Ed Oswald

London police have detained five individuals ages 15 to 26 in connection with an investigation into Anoymous, a "hacktivist" group responsible for attacks on companies that suspended accounts associated with leak site WikiLeaks. The investigation is a global effort, and includes law enforcement agencies in both the US and Europe.

The Metropolitan Police Service did not indentify the accused, nor did they directly link them to the group. In the US, efforts have been stepped up to identify anyone who may have been involved in the efforts here, although so far no arrests have been made. The UK five are charged with offenses under the Computer Misuse Act, passed by Parliament in 1990.

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Facebook has unveiled a new advertising option for its partners that would allow companies to pull user's statuses and use them in ads on the service. Called Sponsored Stories, stauses of a user mentioning a company would be able to be used by a company in ads to that user's friends.

Users would not be able to opt-out of being used in these ads. Facebook said that check-ins to business and places are lost in our ever-moving news feeds, and companies have no way of taking advantage of the marketing potential these statuses could have. Thus, Sponsored Stories would essentially turn any status mentioning a brand into a potential ad.

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Amazon on Tuesday debuted a new bulk e-mail solution for businesses and developers as part of its web services offering. According to the company, Amazon SES is intended to take out the complexity of sending large amounts of e-mail for smaller businesses while ensuring delivery in a timely manner.

Users would receive their first gigabyte of data transfer at no charge, and would be free to those who use Amazon Web Service's EC2 cloud or Elastic Beanstalk application-management service as long as it falls within their bandwidth allocations. 2,000 e-mails per day would be covered under the free plan.

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In what could be considered a shot across the bow of AT&T, Verizon said late Monday that it would offer its $30 per month unlimited data plan that it offers for smart phones to iPhone users as well. Apple's iconic device is set to debut on the network on February 10.

Last June, AT&T restructured its iPhone data plans. While the rates dropped, the company also made the decision to do away with unlimited data. While Verizon's move does look like it is a response to AT&T's decision, at the same time Verizon is doing away with its $15 monthly 150MB capped plan, meaning unlimited data is the only option.

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Browser manufacturers are heeding the Federal Trade Commission's proposal in December of last year to create a 'do not track' system, with both Google and Mozilla saying they plan to add the functionality in coming versions of their respective browsers.

Microsoft was actually first to officially announce support for the feature last month. The Redmond company said at the time it would appear in Internet Explorer 9, and allow users to opt out of sharing information with sites they do not trust. Users would be able to create whitelists and blacklists for sharing browser data.

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A new virus is spreading around Twitter using the Google 'goo.gl' URL shortening service, posing as anti-virus software. Affected users may see tweets with links in their timelines ending with "m28sx.html," says Graham Cruley of security firm Sophos.

Clicking on the link will take the user a page that claims the computer is infected, and attempts to trick him or her into installing the malware-infected software as well as to pay for disinfection. Once downloaded, the virus then posts a tweet under the users account with the link in an attempt to infect his or her followers.

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After being turned away last month in its $6 billion attempted buyout of Groupon, Google is now busy developing an online coupon site of its own, reports indicate. According to Mashable, like competitors Groupon and LivingSocial, users receive e-mail notifications of local deals and have a set time to act.

Activity in the online deals sector has been heating up, with Amazon investing some $175 million into LivingSocial in early December. The fruits of that partnership came to a head this week, when the site offered $20 gift cards at $10. Reports indicate that as many as $1 million in cards were sold in a 24-hour period.

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Verizon said Thursday that it had filed suit in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in an effort to challenge the FCC's authority over net neutrality. The FCC voted on December 21 to prohibit ISPs from selectively throttling web traffic on a 3-2 vote.

The court is the same one that struck down an earlier attempt by the communications agency to stop Comcast from throttling BitTorrent traffic. At the time, the three-judge panel said that Congress has never given the FCC the power to regulate an ISP's network management policies.

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Faced with an increasingly tough go with its US arm, Deustche Telekom met with investors on Thursday to reaffirm its commitment to the division. According to executives, the German telecommunications giant is considering a sale of some of its non-core assets in order to raise cash.

Deutsche Telekom CEO Rene Olbermann and T-Mobile USA Philipp Humm both were in attendance, reportedly aimed at soothing the concerns surrounding the future of the unit. While an outright sale of the division appears very unlikely, the company appears ready to do what is needed to turn things around.

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Starbucks expanded its mobile payments program to more than 7,500 of its US stores on Wednesday, following a successful pilot program in 1,000 company-owed stores plus all of its Target in-store locations. The offering allows customers to use their smart phones to show a barcode that is linked to their Starbucks Card accounts without carrying the actual card.

The coffee retailer initially began offering the app last year as a method to check card balances, reload the card, and check previous transactions. A pilot program for the mobile payments system was later launched in all Target stores as well as select locations in New York, Seattle, and across northern California.

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Huntington Beach city council members are considering a unique way to fight back against drunk driving: posting the photos of repeat offenders to the police department's Facebook page. The idea is actually a scaled-back version of one proposed in November by Councilman Devin Dwyer, who originally wanted the photos of every DUI offender posted.

The problem of drunk driving is a serious one for this resort city a hour south of Los Angeles: according to the Associated Press, some 1,700 DUI arrests were made in 2009, and 195 were either killed or injured as a result of drunk driving. Huntington Beach ranks first among cities of its size for alcohol-related causalities.

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Expanding a fee already charged to those on 4G data plans, starting Jan 30 all new smartphone customers would be charged an extra $10 per month. The company says the decision reflects increased costs to provide these more bandwidth-hungry devices with data service.

The change would not affect current customers, who would be grandfathered in under their preexisting plan. In any case, Sprint's decision may also be a side effect of its push for "unlimited" plans last year.

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While the company has not yet directly come out and said that its planned event in San Francisco is tablet-related, it sure looks like it will be. In an interview with Maria Bartiromo of CNBC, HP personal systems chief Tom Bradley seemed to suggest WebOS would be the topic.

Bartiromo asked Bradley, "where's your tablet?" His initial response was that the company would have a "set of announcements" on February 9 around the topic of Web OS, although when asked later about how HP would catch up to the bevy of tablets released at CES (where the interview was taped), he responded "you and I will talk about that on the 9th."

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In what could be viewed as a shot across the bow of Microsoft, Google on Friday announced that it had modified its Google Apps service agreements to promise users 99.9 percent uptime. In addition, it removed wording that accounted for planned or scheduled downtime as part of the service reliability promise.

"Unlike most providers, we don't plan for our users to be down, even when we're upgrading our services or maintaining our systems," Enterprise Product Management Director Matthew Glotzbach said. He said Google would be the first company to eliminate maintenance window clauses from its service contracts.

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News Corp and Apple have decided to delay next week's expected launch of The Daily -- a digital newspaper formatted for the iPad -- according to several news sources. The issue appears to be related to Apple's wishes to tweak its new system for subscriptions in the App Store.

The AFP had reported earlier this week that both companies had planned to launch the paper in an event at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on January 19. In any case, a delay would be a matter of "weeks, not months" according to Wall Street Journal sources.

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