FBI Director Robert Mueller on Tuesday called on Internet service providers to record their customers’ online activities, a move that anticipates a fierce debate over privacy and law enforcement in Washington next year.

“Terrorists coordinate their plans cloaked in the anonymity of the Internet, as do violent sexual predators prowling chat rooms,” Mueller said in a speech at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Boston.

“All too often, we find that before we can catch these offenders, Internet service providers have unwittingly deleted the very records that would help us identify these offenders and protect future victims,” Mueller said. “We must find a balance between the legitimate need for privacy and law enforcement’s clear need for access.”

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News source: News.com

The United States could be rife with Internet addicts as clinically ill as alcoholics, a study suggested.

Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California, said their telephone survey indicated more than one in eight US residents showed at least one sign of “problematic Internet use.”

The findings backed those of previous, less rigorous studies, according to the Stanford researchers.

Most disturbing was the discovery that some people hid their Internet surfing, or went online to cure foul moods in ways that mirrored the way alcoholics use booze, according to the study’s lead author, Elias Aboujaoude.

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News source: Yahoo! News

Microsoft plans to launch its Internet Explorer 7 browser “within the next two weeks”, the company said at the Digital Life conference in New York.

The software developer previously had said that the application would be available some time in the second half of 2006.

Internet Explorer 7 will be bundled with the forthcoming Windows Vista operating systems and will be made available as a free download to Windows XP users.

The new browser promises an increased level of security by running in a protected mode that limits the software’s access to other data stored on the system. The application also comes with a built in phishing filter that prevents users from accessing known phishing websites.

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The company on Thursday launched a Web site, Google Code Search, which the company says will let programmers search billions of lines of code for tips on how to write their own software.

The service, conceived by the Google Labs early technology group, will crawl publicly available code, most of which is made available through open-source projects. The search and indexing covers code on Web pages and code that resides in compressed files, said Tom Stocky, a product manager at Google.

Google expects that the search engine will be used primarily as a learning tool to help students and serious programmers, rather than a way to find and copy another person’s code.

“Most of the code is open source so you can reuse it. But I don’t think that’s the primary use–it’s more about how to learn about things and, when you’re building open-source packages, to make sure you doing it the right way,” Stocky said.

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News source: News.com