It appears that Google is expanding upon the same sort of heavy handed censorship that saw XenoxNews news articles black banned from their news search results.

Google is now blocking individuals from its services for very minor things like using a pseudonym or having a weird sounding name!

Many users of Google's new social networking effort "Google Plus" have reported that they have received email from Google that suggest in vague terms that they broken the Google Plus terms of service.

The consequences have been that these users have not only been banned from Google Plus but all of their other Google collateral (youtube, adwords, etc etc) were blocked!

First newspapers like Xenox News are banned fom publication, now the regular Joe. Caution people. Google appears to be moving toward becoming both judge and jury and executioner about what content is acceptable on their network.

Is Google becoming the world's biggest internet censorship Nazi?

Read more about the recent Google Plus censorship turmoil

"Users are also reporting in post comments that links are silently being removed form their posts, in addition to having entire posts unexpectedly and quietly removed."  - Violet Blue (Pulp Tech ZDnet)

Are you getting annoyed that every website you visit tracks you in their log files?

Are you perhaps a little annoyed that Google tracks every single search you make from your location; building your profile and storing it for commercial useage?

An onion or a cookie? Your choice.

Would you just prefer that you could browse the internet anonymously?

If you answered yes to any of these questions the answer is TOR.

TOR software brings personal privacy to internet users and you can run it from a USB stick, your desktop machine or even your smart phone.

What's more it is about as easy to use a taking a dump.

The USB stick version is pretty cool. Simply download the USB version, extract the files to a USB stick and you are ready to browse the web anonymously from any location. All you do is plug in the stick, double click "Start Tor Browser" and start browsing the internet with built in version of firefox provided.

All the information you need is on the TOR Project website: www.torproject.org

Are you one of those people who posts things to Facebook assuming that your photos, thoughts, actions, whereabouts, and other sundry personal information, is "private" because you have set it to "private" or "friends only"?

You probably already know that all of the data is accessible by public servants who work for various authorities; the FBI, NSA, and other US government agencies. And you might be fine with that as you have nothing to hide.

But you might want to ask yourself if you would be happy to share this "private" information with any anonymous person, that fruitcake next door, your nasty ex-boyfriend, any of your colleagues at work, your future employer, your future wife, your enemies, anyone at all.

Maybe one day your fabulous Internet idea will get you millions and movies made about you :)

And if you are happy to share these private photos and private musings with 'anyone' why have you marked them as 'private' in the first place? Why not make everything public now?

By making all of your private Facebook info public now you will save yourself a big surprise when the data is leaked and published on the internet for the world to search and download.

It won't be much longer but all of your private Facebook stuff will be searchable by the general public when the big Facebook leak occurs.

It is coming; don't you worry about that!

Don't say you haven't been forewarned. Make all your private Facebook stuff public now!

Top story in the New Yorker this week documents how US National Security Agency is not only saving all of the data about those of us living overseas but now (and for most of this decade) also storing and cataloguing data on every US citizen who uses an electronic device (mobile, Internet, GPS, VISA, electronic transaction, telephone).

It is actually against the US constitution however Bush "overruled" the constitution after 9/11 and the bureaucrats (switching jobs back and forth between public service/outsourced contract firms) have run with it... all the way.

Way back in the late nineties an estimated two and a half billion phones in the world and one and a half billion I.P. addresses were passing approximately twenty terabytes of unique information around the world every minute. One of the NSA programmers created a program to capture and map all of this data, however in good faith to the law and US constitution he anonymised/encrypted all of the data relating to US citizens. Flags on suspicious data were raised and then if warranted a subpoena could be issued and then the privacy of the citizen could be legally be invaded.

Somehow, through quite a dodgy set of circumstances, this privacy protection functionality was all unravelled under George W and the NSA became a massive data mine.

This guy, Drake, who used to work there reported some of this to a journalist and is now being prosecuted for espionage against the nation and will likely end up in the gulag for the rest of his life.

But there is a strong chance the court case will rip all of this stuff open even wider, and well, its this week's number one story in the New Yorker magazine...

You are probably already aware that everything you type, talk, track, buy on an electronic device is being stored by these people (hi guys!) and yeah we all heard about the mysterious Echelon years ago, but this New Yorker magazine article outlines a whole bunch of stuff about how it works.

Warning: The New Yorker article is very long, fascinating, and creepy:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all

Stupid heart, cupid heart

Where does it go from here

Oooooh what you got me into