Wikileaks has revealed that the United States is plotting a ‘Pirate Bay killing’ multi-lateral trade agreement, called ‘ACTA,’ with the EU, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Switzerland and New Zealand.

“The proposal includes clauses designed to criminalize the non-profit facilitation of copyrighted information exchange on the Internet, which would also affect transparency sites such as Wikileaks. The Wikileaks document details provisions that would impose strict enforcement of intellectual property rights related to Internet activity and trade in information-based goods. If adopted, the treaty would impose a strong, top-down enforcement regime imposing new cooperation requirements upon Internet service providers, including perfunctory disclosure of customer information, as well as measures restricting the use of online privacy tools.”

In response to the legal battle a new open-source project called Cubit may save the file sharing network. Cubit is an Azureus plugin that provides decentralized approximate keyword search of torrents in the network.

Spammers will do just about anything to get their e-mail through corporate and desktop filters.

According to MessageLabs, they’re now using Google Docs, a perfectly legitimate way to publish to the Web. Only what they’re publishing is the same old wares–this time, it’s enhancement pills. This week I talked with Matt Sergeant, senior anti-spam technologist with MessageLabs, who told me how they they’ve tracking one Google Doc since May 8, 2008.

Microsoft Corp. is abandoning its effort to scan whole libraries and make their contents searchable, a sign it may be getting choosier about the fights it will pick with Google Inc.

The world’s largest software maker is under pressure to show it has a coherent strategy for turning around its unprofitable online business after its bid for Yahoo Inc., last valued at $47.5 billion, collapsed this month.

Digitizing books and archiving academic journals no longer fits with the company’s plan for its search operation, wrote Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft’s search and advertising group, in a blog post Friday.

Microsoft will take down two separate sites for searching the contents of books and academic journals next week, and Live Search will direct Web surfers looking for books to non-Microsoft sites, the company said.

Nadella said Microsoft will focus on “verticals with high commercial intent.”

Google Inc.’s online communities have little traction in the United States, but the search leader continues to seek a spot in the social-networking hierarchy.

First, it must contend with Facebook, the No. 2 online hangout behind MySpace.

Days after Google unveiled Friend Connect, which lets the sites of musicians, political campaigns and others incorporate profile data from several social networks, Facebook began to block the program.

Although Google was taking advantage of the same tools that Facebook made available free to other outside developers, Facebook said Google was violating Facebook’s restrictions on data sharing. The two sides remain in a stalemate.

This month, Google unveiled Friend Connect, which promises to pool profile data from Facebook, Google Talk, Orkut, LinkedIn, Plaxo and hi5, though not MySpace. The profile information gets incorporated into other sites - a political campaign, for instance, can build communities of supporters by tapping existing networks - with Google serving as the intermediary.

Facebook quickly objected, citing privacy concerns. Normally dealing with other companies one on one, Facebook can block a service it feels violates its rules. With Google as the intermediary, Facebook lost that leverage, so it decided to block Friend Connect entirely.

In a blog posting, Facebook developer Charlie Cheever said Google’s Friend Connect “redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect.”

Google responded, acknowledging it passes along data. But it said sharing is limited to links for profile photos of users and friends who have expressly consented to sharing with that particular site. The user’s name and numeric ID on Facebook are replaced with Google’s own identifiers, Google said in a company blog post.