Google’s Orkut has made a deal to provide IP addresses of posters of content deemed objectionable by Bombay police. They object, among others, to posts against certain Indian personalities, young women admiring Indian mobsters, and, amazingly, “anti-Indian words”

Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner has announced his next endeavor: Vuguru, a new independent studio for the production and distribution of online video content.

Vuguru, officially a project of Eisner’s investment firm Tornante, debuted Monday along with its first production and set of sponsors. According to a statement from the new company, Vuguru aims to focus on “high-quality, story-driven content for the Internet” on a par with professional television and cinema productions.

The inaugural Vuguru series, a mystery drama called Prom Queen, will release the first of its 80 episodes on April 2. The 90-second-long clips, aimed at a tech-savvy teen audience, have been produced in conjunction with Web video company Big Fantastic–best known as the team behind the video podcast Sam Has 7 Friends. Among Prom Queen’s sponsors is the magazine-turned-webzine Elle Girl, which stopped print publication last year in order to focus on online and mobile distribution.

When members of the French parliament and their assistants return from their summer break, they will conduct parliamentary business on PCs running Ubuntu.

Starting in June 2007, 1,154 desks will feature Linux-based PCs. During the latest IT update for parliamentary assistants, the National Assembly decided to switch from Windows to Linux, allowing the 577 parliament members to switch to nonproprietary software for the first time.

The project was won by IT services company Linagora, an open-source specialist, and Unilog. Mandriva was mentioned in several documents under consideration but was eventually dropped.

As well as using the Ubuntu software, the parliament members and their assistants will use Firefox, OpenOffice, Mozilla’s messaging client Thunderbird, and other applications.

IBM is producing the Cell microprocessor at 65-nanometers, shrinking it down from the previous generation, the company said Monday.

Cell is the chip inside the Playstation 3, and it was jointly developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba. IBM didn’t provide any details about the new 65-nanometer chip, other than to note it was now in production.

Moving to smaller tranistors gives chip makers a few options to improve performance. Basically, they can now fit more transistors on the same size chip, or reduce the size of the chip with the same number of transistors. This helps increase performance, reduce costs, or both.

Three men from India were indicted Monday on federal charges of hacking into online brokerage accounts and pumping up stock values to turn a hefty profit for themselves, the Justice Department said.

The alleged “hack, pump and dump” scheme has cost one brokerage firm at least $2 million in losses, prosecutors said. An estimated 60 customers and nine U.S. brokerage firms were duped in the case during a four-month period last year, prosecutors said.

According to the 23-count indictment, unsealed in Omaha, Neb., the three men bought stocks through the U.S. online firms with their own accounts. Operating from Thailand and India, the men then allegedly used stolen identity information to pose as other online share-buyers — inflating the value of the stock.

The men then sold their own shares at a higher price — turning a substantial profit, prosecutors said.

An Egyptian appeals court on Monday upheld a 4-year jail sentence against a blogger convicted of insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak.

Abdel-Karim Suleiman, 22, last month became the first Egyptian to be jailed for his writing on the Internet in what human rights groups and bloggers described as a dangerous precedent that could limit online freedom in the country.

“This was not a verdict issued on a legal basis,” said Gamal Eid, a human rights activist and one of Suleiman’s lawyers.

“This is a religious verdict similar to those of the Inquisition,” he told Reuters.

The court in the port city of Alexandria also allowed a group of Islamist lawyers to file a separate lawsuit against Suleiman demanding compensation on the grounds that his writings had harmed them as Muslims.

The groundbreaking 2.5 inch Momentus 5400 FDE.2 (full disk encryption) has had a long and winding gestation, but is now set to be put on sale at the end of March in a real laptop, ASI’s C8015 , costing $2,150 (£1,100).

As well as on-the-fly encryption integrated into the drive itself using chip acceleration, the laptop also features a trusted platform module (TPM), and fingerprint reader, security add-ons that have added roughly 20 percent to the cost of what is otherwise a mainstream Intel Core 2 Duo laptop.

The drive to ship in the ASI machine will be the 80GB version, but 100Gb, 120Gb and 160Gb versions are also waiting in the wings, all based on a 3Gb/sec SATA interface and spinning at 5400 RPM.

A man who went to a Moroccan internet cafe to surf terrorist websites blew himself up when the owner’s son refused him access, Morocco’s official MAP news agency reports.

Two men entered the cafe in Casablanca’s Sidi Moumen district yesterday at 10pm. According to the Surete Nationale police, they wanted to view terrorist websites, but the firm refusal provoked one of the men to detonate explosives strapped to his body.