A New Zealand judge has taken a step to ban all websites to name two men that have been charged with murder; but giving newspapers, radio stations and television networks the right to reveal those who are charged.

The judge, Judge David Harvey, has said that the online media could not use the names, or even published a photo of the accused, because he is trying to prevent the public ’searching’ for the information of his case when it gets trial - saying that he was "concerned about someone Googling someone’s name and being able to access it later".

The men, since we don’t know who their names are, are aged 21 and 23 and are facing charges of murdering a 14-year-old child, assault with intent to rob, and possessing a pistol for the commission of a crime. Another 15-year-old boy was also charged, but being a party to assault with intent to rob.

This, however, is seen as a rare move by the judge - as no one has even heard of this type of suppression, suppressing only those details on the internet and not in newspapers, television and radio - and it is clearly censorship, just packaged in different words. It’s just another dumb idea by the Kiwis.

In another move to make up for the problems that MobileMe has been plagued with since its launch in July, Apple has made another extension to many users, giving another 60 days for free - on top of the 30 days free extension it gave users in July.

In an e-mail to subscribers, Apple has said that the suite of services needs more work. The service was to be an extension of the .Mac service, and is a “cloud” storage solution that syncs e-mails, calendars, contacts, photos, Safari bookmarks, Dashboard widgets, etc. to Macs, iPhones and the iPod Touch.

Users are given 20GB of storage within Apple’s servers and has an application to cooperates with Outlooks on Windows computers. The full letter is below.

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A pastor in central Queensland has bought two internet domain names which bear the name of Queensland’s Premier Anna Bligh.

Pastor David Ally, from the Mountain of the Lord Christian Church in Mount Morgan, bought the domain names of annabligh.org and annabligh.net in September of 2007, when Bligh took over the role from Peter Beattie. This now allows him to create websites and email addresses using the domain name.

His reasoning - they were available. Telling AAP, he said that, "I actually could not believe that these domains were not taken last year, so I bought them simply because they had not been taken."

Queenslanders are facing an election next year, and Alley has not decided if he will be using them during the campaign. The domain annabligh.com has already been bought - by the Queensland Government, and has not used it.

If you are like me - an addict of social networking sites - then this site is a must-look.

Ping.FM will allow you to post the same message on your friends over at Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, MySpace, and many other services. While it does not say anything to cure that crippling addiction to social networking - well for me at least - it is a very good Web 2.0 service.

You might want to read the review, because at the end of the review, we will give you the invite code to sign up and start using this excellent service.

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ConnectU founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have placed sixth in the Men’s Rowing (Without Coxswain). This also means that their Olympic dreams are finished, as they don’t take any medals home. To get this far; both had to make through two rounds of heats, a semifinal and today’s final.

The eventual winners were Drew Ginn and Duncan Free; from the Australian team (GO AUSTRALIA!!!). Canada came second, thanks to David Calder and Scott Frandsen; and New Zealand finished with bronze, thanks to Nathan Twaddle and George Bridgewater.

The Aussies posted a 6:37.44, while the ConnectU twins finished the round with a 7:05.58. Germany placed fourth and South Africa placed fifth.

The ConnectU founders had just recently settled a lawsuit against Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, accusing him of stealing their plan and code for the site while the three were students at Harvard and Zuckerberg was hired as a programmer.

Australia, as of 10:30PM on the 16/08/08, is placed fourth with 7 gold, 8 silver and 10 bronze - just beating Japan (who is fifth) in the tally. China is ranked first with 27 gold, US is second with 16 gold and Germany is placed fourth with 8 gold.

Twitter users in Europe and Australia will no longer receive text message updates on their mobile phones on their service, in a move to keep the telecom bills down. This action is temporary, but it is unknown when will it be back.

However, users can use the UK number (+44 762 480 1423) to send updates to the site, but won’t give any updates to users. Twitter has also recommended the use of Twitter mobile or any third-party client like TwitterBerry, Twitterrific, TwitterMail or Cellity.

The company’s US, Canada and India’s numbers are not affected by the move as they have find a "sustainable" agreements. As well, Australian users are not happy with the move.

"It was bad enough to be forced to use the UK number. Now, it appears that Australian twitter users are completely invisible," one of the comments posted on the blog post.

Co-founder Biz Stone has written at a blog post that they are still negotiating with operators in Australia - as well in Asia and China.

Having settling its own beef with the ACCC over breaching the Trade Practices Act, Telstra has now leveled similar accusations at rival Australian auction site OZtion - claiming that statements promoting its "free to list" offering don’t clearly explain the additional costs to its customers.

It has set a deadline of 5pm on Wednesday 20 August (Next Wednesday) to stop OZtion to cease making the statements and insert a prominent disclaimer that there are costs associated with the site if there is a item sold.

However, OZtion will take no notice of the letter, with the managing director Phil Druce saying that the accusations are "baseless."

The ACCC complaint against Telstra was when its classified business, Trading Post, posted ads that were misleading and deceptive on Google’s AdSense - claiming that they were local car retailers.

Is now Telstra being the watchdog so it could claim a larger market share?

The Pirate Bay has been censored in Italy after a decree from one of its deputy public prosecutors; meaning that its IP address and domain name are inaccessible by all the ISPs in Italy. However, The Pirate Bay has already announced several countermeasures.

An insider at an Italian ISP told TorrentFreak that all large-access ISPs have complied with the request to block access to the site; and it is not the only torrent site facing government scrutiny. Just two weeks ago, another torrent site (and the largest Italian torrent site) was shut down - and by the same person who blocked The Pirate Bay - with the IFPI assisting in the case.

Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunder has said that they have implemented countermeasures to make sure Italians can access the site - including changing IP addresses and added labaia.org to redirect traffic to the Pirate Bay. labaia.org also means "the bay" in Italian.

TechCrunch is reporting that the Digg-like site, Propeller, is holding a severe round of layoffs to reduce its workforce to its former size after relaunching the site a couple of weeks ago.

Most of the cuts, apparently, consists of its Scouts and Anchors - paid employees who monitor the site to pick the best stories and also ensure that the content is up to standards and is not, well, spam. The cuts also allow the management team to keep their current pay level.

Propeller, which used to be Netscape.com before returning to a branded site that is similar to AOL.com, was supposed to be a "Digg killer" in June 2006, and that never happened. It finally moved to Propeller.com in September of last year.

An International Herald Tribune article has said that before Facebook sued German social networking site, which actually looks like Facebook, StudiVZ; it actually tried to buy them.

According to Silicon Alley Insider, StudiVZ has 10 times more traffic than Facebook has in Germany, so it would make sense they would buy it - maybe to avoid a costly legal proceeding. Just one problem - the owners wanted €85 million for it, or $134 million - the same amount that it had paid for StudiVZ.

While Facebook has not confirmed it, an employee for the company (who is not named) has confirmed that the two companies were in talks for the company.

A former executive is saying as well that it was an attempt to encourage Holtzbrinck, the current owners, to sell StudiVZ to Facebook.