Television host Jay Leno has won control of a Web address using the name of his new show.

The U.N.’s World Intellectual Property Organization says current owner Guadalupe Zambrano of Katy, Texas, will have to transfer the domain name - thejaylenoshow.com - to the comedian.

The agency says Zambrano failed to demonstrate he had a legitimate reason for registering the address five years ago while Leno was still hosting “The Tonight Show.”

Zambrano used the site to redirect Web surfers to his real estate business.

Software developed by a Canadian lab to circumvent online censorship has been downloaded by more than 18,000 Iranians in the last 10 days, says its developer Rafal Rohozinski.

A thirst for online freedom in Iran, as well as in China, Myanmar and other authoritarian hotspots, has led to a sudden proliferation of all technologies designed to overcome curbs on news and social networking Internet sites.

“This speaks to the hunger for access to information when it’s being denied,” Rohozinski told AFP.

Iranians angered by the results of the country’s presidential election that returned hardline incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power have been using social and media sites such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter to communicate and organize.

They have also been posting videos of violent post-election protests and clashes to video-sharing sites such as YouTube.

Hackers defaced the home page of the Oregon University System, posting a caustic message telling President Barack Obama to mind his own business and stop talking about the disputed Iranian election.

Attempts to access the university system’s Web site were automatically redirected to another page, where readers viewed a message said to be from Iran that asserted there was no cheating in the election. That message was up for 90 minutes before university system technicians intervened Wednesday morning.

The hackers apparently took advantage of third-party software that had not been properly updated, university system spokeswoman Diane Saunders said. Hackers frequently attack the system’s computers, but technicians usually beat back their efforts, she said.

Yahoo Inc. has sued the NFL Players Association, claiming it shouldn’t have to pay royalties to use players’ statistics, photos and other data in its popular online fantasy football game because the information is already publicly available.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Yahoo filed its lawsuit Monday in federal court in Minneapolis.

According to the complaint, a licensing arm of the players union has threatened to sue Yahoo if it doesn’t pay for the information. The last of Yahoo’s licensing agreements with NFL Players Inc. expired March 1. But Yahoo claims it doesn’t need authorization, due to a court decision in April in a similar dispute between NFL Players Inc. and CBS Interactive Inc.

Fantasy sports league participants create teams comprised of real players. As the season progresses, participants’ track their players’ statistics to judge how well their team is performing. According to the judge’s decision in the CBS Interactive case, an estimated 13 million to 15 million people participate in fantasy football games that gross more than $1 billion a year.

Yahoo’s lawsuit wants the court to declare that its game does not violate any rights of publicity owned or controlled by NFL Players Inc., and that any such rights would be trumped by the First Amendment and federal copyright law anyway. It also seeks to bar NFL Players Inc. from interfering with Yahoo’s fantasy sports businesses, from threatening litigation, or making any statements that Yahoo or its customers are infringing the rights of NFL Players Inc.

Don’t get too attached to all that free, high-quality video on Hulu. It just might disappear behind a pay wall before too long.

Speaking last night at an Internet Week event sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter, Jonathan Miller, News Corp.’s newly-installed chief digital officer, said he envisions a future where at least some of the TV shows and movies on Hulu, the premium video site co-owned by News Corp. (NWS), NBC Universal and Disney (DIS), are available only to subscribers.

Miller, whose last job was running AOL (parent of Daily Finance), prefaced his remark by noting that he won’t attend his first Hulu board meeting until Monday, so the scenario he foresees is merely his own speculation. But, he continued, “in my opinion the answer could be yes. I don’t see why over time that shouldn’t happen. I don’t think it’s on the agenda for Monday [but] it seems to me that over time that could be a logical thing.”

Digg unveiled a new ad platform on Wednesday that will give companies an ad medium that looks and feels like user-submitted stories that have been promoted to Digg’s front page. Users will be able to Digg up ads they like and “bury” ones they don’t using the same voting mechanism used on regular site links.

Partners for the initial roll-out of ads include Electronic Arts and Intel, the latter of which has provided sponsorship on Digg’s labs pages as well as advertising on other parts of the site.

Two things make advertised Digg stories different than naturally submitted story links. One is the lack of an upcoming section for ads. For regular stories, the upcoming section consists of user-submitted links, which are sent to a holding pen. Users then vote them up to the front page. The other is a way for users to completely remove ads that don’t do well, which can’t be done in this case. Instead of completely removing low-ranked ads from the front page by burying them, they’re simply seen less by users.

What isn’t clear with this move is whether Digg learned its lesson from the DiggBar debacle. By changing the way users interacted with links from the site, it made a good portion of its heaviest users, along with the publishers it was linking to, quite angry. In this case, the line between advertising and user-submitted content may looks and feel a little too close for some.

Chinese authorities shut down blogs, Internet forums and social media sites such as Twitter in an apparent attempt to stem online political discussion ahead of Thursday’s 20th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on 1989’s Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests.

As in past years, dissidents were rounded up and shipped out of Beijing and foreign media reports on the protests and continuing calls for an independent investigation into the events of June 3-4, 1989, have been blocked.

However, the cut off of Internet sites marks a new chapter in the authorities’ attempts to muzzle dissent, one that testifies to the burgeoning influence of such technology among young Chinese in an authoritarian society where information is tightly controlled.

Iran’s decision to block access to Facebook - less than three weeks before nationwide elections - drew sharp criticism Sunday from a reformist opposition hoping to mobilize the youth vote and unseat President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The decision, critics said, forces Iranians to rely on state-run media and other government sources ahead of the June 12 election.

It also appeared to be a direct strike at the youth vote that could pose challenges to Ahmadinejad’s re-election bid.

More than half of Iran’s population was born after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and young voters make up a huge bloc - which helped former reformist President Mohammad Khatami to back-to-back victories in 1997 and 2001 but failed to rally strongly behind Ahmadinejad’s opponent, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, four years ago.

Young voters are now strongly courted by the main reformist candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, as the possible swing factor.

“Every single media outlet that is seen as competition for Ahmadinejad is at risk of being closed,” said Shahab Tabatabaei, a top aide for Mousavi, the leading reformist candidate. “Placing limits on the competition is the top priority of the government.”

For the past few years, Facebook has been flirting with the possibility of supporting the OpenID log-in standard, which calls itself “an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity” without actually building support for it.

Now, the massive social network–once famous for its ultra-walled-garden approach to data and user experience–announced Monday that it has become an OpenID “relying party,” which basically means that it’s started, at last, to deploy support for the standard. Facebook joined the OpenID Foundation in February, even though many considered its Facebook Connect log-in standard to be a proprietary competitor.

But, Monday’s announcement indicated, Facebook believes the two can work in tandem.

“We’ve always let our users express their real world connections,” a post on the Facebook blog read. “From the beginning, Facebook users could use their college and workplace identities to establish real world networks. Now, they can use open standards to establish their identities on Facebook.”

Most notably, you can now register for a Facebook account with your Gmail account, or can link an existing Facebook account with Gmail or other OpenID-participating services if they support automatic log-in.

I understand why celebrities - who continue to flock to Twitter as if their careers and social status depend on it - manage to attract massive amounts of users following their every 140-character move, but this is getting plain ludicrous. Meet @Sockington, a cat on Twitter that has succeeded in surpassing the 500,000 follower mark some time yesterday.

A month after the killing of a masseuse who advertised on Craigslist, the classified ad site announced plans Wednesday to eliminate its “erotic services” category and screen all submissions to a new “adult services” section before they are posted.

Law enforcement officials praised the move as a victory against online prostitution, but they acknowledged doubts about whether the changes will curb the practice.

Twitter has confirmed that someone broke into its network and gained access to 10 accounts, which appear to include Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher, according to screenshots posted on a French blog site.

“Our initial security reviews and investigations indicate that no account information was altered or removed in any way,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in a blog post Thursday afternoon.

“Personal information that may have been viewed on these 10 individual accounts includes email address, mobile phone number (if one was associated with the account), and the list of accounts blocked by that user,” the posting said. “Password information was not revealed or altered, nor were personal messages (direct messages) viewed.”

Stone did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.