Today SamKnows is kicking off a weekly round-up of all the tech and Internet news stories that didn’t warrant their own post but we just can’t let slip under the radar. This week’s mainly about Craigslist and Google, both of which have been racking up more than their fair share of headlines.

Most of us are used to living in three dimensions – or four, if we have the time – but researchers in Australia have created what they’re calling a “five-dimensional” storage medium. Their new optical technology could produce discs the same size as DVDs but hold three hundred times as much data.

Spotify’s announced plans for streaming over mobile phone networks, social networking integration and finally reach out to our friends across the pond. The Swedish music service, which currently has over a million UK users, is seen in some quarters as the music industry’s potential saviour.

Wolfram Alpha has been heralded as the next Google by technology writers and bloggers around the world. It’s due to launch later today – but what’s all the fuss about?

With a concerted push from Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, the net piracy bill has found its way onto the French statute books. After the lower house voted on Tuesday night, the Senate passed the Creation and Internet bill by 189 votes to 14. The three strikes law is known as the Hadopi law — the name [...]

The best known classified ads website in the United States is closing down its “erotic services” section following pressure from state authorities after a woman who advertised on the site was murdered. Craigslist will replace it with an “adult services” section – and manually check every ad posted within it.

Virgin Media are proposing to marginally increase the coverage of their cable broadband network and to increase daily traffic allowances.

The world’s most popular BitTorrent site is blocking off content that infringes copyright ahead of its forthcoming court appearance. MiniNova, which reached the “eight billion downloads” milestone last month, is testing a third party filtering system that stops users getting their hands on hit TV shows and films.

AOL is relaunching its home page as the only place where UK surfers can check their mail and log on to multiple social networks automatically from one location.
Curiously, the new homepage is not yet available to all visitors, despite today’s announcement. It is instead being rolled out so that within a couple of weeks all [...]

Eight bodies representing the creative industries are calling for persistent copyright law offenders to be disconnected by their ISPs. John Woodward, head of the UK Film Council, said illegal file-sharing was hurting film-making and risking jobs. The coalition says more than 50% of net traffic in the UK is illegal content.

It may sound like something out of Matt Groening brain-child Futurama but open source video client Miro’s come up with what could be a unique idea: letting you adopt a line of code. For four American dollars a month – that’s around £2.70 at today’s exchange rate – you’ll get to experience something like adopting [...]

Paul Brown, Managing Director of the UK arm of Spotify, has given an interview to Media Guardian. As well as claiming that “a decent proportion” of subscribers have plumped for paying for their music streams, the company is looking at both mobile apps and rare content to boost their revenue. However, he remained coy when [...]

ISPs have reacted with guarded optimism to Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, pulling back on controversial plans to store all details of a subscriber’s web and email traffic on a single, unified database.
The ISPs are still legally obliged to record details of a person’s web viewing habits – including what IPTV they have consumed, which sites [...]

Project Canvas – the on-demand broadband TV collaboration between the BBC, BT and ITV – could run into exactly the same problems that saw Project Kangaroo mothballed, according to the UK’s communications regulator. In a letter to the BBC Trust, Ofcom have warned the project could be subject to an Office of Fair Trading (OFT) [...]

For US President Obama, cybersecurity is a national-security issue – up there with the threat of nuclear and biological weapons. After he made getting a grip on American net security one of his campaign pledges, now we’re starting to see how his administration intends to turn the United States into a cyber-superpower.
First off – according [...]

Cyber criminals have taken over almost two million PCs in a worldwide botnet  – the name for a network of remotely controlled computers – including machines owned by the UK and US governments. The hackers, who’ve been traced back to the Ukraine, have been selling control of machines for between $50 and $100 in a Russian online [...]

No sooner have the Pirate Bay bad boys been found guilty of breaking copyright law than a report comes out claiming that eyepatch-wearing internet bandits may not be the freeloading bastards that some people claim they are. After studying the habits of 1,900 internet users, a Norwegian business school claims that 15- to 20-year-olds au [...]

Four men representing The Pirate Bay have been sent to jail for a year and handed a bill for £2.4 million in damages after losing what could be a landmark piracy case. Peter Sunde, Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Carl Lundstrom have all been found guilty of accessory and conspiracy to break copyright law [...]

BitTorrent users are being invited to a street party in the middle of Moscow this evening in support of The Pirate Bay – with the backing of the Russian government. One of the file-sharing website’s founders says he’s confident they’ll still have reason to celebrate after the Swedish court announce their verdict on Friday.
Peter Sunde [...]

After Microsoft reported last week that fear of viruses is scaring casual Internet users into downloading fake security software, a new twist’s emerged. Now the best known, Conflicker, is downloading fake anti-virus programmes onto computers it has infected.
Conflicker spreads through a hole in Windows-based operating systems, which Microsoft patched back in October. (Of the machines scanned [...]