Japanese youngsters are getting so addicted to Internet-linking cell phones that the government is starting a program warning parents and schools to limit their use among children.

The government is worried about how elementary and junior high school students are getting sucked into cyberspace crimes, spending long hours exchanging mobile e-mail and suffering other negative effects of cell phone overuse, Masaharu Kuba, a government official overseeing the initiative, said Tuesday.

“Japanese parents are giving cell phones to their children without giving it enough thought,” he said. “In Japan, cell phones have become an expensive toy.”

The recommendations have been submitted from an education reform panel to Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda’s administration, and were approved this week.

The panel is also asking Japanese makers to develop cell phones with only the talking function, and GPS, or global positioning system, a satellite-navigation feature that can help ensure a child’s safety.

Borders Group Inc. is returning to online retailing after seven years paired with Amazon.com, but analysts say it will be a challenge for the nation’s second-largest bookseller to compete with established Web retailers.

The move comes as Borders, which has said it may put itself up for sale, has lost market share both to online retailers and to discounters such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. amid a difficult economic climate in the United States.

It’s a long shot, analysts say, in an environment where people are spending less and Amazon.com rules.

“Amazon just dominates,” said Fred Crawford, managing director at turnaround consultant AlixPartners who has studied consumer attitudes toward major booksellers. “Amazon is nearly unassailable.”

In 2001, Borders abandoned its money-losing online business, turning it over to Amazon. Under that arrangement, Borders.com took shoppers to a site partnered with Amazon, while a Web site for its stores allowed shoppers to check inventories and reserve items.

A masters student researching terrorist tactics who was arrested and detained for six days after his university informed police about al-Qaida-related material he downloaded has spoken of the “psychological torture” he endured in custody.

Despite his Nottingham University supervisors insisting the materials were directly relevant to his research, Rizwaan Sabir, 22, was held for nearly a week under the Terrorism Act, accused of downloading the materials for illegal use. The student had obtained a copy of the al-Qaida training manual from a US government website for his research into terrorist tactics.

The case highlights what lecturers are claiming is a direct assault on academic freedom led by the government which, in its attempt to establish a “prevent agenda” against terrorist activity, is putting pressure on academics to become police informers.

A $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit challenging YouTube’s ability to keep copyrighted material off its popular video-sharing site threatens how hundreds of millions of people exchange all kinds of information on the Internet, YouTube owner Google Inc. said.

Google’s lawyers made the claim in papers filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan as the company responded to Viacom Inc.’s latest lawsuit alleging that the Internet has led to “an explosion of copyright infringement” by YouTube and others.

The back-and-forth between the companies has intensified since Viacom brought its lawsuit last year, saying it was owed damages for the unauthorized viewing of its programming from MTV, Comedy Central and other networks, including such hits as “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

In papers submitted to a judge late Friday, Google said YouTube “goes far beyond its legal obligations in assisting content owners to protect their works.”

It said that by seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for Internet communications, Viacom “threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression.”

Google said YouTube was faithful to the requirements of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, saying the federal law was intended to protect companies like YouTube as long as they responded properly to content owners’ claims of infringement.

The discovery of a trio of security bugs means that users of the popular Trillian instant messaging client need to update their software.

All three of the newly discovered bugs create a means for hackers to inject malware onto the PCs of surfers running vulnerable versions of the multi-protocol chat application from Cerulean Studios. The vulnerabilities involve flaws in how Trillian parses MSN protocol traffic, an error within XML parsing, and a third flaw involving the processing of messages with long (malformed) attribute values within the FONT tag can be exploited.

Users need to update to Trillian version 3.1.10.0

It appears that while some people are increasingly concerned that Google’s entertaining Street View might visually rape their swimming pool or lay bare their military secrets to black turbans and other jihadist riff-raff, the residents of Illinois have a rather more relaxed attitude to privacy.

The proof comes in the twin forms of this gal south of Chicago, who decided the best way to confront the search monolith’s prowling black snoopvan was to give its multiple eyes an eyeful:

A benchmark test for rich internet application (RIA) frameworks claims Apple’s OS X lags Microsoft’s Windows XP on Intel when rendering HTML, being just over half as fast.

Sean Christmann, an experience architect at user interface specialist EffectiveUI, released the GUIMark benchmark following concerns over the lack of a proper test to compare RIA frameworks and technologies such as Adobe Systems’ Flex and Flash, Java’s Swing, Microsoft’s Silverlight and good, old HTML.

EffectiveUI specializes in building RIAs and numbers eBay, Ford, Discovery Channel and United Airlines among its clients.

Christmann, an experienced user interface designer who led the development team for eBay’s Desktop, tested a range of RIA frameworks on an Intel-based MacBook Pro under Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.5 and found that XP consistently outperformed OS X.

German police are investigating a couple after they offered their eight-month-old son for sale on internet auction site eBay.

Renee Beck, a police spokesman in the Bavarian town of Krumbach west of Munich, said on Saturday the 23-year-old woman told them it was only a joke.

But he said police were nevertheless continuing their investigation and the baby was put in state custody.

A number of people called authorities across Germany after seeing the offer on eBay that read: “Baby — collection only. Offer my nearly new baby for sale because it cries too much. Male, 70 cm long.”

The opening bid was 1 euro ($1.57). There were no bidders during the two hours before the offer was removed, police said.

The mother was quoted in Bild newspaper saying: “It was only a joke. I just wanted to see if someone would make an offer. They’ve taken my son to hospital and I’ve got to take psychiatric tests next week.”

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.