of more than 5,000 temporary staff from across Europe to work at its German packing and distribution centres.The film showed omnipresent guards from a company named HESS Security wearing black uniforms, boots and with military haircuts. They were employed to keep order at hostels and budget hotels where foreign workers stayed. “Many of the workers are afraid,” the programme-makers said.The documentary provided photographic evidence showing that guards regularly searched the bedrooms and kitchens of foreign staff. “They tell us they are the police here,” a Spanish woman complained. Workers were  allegedly frisked to check they had not walked away with breakfast rolls.

Another worker called Maria said she was thrown out of the cramped chalet she shared with five others  because she had dried her wet clothes on a wall heater. She said she was confronted by a muscular, tattooed security man and told to leave. The guards then shone car headlights at her in her chalet while she packed in an apparent attempt to intimidate her.Several guards were shown wearing Thor Steinar clothing – a Berlin-based designer brand synonymous with the far-right in Germany. The Bundesliga football association and the federal parliament have both banned the label because of its neo-Nazi associations. Ironically, Amazon stopped selling the clothing for the same reasons in 2009.ARD suggested that the name “HESS Security” was an allusion to Adolf Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess. It alleged that its director was a man, named only as Uwe L, who associated with football hooligans and convicted neo-Nazis who were known to police. The programme-makers, who booked in at one of the budget hotels where Amazon staff were housed, said they were arrested by HESS Security guards after being caught using cameras. They were ordered to hand over their film and, when they refused, were held for nearly an hour before police arrived and freed them. The film showed HESS guards scuffling with the camera crew and trying to cover their lenses.

The Government yesterday launched a consultation on a possible change in the law to give parents more control over the material their children are viewing online.

Internet service providers have been in talks with the Government about ways of enabling parents to block sites containing sexually or gambling as well as forums glorify suicide and self-harm.

a report by MPs who called for a full “opt-in” which would automatically block adult material unless the user chose to deactivate it. Google has argued that an automatic block as a “mistake”, while Virgin Media, BT, TalkTalk and Sky have developed versions of the “active choice” system which makes users chose whether they want parental controls when they sign up, rather than imposing them automatically.

New stalking software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behaviour using data from social networking websites has been developed, it emerged today.

The sophisticated technology relies on websites such as Facebook and Twitter to build a detailed picture of people’s lives in a move that could raise concerns over breach of privacy and civil liberties.

t was claimed that the technology could be transformed into a "Google for spies" and used by governments as a means of monitoring and controlling people online.

Five-year-old runs up £1,700 iPad bill in ten minutes

"Danny was pestering us to let him have a go on the iPad. He kept saying it was a free game so my husband put in the passcode and handed it to him.

"He was crying, as the rest of the children were telling him we could have bought a house with the amount he had spent.

The European Union is seeking to increase the private sphere of its citizens by strengthening data protection laws for the web. Large Internet firms and lobbyists are fighting the plans.

Gmail and Facebook may be forced to abandon their ad-supported models and start charging their customers in Europe or stop providing them with these popular services altogether.

Take Facebook, for example, which has its European headquarters in Ireland. The Irish government's data protection commissioner would then be responsible for the concerns of all EU citizens relating to the company's privacy policies.

Increasingly, Internet companies are pushing each other to prove to consumers that their data is safe and in their control.

In some instances, established companies are trying to gain market advantage by casting themselves as more privacy-friendly than their rivals.

“It’s not just privacy advocates and regulators pushing,” Mr. Lynch said. “Increasingly, people are concerned more about privacy as technology intersects their life.”

Adults must impose the necessary checks and balances to keep children safe online, says the children's commissioner for Wales.

"All children and young people don't seem much of a distinction between their online and offline lives,"

Mr Towler told BBC Radio Wales. "It's all just one thing and they get really excited by the opportunities the internet affords and sometimes parents get a little scared about that and worried about what their children are accessing." 'Crossing the road' Continue reading the main story “Start Quote They're all running around with handheld computers these days, they're not just on phones ” End Quote Keith Towler Children's commissioner Mr Towler said he talks to children in lots of different settings and they "still enjoy playing outside as much as they ever did". He said we need to recognise that the internet provides fantastic opportunities for education and learning and its making sure that children access that safely. He said that was a real challenge for parents and carers. "It's a bit like crossing the road, you try to teach your children the best way of crossing the road well. We need to teach our children the best way of using this fantastic resource. "I think too many parents are very very scared of the internet and because they're so scared they will say 'Oh I don't understand it'". Handheld computers The commissioner also praised Hwb, the virtual learning environment, which he said provides protection for children using the web in schools. Mr Towler said: "We've got to get parents and carers to recognise that children do operate in the digital world. They're all running around with handheld computers these days, they're not just on phones. "They can access whatever they want whenever they want and parents need to engage on that. " "We need to remember that children and young people are much more savvy than sometimes we think they are, and they are much more responsible than sometimes adults think they are so its not all doom and gloom. "What we need to do is put the right checks and balances in place and what children always want from parents and carers is to understand what the boundaries are, and that's our job to do that." Sangeet Bhullar, executive director of Wise Kids, added that the digital landscape was "evolving rapidly" and up-to-date data was needed on how children and young people in Wales related to it. More on This Story .related-links-list li { position: relative; } .related-links-list .gvl3-icon { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; } Related Stories Web safety lessons urged for infants 05 FEBRUARY 2013, EDUCATION &amp; FAMILY Online chat 'should be monitored' 22 JANUARY 2013, TECHNOLOGY Body to promote digital teaching 22 JUNE 2012, WALES $render("page-see-also","ID"); $render("page-newstracker","ID"); Related Internet links Children's Commissioner for Wales The BBC is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites $render("page-related-items","ID"); Share this pageShare this pageShareFacebookTwitter Email Print In association with $render("advert","advert-sponsor-module","page-bookmark-links"); $render("advert-post-script-load"); $render("advert-post-script-load"); More Wales stories RSS Army base shuts in defence shake-up An Army base in Pembrokeshire is to close with 600 troops transferred to St Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan. Soldiers' conman jailed three years Wales recall Warburton and Jones <!--

long maintained tight control over the flow of information within its borders

foreigners

unfettered mobile access to the web

Last week, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt urged North Korean leaders to embrace the Internet. Only a small proportion of that country's 24 million people can access the World Wide Web, and the majority of the 1.5 million mobile phones there belong to political and military elites.

Meanwhile, in China, a country that has embraced the Internet to a much greater extent, the big story was about censorship, both online and off.

For Chinese social media users, the irony here was too perfect to go unnoticed

As European parliaments reject the Anti-Counterfeiting trade Agreement on human rights grounds, some are asking why it was signed in the first place.

The question is&nbsp;– why was the agreement signed in the first place, if its chances of being ratified are dropping by the day?

The pretext was the protection of intellectual property, and to control Internet resources that could be used by terrorists or to incite riots and other criminal activity.

is strictly controlled by Google."

to allow European users of its Windows operating system to choose among competing browsers, according to a Reuters report citing three anonymous sources.

A recently discovered flaw in the HTML 5 coding language could allow websites to bombard users with gigabytes of junk data, with a number of popular browsers being open to the vulnerability