Syrian authorities have blocked access to 160 dissident websites since 2000 as part of a drive to censure the press and control Internet use, a free speech organisation said on Tuesday.

Security services have stopped access to “160 sites run by Kurdish political parties, opposition groups, newspapers — particularly from Lebanon — human rights, Islamic and civil society organisations,” said the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression.

Google Inc has halved the amount of time it stores personal data gathered from its users’ Web surfing habits, a move aimed at improving its privacy policies, a company official said.

Google used to store such data for 18 months, but has now trimmed that duration to nine months.

Nicole Wong, Google’s deputy general counsel, told a meeting of computer industry privacy experts at Microsoft Corp’s Silicon Valley offices that her company planned to “anonymize” the computer addresses of its users more quickly.

A thin and smiling Apple Inc Chief Executive Steve Jobs launched a much thinner, curved iPod nano music player and joked about the state of his much-discussed health on Tuesday.

But shares of Apple fell more than 4 percent after the presentation, which had no major surprises for investors, amid a broad decline in the stock market. Apple last week invited reporters to a music-related event, stoking expectations of new players. Some had hoped for new computers as well as iPods, but that did not happen.

Jobs appeared thin but jaunty as he walked around the stage in his trademark outfit of jeans and long-sleeve black shirt in front of a screen that flashed “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” — a quotation borrowed from Mark Twain.

Jobs introduced a curved aluminum and glass nano — the best-selling iPod — for $149 with 8 gigabytes of storage, $50 less than the predecessor model and a 16-gigabyte version for $199, capable of playing back 24 hours of music or four hours of video. He also showed off a thinner, $229 version of the Web-connected iPod Touch with rounded edges and 8 gigabytes of storage. At the high end, Apple is charging $399 for 32 gigabytes.