However, when the interior ministry of Russia made an announcement about buying a golden, Russians turned to the Internet to express their outrage.

The Russian media is almost totally run by the government and do not pay attention to wrongdoings by state officials. But a small group of bloggers is doing everything they can to expose this malignant issue.

Their blogs have surprisingly attracted a degree of popularity after they became a channel of the anger that Russian citizens have been keeping for years.

One of the bloggers is Alexander Malyutin who runs his own blog where he devotes his time exposing suspicious government activities, including the golden bed purchase of the interior ministry.

According to documents uncovered by Malyutin, the ministry declared in August 2009 that it was about to purchase a set of furniture worth 24 million rubles ($800,000) which included a bed covered in 24-carat gold.

The documents were available online as a law instructing all state purchases to be published in a website was passed in 2005 in an effort by the Kremlin to unearth corruption in its system. The documents were well hidden in the website.

After the news broke out courtesy of the bloggers, the ministry was quick to defend itself from getting much ridicule by stating that the bed was for foreign officials staying in a VIP guesthouse in Moscow.

Malyutin’s blog is appropriately called zakupki_news, name after the Russian word for “purchases.” The blog has attracted audience by publishing reports about overspending among government agencies.

One document included a plan to buy a Mercedes by a space institute in Saint Petersburg. Another detailed the plan of the governor of Sakhalin province to hire drummers from Burundi to perform at his New Year’s party.

Both tenders were taken out of the blog due to outcries in the blogosphere but the golden bed exposé still pushed ahead.

Malyutin, who also works as editor for Marker.ru, a Russian news website, acknowledged that what the officials did were not illegal, but “just shameless behaviour.”

Transparency International, a graft watchdog, ranked Russia 146^th in the world last year based on the relative levels of corruption in the country.

Chavez said Saturday that he was not in favor having an open Internet “where anything is said and done.” He suggested that every country must have its own laws about the matter. He even said that German Chancellor Angela Merkel felt the same way.

Most of Chavez’ anger was hurled towards Noticierodigital, a political opinion nad gossip website. According to the president, the site wrote an article that falsely reported that Diosdiado Cabello, one of his closest aides, was assassinated. The story, he said, remained online for two days.

Chavez added that he would ask the assistance of the attorney general because he thinks what the site did was a crime. He even accused the Web site of publishing stories encouraging people to participate in a coup d’etat.

Political oppositionists and activists use social networking web sites such as Twitter and Facebook to set up anti-government protests. Chavez has also complained that the sites are used by people to spread unfounded rumors.

Opponents of the Venezuelan president fear that he would follow the government oversight of the Internet currently exercised by his allies China, Cuba and Iran. No such move has been detected from Chavez yet.

In 2007, Chavez did not renew the broadcast license of RCTV after he alleged the channel incited the 2002 failed coup attempt. It is now operating as a cable channel.

Globovision, an opposition network, has also been asked by the government to soften on its editorials. Also last year, radio stations were closed due to administrative violations.

Li Yizhong, the minster of China’s Industry and Information Technology, said during the annual legislature that if Google chooses to not abide by the Chinese law, “you are unfriendly, you are irresponsible and you will have to pay the consequences.”

Li did not confirm or provide any detail of talks with Google Inc. The California-based company announced in January that it was pulling out of the communist country if the government would not lift the censorship on sensitive online contents.

Li said that China has nothing to lose if Google leaves.

Being the most populated country in the world, China also has the largest Internet market with about 384 million people online. Google currently has a 35 percent share in the search engine market compared to Baidu, a local rival, with 60 percent.

Users of Google in China, as well as state-run media, have warned that the loss of a major competitor could weaken the growth of the industry.

Beijing strongly supports Internet use for education and business but blocks access to contents it deems as pornographic or subversive. Web sites centered on human-rights and democracy are banned in China. Li insisted that China must protect its people by censoring these sites.

When asked about the hacking incident focused on anti-China activists, Li only echoed what has been said by other communist officials before: China opposes any form of hacking.

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, said on Wednesday that the company and China are still in talks trying to resolve the issues. According to unnamed sources, Google wants to come up with an agreement within weeks.

Internet service providers reported on Tuesday that Troyak, the ISP linked to the Zeus botnet, has been taken down. However, by Wednesday, it has found its way to reconnect again to hacked computers.

In an e-mail, Roman Starchenko, spokesman for Troyak, said that the ISP is definitely working again and they just had to fix an administrative error to become stable again.

According to security experts, Troyak went back online after it peered with another Internet service provider called Ya.

Troyal is associated with 68 Zeus botnet command-and-control servers which can communicate with new instructions to infected computers.

Experts however, dispute that they have found a way to isolate the ISP from the rest of the Internet world by severing its peering with upstream providers.

According to the researchers involved in the situation, the person or group directly responsible for taking down Troyak wants to remain unnamed.

Zeus is a botnet kit utilized by a growing number of hackers and cybercriminals. To date, researchers have detected 249 Zeus command-and-control servers.

Another botnet-related ISP named Group 3 was also taken down on Wednesday but has stayed offline so far.

The next move by experts is to try to cut Troyak’s ties with its new service provider. They think its either Nassist, another ISP, or Hurricane Electric, an upstream provider.

A similar situation happened in November 2008 when ISP McColo was taken down taking with it almost half of the world’s spam. It slowly regained its connection, however, during the next few days.

In 2006, the domain name was reportedly sold for $14 million. A lending firm in New Jersey backed that purchase. However, according to legal notices, DOM Partners LLC will foreclose the online property and will be due to auction on March 18 at Windels Marx Lane and Mittendorf LLP, a law firm in New York.

The bidding will start at $1 million for the Internet property that endured multiple lawsuits in the past as well as two books.

Online entrepreneurs are often the ones targeted by these auctions of simple domain names. In 2008, bids for www.pizza.com went way above $2.5million.

If sex is indeed a sellable online commodity, then sex.com may be the domain name with the greatest value in the world. According to a book, The Sex.com Chronicles by Charles Carreon, there was a time when the website was making a minimum of $15,000 per day.

Gary Kremen, chief executive of Grant Media and founder of Match.com, registered the sex.com domain name in 1994. In January 2006, Escom LLC was able to acquire the domain name from him.

A statement in 2006 announced that the sale was “believed to be among the most significant domain sale transactions in history.” No exact figure of the deal was disclosed but reports surfaced that it was about $14 million.

According to Scott Matthew, attorney for DOM, the lender’s loan to Escom has been in default for more than a year and DOM is just exercising its right under the security agreement.

Escom and sex.com did not issue any immediate statement about the upcoming auction.

However, one auctioneer, Richard Maltz of Maltz Auctions who will run the sale, said Monday that the interests for the auction are mounting.

Ahmed Moustafa, a 20-year-old engineering student was charged with “tarnishing the image of the military” and disseminating false information.” He stayed in a detention facility in Kafr el-Sheikh, a city north of capital Cairo, during the course of the military trial.

According to Hamdi al-Assiuty, Moustafa’s lawyer, the military court reversed its position on the case without giving any reason. However, the case was kept on file and could be opened in the future if the authorities choose to, al-Assiuty added.

If Moustafa had been convicted, he could have been sentenced to one year in jail.

Moustafa’s release came after the Committee to Protect Journalists, along with other rights groups, appealed to Egypt to drop the charges against the blogger. The groups also took notice on the harshness of the treatment on anti-government bloggers.

The rights groups mentioned that Egypt always uses its Emergency Law to allow civilians to be tried on military courts to get guilty verdicts. Governments in the West have joined the call of the groups to have Egypt end this law.

Egyptian officials however, argue that the law is put in place as a way to persecute anyone who threatens national security or those that are considered terrorists.

In the hearing on Saturday, Moustafa told the court that he was only repeating the information he received from an email. He apologized for his action saying that he had no intention of harming the military or anyone else.

The Open Net Initiative said Friday that it ran a test of Bing with a version customized for Arab countries. In the test, ONI found that Bing filtered words in English and Arabic that are related to sex as well as LGBT contents.

When the filtered keywords are searched, the search engine will display the message “Your country or region requires a strict Bing SafeSearch setting, which filters out results that might return adult content.”

ONI reported that Bing’s censorship is quite odd considering that although countries in the Middle East mostly exercise political censorship, not all countries filter contents related to sex and homosexuality.

ONI suggests that filtering should be done country-based or better yet, as preferred by online users to become parallel with freedom of speech that Microsoft professes to protect.

The report by ONI noted that users can be able to get around the filters by using versions of Bing for other countries because the search engine does not impose search settings based on IP addresses.

The new deals would bring more income to Twitter and it is also poised to get its technology more polished with new tools that these less popular websites can provide.

The websites that Twitter will be partnered with include Chainn Search, Collecta, CrowdEye, Ellerdale, Kosmix, Sccopler and twazzup. Twitter tweets would appear on these websites as Twitter hopes to become a leader in innovation for online search and discover done in real time.

Ryan Sarver, official of Twitter, said in a blog post that with the number of applications using the Twitter platform, the company could move forward to an even advanced future.

In a recent announcement by Twitter, it stated that 50 million tweets are being posted everyday up from 2.5 million tweets per day in 2009.

Some of these tweets contain useful information which can be screened for income generation for the site. Search engines like Google can do this screening for Twitter.

The new online tool called simply as “person finder” has been activated by Google so that people from other countries can located any relative or friend they have in China.

The “Person Finder: Chile Earthquake” was set up by the Internet giant at Chilepersonfiner.appspot.com and allows the users to choose English or Spanish as language.

When users log in, they are asked “What is your situation?” and they are given options: “I’m looking for someone” or “I have information about someone.”

They will then be able to search through the app’s database about the person they are trying to look for or input data on the database.

As of 1815 GMT, the “person finder” was already able to track down about 1,400 records.

Google was able to use the same app during last month’s 7.0-magnitude quake in Haiti and has so far collected 58,700 records.

The Chilean government has already confirmed 122 people died during today’s earthquake and tsunami warnings and advisories were raised in 53 countries and territories in and around the Pacific Ocean.