Seventy-five years ago this month, the US junked Prohibition. However, a remarkable number of states still fight bottle battles in one of the Web's longest-running e-commerce controversies -- one that pre-dates e-commerce.

About one-fifth of the US is substantially restricted from buying wine or other spirits online. Fifteen states, according to the Free the Grapes! site, prohibit consumers from doing business directly with wineries in other states; it's a felony in Kentucky, Tennessee and Utah.

Popular microblogging service Twitter, which has been used for everything from keeping track of jailed journalists to recording the kicks of an unborn baby, has integrated with Friend Connect, Google's open identification platform.

Now, users can join Google Friend Connect affiliated site with their Twitter login information. Users also have the option to use their Friend Connect profile to see if their friends on Twitter are also members of that site. If not, they can invite their subscribers by sending out a tweet containing a link to the new site. Very little is required of the invited users other than clicking through to the new site.

Yahoo has begun the final rollout of its new "smarter inbox" system -- which has been in beta since October -- adding redesigned user profiles, a now familiar Friendfeed-style activity monitor, and integration with third-party apps.

The path upon which Yahoo has taken its Web mail service is well trodden. Not two weeks ago, the company's one-time chief suitor Microsoft bundled its Windows Live services into a single portal through which both Live and third-party mailboxes are accessed.

CBS will reportedly be re-launching TV.com, a property it obtained through its $1.8 billion acquisition of CNET Networks, as a video portal where content comes from numerous providers, including Hulu.

The market is getting increasingly full of streaming TV sites. There are sites which encode and post their own intellectual property like WB.com, and abc.com, and there are sites which redistribute content from a number of networks like Hulu, Joost, and even YouTube. Then, there are sites like AT&T's VideoCrawler, AOL's Veoh, Sling.com, and Comcast's Fancast which catalog and link to content from those distributors, while providing their own reasons for users to sign on.

Download Microsoft Windows Live Essentials Beta installer from FileForum now.

Over two years since Microsoft's everyday online product suite entered its first round of testing, its "Wave 3" beta is complete, with the result being that the suite that includes its newest online mail client...is entering beta?

The gains of early summer were ghosts by winter for BitTorrent, which has both renegotiated its recent Series C round of financing and re-valued the company.

BitTorrent's new software may be looking good, but the company's visibly struggling. Layoffs last month eliminated (it is believed) 18 positions -- about half the staff -- and saw the departures of co-founder Ashwin Navin and CEO Doug Walker. (The former departure was in the works for several months, but Navin did take the November opportunity to announce that he was off to launch an incubator-type firm.)

Twones, a Dutch start-up funded by concert giant Live Nation, is now heading into beta with a new service for tracking, storing, and sharing music across multiple Web sites.

The new Twones service tracks people's music usage both online and elsewhere on their PCs. In exchange, users are able to store their musical files with Twones, share them with friends, and receive "collectively filtered" music recommendations.

Radio Shack is now advertising a $99.99 Acer netbook on its Web site. Yet to get the Windows XP-enabled device at that price, you also need to sign up for a two-year 3G wireless contract from AT&T.

The only catch in the deal for the Acer Aspire One netbooks is that you need to agree to a two-year contract with AT&T's DataConnect service, at a price of $60 per month.

A new, left-of-center politician seizes power in a wave of change against an unpopular right-winger who supported the war in Iraq. With him comes sweeping new policies that could change the fabric of society. But this isn't America.

It's Australia, where a popular uprising is gaining strength against a plan to force that country's ISPs to disallow Web access to two government-maintained blacklists of sites, including some that are known to provide child pornography. The protest comes just two days after the Canberra government's new Minister for Broadband, Sen. Stephen Conroy (L - Victoria), put forth an ambitious plan that would effectively guarantee taxpayers' accessibility to broadband service throughout the country.

While ISP Virgin today launched its fiberoptic network, with the hopes of becoming the fastest network in the United Kingdom, the firm's throttling practices will likely remain in place.

Virgin has announced that its 50 Mbps tier will cost £51 per month alone, or £35 if paired with an £11 per month Virgin landline.

Web metrics company comScore has been tracking activity and spending on e-commercial sites this holiday season, and this year is on par with last year, indicating that the dreaded "r-word" is not having too negative an impact.

Before "Cyber Monday," comScore predicted the growth in online commerce for the holiday season would remain mostly flat, or with negligible growth. This prediction has thus far been fulfilled as holiday spending hit a slow patch last week.

In a filing last December 4, Microsoft has trademarked the "Kumo" name, after previously acquiring the Kumo.com domain name. So it's bound to mean something eventually; the question is, will it mean something new?

In its trademark filing, Microsoft said that it might use the Kumo name for a variety of purposes, such as "computer search engine software," "computer searches, including search engine services," and "dissemination of advertising including dissemination of advertising for others via the Internet."

What could be a "non-story story" in this morning's Wall Street Journal which some are saying strays too far from the truth, was met with a "non-denial denial" response from Google indicating it may not be too far from wrong.

The chatter this morning is about whether Google, a company whose name actually means "big," is approaching cable companies about possible partnerships that could give certain customers higher-speed, premium access to higher-bandwidth content such as YouTube and Google Apps. This after a Wall Street Journal story painted Google as two-faced, advocating so-called "net neutrality" principles in public while making exclusivity deals with carriers in private.

Everybody wants something from the next administration, and a group called the Family Online Safety Institute is no exception, asking that increased effort be put toward kids' online safety.

The group requests that President-Elect Obama create a post of "National Safety Officer," to be located within the office of the Chief Technology Officer -- an office to which the new administration has long been committed to creating. FOSI also seeks the creation of an annual White House Online Safety Summit, a US Council for Internet Safety, and an ongoing Online Safety Program.

A serious corporate realignment re-focusing the business on three markets (and four investment areas) puts a Web 2.0 glamour -- it's still glamorous, Web 2.0, right? no? how about Web 3.0? -- on telco manufacturer Alcatel-Lucent.

There are layoffs on tap as well for the French firm. Around 1,000 managers and 5,000 contractors will find their jobs eliminated over the course of 2009 and 2010.