Russians will be required to hand over their passport-validated phone numbers to access public wireless networks under new laws. The laws ban the use of public wireless networks, creating confusion around precisely which networks would be affected and what form of identification would need to be provided. Leonid Levin, deputy …

The Vietnamese government has introduced new restrictions on internet freedom with "Decree 72" – a new law which critics say will encourage self censorship and deter foreign investment. Brought into force lastSunday, Decree 72 limits the use of blogs and social media to “providing or exchanging personal information”, and …

ExclusiveTumblr's iOS app fails to log users in through a secure (SSL) server, it has emerged. As a result users' plaintext passwords are exposed to anyone able to sniff traffic on any Wi-Fi network an iOS user happens to use to connect to the popular cats'n'grumble free-content platform. The wide-open security howler was discovered by …

Yahoo! has "promised not to screw it up" after agreeing to acquire cat'n'porn blogging site Tumblr for about $1.1bn. The Purple Palace is sticking to a hands-off approach to try to keep its square taint off the cool vibe of GIF-heavy Tumblr and stop users abandoning it in droves. Yahoo! said the blogging site would continue …

Just two years after Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp said that advertising on sites like his made him physically sick, Karp has announced that Tumblr will start offering paid advertising. In 2010, Karp told The LA Times that the blogging site was "pretty opposed to advertising" and "it really turns our stomachs". Today at …

Bloggers whose online scrawling earns just 41 page impressions a day could be forced to apologise to those they wrong on their sites and issue corrections, under a proposed new model of media regulation for Australia. The 41 a day recommendation comes from the so called Finkelstein report, formally known as the Report of the …

OpinionNew Labour showed both its technological illiteracy and authoritarian streak by floating plans to establish an official register of journalists from which miscreants might be struck off. Shadow culture secretary Ivan Lewis suggested the idea as a sanction against rogue reporters in the wake of the ongoing News International …

Community and blogging site LiveJournal is continuing to suffer a prolonged outage. The service has been down since Monday due to unspecified data centre problems. Russian media firm SUP bought LiveJournal from original developers Six Apart back in 2007 before moving product development and design functions to Russia. …

Tumblr has become the target of a chain letter-style spam that spread rapidly over the micro-blogging service. The fake messages falsely warned that "your blog will be deleted unless you repost this" note, which claimed that Tumblr was drawing up a list of inactive profiles. Totally untrue, but over 130,000 people were taken …

Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has denounced online vandals who launched an attack against the site that hosts his blog. The denial of service assault on the LiveJournal site on Wednesday was both "outrageous and illegal" the Russian politician fumed after the assault, the BBC reports. "What has occurred should be examined …

WordPress has published a new version of its popular open-source blogging platform to address multiple security bugs. Version 3.0.2 of the software corrects a loophole that creates a means for ordinary authors to gain admin-level privileges on a site, among a slew of other bugs. The update also removes a "pingback/trackback …

China has issued an edict banning its 2.3 million military personnel from blogging or creating homepages or websites, AP reports. The new rules came into force on 15 June, as part of a People's Liberation Army Internal Affairs Regulation. Wan Long, a PLA political commissar, told Xinhua news agency: "Soldiers cannot open …

Teenagers are bored with blogging and are moving onto other public confessionals forms. In 2006 28 per cent of US teen internet users were bloggers. Now only 14 per cent blog today, with 52 per cent commenting on friends' blogs, down from 76 per cent in 2006 (source: Pew Research Center, Feb'10). Is this such a surprise? …

Cybercrime affiliates of unlicensed pharmaceutical websites have begun moving on from attacks purely designed to poison Google search engine results, and are now targetting Microsoft's web properties. Search engine poisoners are actively making use of Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces blog hosting environment, net security firm …

UpdatedThe Guardian newspaper was yesterday prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings, after legal action apparently trumped the media's right to report on the House of Commons. According to the Guardian, yesterday: "Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The …

Hackers are exploiting older installations of WordPress to distribute blog comment spam and disguise links to malware-contaminated sites. The worm-based attack targets an older version of the popular blog publishing software. Although the worm attempts to hide its tracks, coding errors mean that links on a blog wind up getting …

The Koobface worm, which previously infected users of Facebook and MySpace, is spreading among users of micro-blogging website Twitter. The scale of the attack is unclear but serious enough for Twitter to issue a warning on Friday morning, via the service's status page. Koobface-related activity has been detected on Twitter …

A group of wealthy Californian bloggers are taking a holiday in the UK this month - and the taxpayer will help foot the bill. Calling themselves The Traveling Geeks, the bloggers will spend a week here meeting other bloggers. In addition to corporate sponsorship, they're getting a helping hand from NESTA, the lottery-funded …