Internet providers

In what could be the final deathblow to dial-up connections, the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday will outline to Congress how it will spend $7.2 billion in stimulus funds to provide high-speed broadband Internet access to millions of Americans.

Cisco Systems Inc. doesn't want Wall Street to interpret its forecast for its first quarterly revenue growth in a year as evidence that the U.S. and other economies are roaring back.

A slow improvement in orders is under way but the pace is still slow and the recovery is fragile, executives from the world's No. 1 maker of computer-networking equipment told analysts Wednesday.

People who repeatedly download copyrighted films and music could have their Internet connection cut off under proposed laws to tackle illegal file-sharing unveiled by the British government on Tuesday.

The proposal to ban repeat offenders from the Internet, which drew criticism from both civil rights groups and Internet service providers, toughens up the measures being considered in Britain to crack down on online piracy.

Treasury Minister Stephen Timms said that previous plans, which would only have restricted users' broadband speed, did not go far enough.

The U.S. government has dropped -- for now -- a plan to classify the use of "proxy" servers as evidence of sophistication in committing a crime.

Proxy servers are computers that disguise the source of Internet traffic. They are commonly used for legitimate purposes, like evading Internet censors and working from home. But they can also be used to hide from law enforcement.

A whistle-blower organization claims a secret list of Web sites that Australian authorities are proposing to ban includes such innocuous destinations as a dentist's office.

Australia's government denied that the list -- published by renegade Web site Wikileaks.org -- was the same as a blacklist run by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, or ACMA. However, a manager at the dentist's office said the ACMA had confirmed her site's inclusion on the ban list.

Bangladesh blocked access to the video-sharing site YouTube after it hosted a recording of a tense meeting between the prime minister and army officials following a bloody mutiny by border guards, officials said Monday.

The insurrection last month claimed more than 70 lives, shook the two-month-old government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and raised tensions with the powerful military, which opposed her handling of the incident.

The British government outlined plans Thursday to bring broadband to every home in Britain by 2012, and proposed new ways to support the music industry and other media businesses by cracking down on online piracy.

Stephen Carter, the communications minister, is eager for the media, telecommunications and technology sectors to pick up part of the slack as other important parts of the British economy, including financial services, go into reverse. By 2012, the government said in a report, 20 percent of all commerce in Britain will occur online.

EMC on Monday announced its first cloud-infrastructure offering. Dubbed EMC Atmos, the offering is a multi-petabyte information-management solution that aims to help customers automatically manage and optimize the distribution of rich, unstructured information across global, cloud-storage environments.

You've been browsing the Internet lately for information about carbon emissions to help your daughter with her climate change project at school.

You've also done a little shopping in advance of the holidays, buying that more-than-you-really-wanted-to-pay-for digital camera for your spouse.

Now, instead of that usual Staples banner ad on the online site of your local newspaper, you are getting ads about hybrid cars and high-definition TVs.

In the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, a new breed of hackers is conducting digital espionage.

They are among a growing number of investigators monitoring how traffic is routed through various countries, where Web sites are blocked and why it's happening. Now they are turning their scrutiny to a new weapon of warfare: cyber attacks.

Tracking wars isn't what many of the researchers set out to do. Many began intending to help people in countries that censor online content. But as the Internet has evolved, so has their mission.