Whether or not easing away from supporting ACTA will prove a populist smokescreen remains to be seen, but burying bad news is not so easy when the entirety of the web is angry and has its eyes wide open.

Still, web users across America prefer Google - as its market share rose slightly across the country to 66.2 percent over January. Microsoft's alternative managed a 0.1 point gain to reach 15.2 percent of the market, reports the Dow Jones.

Yahoo was the third most popular search service in the USA, but it dropped 0.4 percent to 14.1 percent overall.

In terms of numbers, that means Americans searched 11.79 billion times on Google in January alone. Microsoft hit 2.71 billion while Yahoo's share was 2.51 billion.

Incredibly, three percent of the USA's web prefers to use Ask.com. AOL made no change, at 1.6 percent of all searches for the month. 

If you’re expecting to watch some prime IT rib strutting their stuff on the catwalk, think again. Microsoft has decided to latch on to the trendy New York Fashion Week to milk it for its visibility and name, while showcasing what’s nice and shiny in the world of mobile computing.

In fact, you’ll find it hard to figure out why Microsoft even put up such news on their website until you hit the last images of the gallery, where you’ll find a series of nice looking mice that almost do without introduction.

Under no circumstance should you expect to see under-dressed swizzle-stick-thin models carrying around the latest shiny gadgetry.

We’ve seen blatant attempts at crashing someone else’s party just to get some attention - AMD at IDF comes to mind - but Microsoft has enough dosh to throw around to start its own IT Fashion Week. Of course, leeching the existing one might be more cost-effective.

Microsoft says: “If you’re into technology and fashion, you’ll want to see what we’re talking about”. Indeed.

It seems that while they think that the rest of the world should not have access to whatever they like online, it is OK for them.

According to Reuters, three politicians from a morally conservative party, including a women's affairs minister, have resigned after being caught watching pornography on a mobile phone during a session of state parliament.

Karnataka state minister for cooperation, Laxman Savadi, even shared a porn clip with colleague C.C. Patil, the minister for women and child development, while sitting in the state assembly.

The state minister for ports, science and technology, Krishna Palemar, who owned the phone with the porn clip also quit.

Patil requested the speaker of the house to conduct an inquiry and they will come out with a "clean chit". We admit that we had to read his quote twice before we twigged he was not saying something rude.

The three said they did not want to cause any embarrassment for their party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules the state and is in opposition at a national level.

It appears a bit late for that. It seems that by looking at porn they angered the right-wing Hindu groups and by calling for it to be banned they have miffed rights activists.

Renuka Chowdhary, a former federal minister for women's development and a member of the Congress Party, said that India is seen as a country where there already is a social mindset that women are disposable commodities and transferable properties.

People in positions of power have the responsibility to change things clearly have the same mindset and are busy watching porn, she said.

Cary Sherman wrote in the New York Times that the campaign that was waged against the SOPA and PIPA bills was "unfair".

He claimed that Wikipedia and and others had fed people with misinformation about what the two laws meant. It was being claimed that the two laws amounted to internet censorship which would put the US on a par with China.

Sherman said that was not the case. We guess he means that censorship in China was carried out by the State, were in the case of this law it would be enforced by Big Content. He pointed out that there was no difference between what was being touted in SOPA and what happens when an American court, upon a thorough review of evidence, has determined something to be illegal and when police close down a store fencing stolen goods.

However, he seemed to miss the fact that the laws did not involve any evidence or courts at all. A person could lose their internet connections simply on the say so of Big Content.

Sherman said that no doubt some of the opponents of SOPA and PIPA were worried about the way the law would be interpreted, but the vast majority of them were those who thought that content should be free.

"How many of those e-mails were from the same people who attacked the Web sites of the Department of Justice, the Motion Picture Association of America, my organization and others as retribution for the seizure of Megaupload, an international digital piracy operation?" he said.

He said that it was hackers like the group Anonymous that engage in real censorship when they stifle the speech of those with whom they disagree. 

Michael Doyle claims that it was actually he and two co-inventors who invented, and patented, the "interactive web" before anyone else, while they were employed by the University of California in 1993.

He claims that the program he created at the UC's San Francisco campus, which allowed doctors to view embryos over the nascent World Wide Web, was the first program that allowed users to interact with images inside of a web browser window.

According to Wired which is following the case, Doyle is fighting in East Texas which has a history of giving over to patent trolls, usually because their side of the argument is the easiest for juries to understand.

He is now suing almost everyone you can think of claiming he is owed trillions for royalty payments for practically all modern web technologies.

Doyle has a history of winning patent cases. His outfit Eolas Technologies has already brought Microsoft to its knees, probably winning more than $100 million from the Vole.

But this case pits him against the finest legal minds in the world from Yahoo, Google, Amazon and YouTube. It also has shoved him against the web's father. Sir Tim Berners-Lee himself (pictured) has flown in for the case because if Doyle wins it will be the end of the web. Everyone would have to pay something to some patent troll in the US.

The W3C, the global web standards group, contacted the patent office directly, sending a letter signed by Sir Tim warning that unless the Eolas patent was invalidated it would cause the "disruption of global web standards" and cause "substantial economic and technical damage to the operation of the World Wide Web."

The PTO initially rejected the Eolas patent claims in re-examinations, but Doyle and his lawyers insisted they had the right to some kind of patent claim and the PTO changed its mind. This change of heart is being used by Doyle's lawyers as proof that other people agree he invented the internet.

The tech companies in the case asked to transfer the case to California, where it is more likely to have been laughed out of court, but Judge Leonard Davis, who is overseeing the case, refused. This was because Doyle sued six Texas companies to make sure that the case was heard in that state.

Earlier this week, Sir Tim repeated his argument he made in Scientific American in 2010 that patents could kill the web and that this case is a nightmare that may be about to come true.

The situation is also embarrassing for the University of California which could make lots of money if Doyle wins. However, it is also about to become a leper in the technology industry, and could even end up with its students being blacklisted by IT. 

The ad was meant to be funny, but it appears to have backfired, judging from the reactions by Westerners in North America and Europe.

"Steve Jobs' ad blasted as disrespectful," was the headline of a news story in Taiwan after the controversy erupted on blogs and YouTube channels.

The ad "has been broadly criticized in Taiwan as disrespectful," wrote the Central News Agency in Taipei. noting: 'The commercial has attracted worldwide media attention - Reuters news agency, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, Fortune magazine and other media have reported on the 20-second TV commercial, with most of them quoting critics who described it as tasteless and shameless."

The responses were particularly vehement in the United States where it was well known Steve Jobs accused Google of stealing Apple's technology to create the Android OS, the CNA reporter added.

Jobs branded the technology as "grand theft Android" and promised to spend all his company's money to wreck Google. He vowed a "thermonuclear war," saying that he would not accept any compensation because all he wanted was the company's ruin.

"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong," Jobs said, as was revealed in his biography.

Some overseas netizens have lambasted Taiwanese as a whole and have called for a boycott of Action Electronics, a major daily Mandarin-language newspaper, the United Daily News, reported in a front page banner story on Sunday.

Taiwanese media critic Wu Juo-chuan termed the ad a "shallow creation that hurts." Wu said he believed that the commercial was a natural product of Taiwan society, which is obsessed with entertainment and low-class jokes.

"In such an atmosphere, the basic values of our traditional culture - empathy and respect - have been overwhelmed," Wu said.

In a blog post on Jan. 30, Wu said the commercial was made without the consent of Jobs' bereaved family and showed no empathy for them.

Wu said that from his experience in the advertising industry, he knows that the commercial has hurt the feelings of the Jobs family, and Action Electronics could be sued for infringing on the personal image rights of a famous figure.

Niu Tse-hsun, an associate professor of advertisement at Chinese Culture University in Taipei, said the electronics firm may think it is a creative approach to use a Jobs portrayal in its product promotion campaign.

However, Niu said, he would not recommend using the image of a deceased person since this could be seen as inconsiderate and cold-hearted.

Nonetheless, by making Jobs appear as a lovely angel, Action Electronics has not slandered the late electronics guru, Niu said.

Amid the fracas, some netizens in Taiwan said they saw nothing wrong with the ad. "Is Steve Jobs a god who cannot be portrayed in an ad?" one person wrote. "Many of our ads feature portrayals of Dr. Sun Yat-sen (founding father of Taiwan) and Meng Jiang Nyu (a woman in an ancient Chinese legend whose tears of mourning for her enslaved husband's death led to the collapse of a section of the Great Wall of China)."

The netizens berated Wu as taking the "high moral ground" to find fault with the ad.

In response, Wu said "respecting others is a basic moral ethic -- not that high a standard."

Meanwhile, Ah-Ken's agent said the ABT entertainer never meant to show any disrespect for Steve Jobs when he decided to take the job.

"We were just doing what our client asked us to do," said the agent, adding that Ah-Ken never thought of it as making fun of Jobs.

Sun Yi-min, an executive at Action Electronics, told the United Daily News that the ad was aimed simply at promoting the company's latest product and not at disrespecting anyone.

Despite that, now there are murmurs that Action Electronics has pulled the advert. TechEye will have its eyes glued to the TV to confirm.

A snap on the Google Earth map showed the Atlantic seafloor as having a gridlike pattern that some vigilant users suspected were sunken streets from Atlantis.

Google insisted it was just a data artifact from the sonar method that oceanographers use to map the seafloor.

This week, Google updated the software with new seafloor data from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).  Needless to day the grid pattern vanished and Atlantis was no longer there.

Now, you could say that the lizards don't want humans to find the lost city and Google is just obeying orders, but David Sandwell, a Scripps geophysicist, who is not a lizard, told MSN that the original version of Google Ocean was a newly developed prototype which had high resolution but also contained thousands of errors.

It took UCSD undergraduate students the past three years identifying and correcting the blunders, Sandwell said.

The British site's closure comes three weeks after police managed to lock up the founder of Megaupload and shut the site down.

The site has been running since 2005 but it has now reached the end of the line.

"We've been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it's time to move on... it's been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!" it said.

The site has provided a search engine for Bit Torrent files and was one of the top five torrent sites with "dozens of millions of users a month."

According to TorrentFreak, an unidentified founder of BTJunkie said BTJunkie's decision to close down stemmed partly from recent legal actions against Megaupload and The Pirate Bay.

BTjunkie was never targeted directly by copyright holders, but there were fears that it might be next on the RIAA and MPAA's shopping list. The site was reported to the US Trade Representative (USTR) November last year which is a sign Big Content was leaning on various governments to shut the site down.

Both the RIAA and MPAA listed the torrent index as a 'rogue' site that facilitated mass copyright infringement. Then again, the MPAA thinks that Google is the same thing. 

Dubbed "Volunia", the search engine allows users to look at bits of particular websites to find the subject of interest more quickly. It also allows you to chat with registered users who might be looking at the same web pages.

Massimo Marchiori is from the University of Padua. Padua is a city which is a bit like Venice, only there is no water in the streets, which is why its gondoliers have sprained wrists.

Marchiori came up with the algorithm for the internet page ranking service "HyperSearch" in the 1990s and used to teach at MIT.  Marchiori is a bit of a hero in Italy because he came home from the US where he was earning a bomb and now gets paid rubbish Italian wages of just 2,000 euros a month. Still, the food is much better.

He told the Italian press that the functions available on Volunia would soon become normal on all the major search engines including Google and Yahoo.

Volunia, which has a US copyright, was only launched to selected users on Monday and will be rolled out more widely and in 12 languages including Arabic, English, Japanese and Russian over the coming days.

It will be funded by selling advertising space.