The Department of Treasury and Federal Reserve have given banks six additional months to comply with rules aimed at squelching online gambling. Financial institutions now have until June 1 to comply with the new rules, aimed at enforcing the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act.

The Obama administration's deputy technology officer, Andrew McLaughlin, recently caused a stir by saying that net neutrality principles prevent the type of censorship associated with repressive regimes. "If it bothers you that the China government does it, it should bother you when your cable company does it," he said at a conference last week at University of Nebraska-Lincoln law school. Now AT&T is crying foul, saying that it's not fair to compare Internet service providers to repressive governments, especially with the Federal Communications Commission considering imposing new neutrality rules.

Google's global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, says he doesn't plan to attend his criminal trial in Milan for allegedly violating the country's data protection laws. "I'm under clear instructions from my outside counsel not to set foot in Italy, at all," Fleischer wrote on his blog, revived this week after a seven-month hiatus. "That's a tragedy, since I love Italy."

Last year, computer scientists at the University of Washington who were studying peer-to-peer networks reported that they received more than 400 bogus takedown notices in two months. Now, Mike Friedman, an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton reports that a research system he runs, CoralCDN, recently received around 100 letters alleging copyright infringement.

The federal government today dropped its appeal in the MySpace suicide case, ending its efforts to prosecute Lori Drew for her role in an online hoax tied to the death of 13-year-old Megan Meier.

Not swayed by BlueBeat CEO's "pschoacoustic simulation" argument, a judge has issued a preliminary injunction banning the music site from continuing to sell Beatles tracks.

Kurt Greenbaum, an editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, doesn't seem all that happy that his newspaper allows people to publish unmoderated comments. And he doesn't seem to be much of a fan of the paper's privacy policy, either. In a recent, remarkably self-satisfied column, "Post a vulgar comment while you're at work, lose your job," Greenbaum bragged about how he outed one formerly anonymous commenter.

When privacy advocates complain about behavioral targeting techniques, industry executives tend to respond by condemning the critics as ivory-tower elitists. But new research is increasingly casting doubt on the idea that the average consumer doesn't care about behavioral targeting.

The revised Google Books settlement, filed Friday just minutes before a midnight deadline, has left privacy advocates underwhelmed. The deal would allow Google to digitize and sell books at prices set by a new book registry, a collective rights group similar to the music industry's ASCAP and BMI. Civil liberties organizations have pointed out that the agreement leaves Google in a position to amass at least as much in-depth information about users' reading habits as libraries.

Ten years ago a stunt marketing campaign online propelled "The Blair Witch Project" to $250 million in box office receipts, but few other Web hoaxes have been similarly successful. Some, in fact, have been so questionable that it's hard to believe anyone greenlighted the campaigns.