The Ukrainian owner of KickassTorrents (KAT) has been arrested in Poland and his torrent-touting website seized by authorities. Artem Vaulin -- who also goes by the name 'tirm' -- stands accused of criminal copyright infringement, as well as conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and money laundering.

The Department of Justice says that the site owned by 30-year-old Vaulin "has enabled users to illegally reproduce and distribute hundreds of millions of copies of copyrighted motion pictures, video games, television programs, musical recordings and other electronic media, collectively valued at more than $1 billion". Authorities now want to extradite him to the US to face prosecution.

This morning, thousands of BT and Plusnet customers complained about dodgy internet connections. The problem has now been fixed, and the cause identified as a failed UPS owned by Equinix, leading to massive disruption.

Equinix, owned by Telecity, said there had been a problem "with one of our UPS system at 8/9 Harbour Exchange (LD8)" in London. The exact cause is not yet known, but further investigations are underway.

Artificial intelligence is frequently associated with sentient computers, bots and the like. But in the real world, AI is being put to a far wider range of uses. DeepMind, Google's AI division has been instrumental in slashing energy consumption in data centers.

Lying at the heart of the internet, data centers are huge electricity gobblers, and anything that can be done to reduce usage is to be welcomed. DeepMind has reduced consumption in Google's data centers by an impressive 15 percent, helping the company to do its bit for the environment.

BT broadband customers across the UK are reporting problems accessing websites today. The ISP is aware of the issue and is currently working to implement a fix, but in the meantime, thousands of users up and down the country are experiencing DNS problems.

The problem is also affecting customers of Plusnet, a separate branch of BT. The company says that "Engineers are working to fix things as fast as possible", but this will come as little comfort to those who find they are unable to go about their daily business.

There's a lot going on at Twitter at the moment. Yesterday, the company opened the floodgates, giving everyone the opportunity to apply for account verification. In the same day, Twitter also handed out a rare permanent ban to Breitbart tech editor and right wing pundit Milo Yiannopoulos, who went under the handle of @Nero.

Yiannopoulos has long-been a controversial figure -- a troll, many would say -- who has spoken out against feminism, movements such as Gamergate, Islam, and political correctness. This is not the first time he has received a ban, but in the past they have been temporary. The permanent ban comes after he was involved in a spate of tweets attacking Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones.

Key components of Opera Software are to be taken over by a Chinese business consortium. A planned $1.24 billion takeover of the entire operation fell through after failing to gain regulatory approval, but a new deal has been struck in its place.

Instead, the consortium -- comprising Qihoo 360 Technology Co, Beijing Kunlun Tech Co and others -- will take over just a portion of Opera Software's consumer business for $600 million. With the desktop and mobile version of the Opera web browser now falling into Chinese hands, there will no doubt be concerns about potential privacy issues based on China's history.

In the world of web browsers, there are four or five big names to choose from but no end of smaller alternatives. One such browser is Maxthon, and security researchers have just discovered that this Chinese-produced browser is transmitting a wealth of data about users back to China.

Researchers at Fidelis Cybersecurity and Exatel found that Maxthon frequently sends zip files to Beijing over HTTP and this contains a terrifying amount of data about users' browsing habits. The ueipdata.zip file incudes, among other things, details of the sites visited by users, the applications they have installed, and what searches have been performed.

Blocking online adverts is a controversial subject -- yes, adverts can be annoying but they also represent the only revenue stream for many sites.

A new survey from Adblock Plus in conjunction with HubSpot Research reveals that 83 percent of users just want to block the most intrusive ads and 77 percent would rather filter ads than block them completely.

Industrial control systems (ICS) are not supposed to be connected to the Internet, Kaspersky Lab says, as it opens a sea of opportunities for hackers. Such systems are run by energy, transportation, aerospace, oil and gas, chemicals, automotive and manufacturing, food and drink, governmental, financial and medical institutions, and should be, for the sake of security, run in a physically isolated environment.

However, Kaspersky Lab says that is not the case, and that it has found 13,698 ICS hosts exposed to the Internet, which very likely belong to large organizations. More than nine in ten (91.1 percent) host remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities, and 3.3 percent contain "critical and remotely executable vulnerabilities".

Google wants to make Project Fi an attractive plan not only in the US but also internationally as today it announces that it is expanding the coverage of its service in more than a dozen additional countries. Project Fi now provides high-speed data access in nearly all the places visited by Americans across the globe, claims Google.

To cover "over 97 percent of the places Americans travel internationally", Google is adding Three, which is present in Austria, Denmark, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Sweden and UK, to the list of mobile operators that work with Project Fi.

Kim Dotcom is a difficult man to ignore, and he's all set to get right back in your face after lurking in the shadows for a few months. In a series of tweets over the weekend, the German technology troublemaker announced that his file sharing service Megaupload is due to relaunch in 2017 -- on the fifth anniversary of a police raid.

Known as Megaupload 2.0 (remember the 2.0 phenomenon?), the platform is expected to appear on 20 January next year. Dotcom has previously expressed something of a passion for Bitcoin, and this looks set to continue with the relaunch -- complete with 100GB of free storage and on-the-fly encryption.

PostGhost, the website that describes itself as "an archive of public tweets deleted by politicians, celebrities, and other public figures" has been shut down by Twitter. The website was told that its display of deleted tweets was a violation of the Developer Agreement and Policy.

The site was a relative newcomer, having only been active for less than a week. Political tweets archive Politwoops almost met a similar fate, but the distinction with PostGhost is that it was only concerned with tweets from verified users with 10,000 followers or more -- a group that includes politicians, writers, singers, and other celebrities (major and minor).

The UK government is on a mission to protect the young of the country from the dark recesses of the web. And by the darker recesses, what is really meant is porn. The main ISPs have long been required to block access to known piracy sites, but porn is also a concern -- for politicians, at least.

As part of its bid to sanitize and censor the web, Sky -- from the Murdoch stables -- is, as of today, enabling adult content filtering by default for all new customers: Sky Broadband Shield. The company wants to "help families protect their children from inappropriate content", and in a previous experiment discovered -- unsurprisingly -- that content filtering was used by more people if it was automatically enabled.

To the amazement of some, and the disappointment of others, the FBI today recommended that no charges be brought against Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server. The presidential hopeful was roundly criticized, however, with James Comey describing her actions as "extremely careless".

The FBI director's remarks came after Clinton took part in a voluntary interview over the weekend, and after the bureau's investigation found that her private email account had indeed been used to send classified and even secret information -- officially a misdemeanour. The FBI's line is that "no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case".

Continuing its control of the internet, China has announced that news outlets may not use social media as a source of news -- at least not without official approval.

The Cyberspace Administration of China says that the move is part of a campaign to prevent the spread of rumors and fake stories, but most people will see it as the government continuing to flex its online muscles.