The American Insurance Group is currently in the middle of what has been called a growing political firestorm, after allowing payouts of $165 million from government aid in bonuses to their executives. “People are right to be angry. I’m angry,” said president Obama this Wednesday. AIG, which has received a whopping $180 billion in a tax payer funded bailout the last six months, is now asking the people who received more than $100,000 to return half.

Oh noes, news industry. Ad revenues are plummeting, your journalists are disappearing, local television stations have insufficient resources to cover their communities, blogs are stealing your audience, nobody is paying for your content, and the Internet seems like the bully who shoved you off the top of the hill.

In 1998, Google’s search engine—then still in beta—answered 10,000 queries daily. Today, less than ten years later, that is their number of employees. Google’s services, which include the worlds biggest search engine, a blog platform, an RSS feed reader, an e-mail service, an entire web-based office suite and numerous other applications, are being used by millions every day. “The innocuous and ubiquitous web search box presents a significant and increasing risk to individuals and organizations” (2, p. 1), and every time these services are used, more information is gathered, organised and stored. We provide Google with a “progressively clearer picture of our personal and professional lives, the lives of our associates and the health, stratagems and structure of our private and public organizations” (2, p.1). The costs of high capacity storage has decreased drastically, which makes it possible for service providers such as Google to store huge amounts of data for a long period of time. Does Google represent a very real privacy threat?

Iranian media reported Sunday that a new air-to-ground missile has been tested. The missile, which has been under development for a long time, had a range of 110 km, and was designed to target ships. Defence analysts are theorising that “the missile test was a signal by Iran that ‘we can severely disrupt traffic’ in the Gulf if attacked.”

In January last year, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) announced the test release of one of their most popular shows through BitTorrent. The show was made available in high quality (MPEG4, 1024×576, 25fps, no DRM) through the Amazon S3 tracker. The release was an experiment, but with roughly 8000 downloads the first day (Norway has a population of 4.6 million), it was considered a success. This week, NRK announced that they are setting up their own BitTorrent tracker, based on the same software the the Pirate Bay uses.