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Google Buzz aims to crack the social web

Google Buzz

share messages, web links and photos with friends and colleagues directly within Gmail

How many times do you click on your email icon in a day? Or look at Facebook, or Twitter? And how many times when reading on the internet do you click on a link navigating away from the text that was the original object of your enquiry? The web, it seems, is like an electronic sweet shop, forever tempting us in different directions. But does this mental promiscuity, this tendency to flit around online, make us, well, thicker?

power of modern electronic media – the net, mobile telephones and video games – to capture the attention of the human mind, particularly the young mind, and then distract it has lately become a subject of concern. We are, say the worriers, losing the ability to apply ourselves properly to a single task, like reading a book in its entirety or mastering a piece of music on an instrument, with the result that our thinking is becoming shallower. Sir Tom Stoppard aired a version of this view last week when he warned that the printed page was in danger of being "swept away" on a tide of technology, with the moving image assuming ever-greater precedence in the lives of young people.

pongeBob app became the latest game to be pulled following a complaint it had violated children's privacy rights.

The Washington DC-based group urged the FTC to investigate Nickelodeon and mobile game-maker PlayFirst's privacy practices.

ickelodeon has denied the allegation that it breached children's online privacy rules.

We want to show the world that we are innovators. We want to show the world that cloud storage has a right to exist. And, of course, when you launch something like this, you can expect some controversy. The content industry is going to react really emotionally about this. The US government will probably try and destroy the new business … you've got to stand up against that, and fight that, and I'm doing that … I will not allow them to chill me."

Megaupload was created initially as a service that allows you to send large files because email attachments had limitations … and that's still the case today. The popularity and initial growth was all around that. This was never set up with the intent to be some kind of piracy haven. If the US government says that we are a mega-conspiracy, a mafia that has created this kind of thing to be a criminal network of pirates, they're completely wrong … for them it was about shutting it down and dealing with it later on the fly. They are hacking the legal system."

Aaron Swartz files reveal how FBI tracked internet activist Firedoglake blogger Daniel Wright publishes once-classified FBI documents that show extent of agency's investigation into Swartz

Amanda Holpuch guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 February 2013 22.42 GMT

A blogger has published once-classified FBI files that show how the agency tracked and collected information on internet activist Aaron Swartz. Swartz, who killed himself in January aged 26, had previously requested his files and posted them on his blog, but some new documents and redactions are included in the files published by Firedoglake blogger Daniel Wright.Wright was given 21 of 23 declassified documents, thanks to a rule that declassifies FBI files on the deceased. Wright said that he was told the other two pages of documents were not provided because of freedom of information subsections concerning privacy, "sources and methods," and that can "put someone's life in danger."