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Several Radio Free Europe websites were under a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in the past week. The attacks started on 26 April 2008, the 22nd anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, primary targeted at the Belarus Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) service which was offering live coverage of a rally of protest organized in Minsk against the plight of uncompensated victims and a government decision to build a new nuclear plant.

Martins Zvaners, RFE spokesman, thinks that was the largest attack ever experienced by RFE. At its peak, the DDoS attack was sending more than 50000 requests to the RFE sites, flooding its servers' capacity and throwing them

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The Russian prosecutor's office wants to extend the anti-extremism laws to the Internet, proposing an amendment to the rules that presently govern printed media on the basis of which newspapers considered by the court to have published extremist material can be shut down.

In terms of the new proposal, which began circulating in the State Duma's Security Committee on 10 April 2008, any kind of material considered extremist or website deemed to have hosted extremist material should be blocked by ISPs. If found guilty of repeatedly hosting extremist materials, the website will be shut down. A list of extremist Internet-based materials and sites must be regularly made available and the ISPs will be bound to

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A French Parliamentary report suggests a change in the law (LCEN) that implements the European Directive on e-commerce in order to make clearer the distinction between editing and hosting activities in the new applications related to Web 2.0.

The report of the Deputy Jean Dionis du Séjour on the application of the LCEN was updated on 16 April 2008, after the first version was submitted to the Parliament on 23 January. The update concerns some of the latest court decisions in France that established the responsibility of some websites for others' RSS feeds or for user-generated content. The report specifies that the law has created a hosting status that is different from that of an

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On 14 April 2008, Fontanka.ru online newspaper reported that Rossvyazokhrankultura, the Russian Mass Media, Communications and Cultural Protection Service, intends to ask for the mandatory registration of all WiFi devices, including personal home networks, notebook computers, mobile telephones and PDAs.

Vladimir Karpov, the deputy director of the agency's communications monitoring division, told the newspaper that wireless Internet users will have to register any electronics using WiFi technology. The registration could take as long as ten days for standard devices like PDAs and laptops and the noncompliance may bring forth the confiscation of the respective equipment. Users wanting to operate a wireless access point or a

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The European Ministers of Justice and Internal Affairs have agreed to make publishing bomb-making instructions on the Internet a crime. The French authorities are discussing making the publication on the Internet of any alleged pro-anorexia information a crime.

Justice and interior ministers from the EU member states backed a proposal from Commissioner Frattini to harmonise the normative acts that will make the "public provocation to commit a terrorist offence, recruitment, and training for terrorism" a crime. According to the statements of the EU officials publishing these acts on the Internet completed the European legislation in this domain. They described the Internet as "a virtual

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The 9th meeting of the Council of Europe (CoE) group of specialists on Human Rights in the Information Society (MC-S-IS) was held in Strasbourg from 31 March to 2 April 2008. At the same time, on 1-2 April, another division of the CoE was holding in a building across the street its 2008 Octopus conference on cooperation against cybercrime. This schedule overlapping is not the only sign that CoE's left hand seems to ignore what its right hand is doing: different divisions are also addressing same issues, though from different points of view and with different results.

It happened this time with the guidelines for Internet Service Providers (ISPs). While the Octopus conference was discussing and then adopting its

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A recent decision by the Paris Tribunal has condemned 3 different French websites for linking to another website containing gossip information on the French actor Olivier Martinez.

The actor has decided to sue 3 websites (Fuzz.fr, Vivre-en-normandie.com and CroixRousse.net) for linking to external websites that presented the respective information.

Fuzz.fr is a Digg-like website, where the website users can vote which news comes on first. However, the court decided that the owner of the website has an editorial responsibility, even if it's a digg-like service, and forced him to pay 1000 euros as damages for infringing the actor's privacy and 1500 euros as legal fees.

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EMI, Sony, Warner and Universal have sued Ireland's largest ISP, Eircom, demanding that it install filters to prevent users from illegally sharing or downloading music. The action was admitted by Mr. Justice Peter Kelly to the Commercial Court, meaning that it will be heard on an expedited basis.

Eircom has said that it is not on notice of specific illegal activity that infringed the rights of the companies and has no legal obligation to monitor traffic on its network. Previously the music companies had sought to have Eircom voluntarily install software such as that produced by Audible Magic, which will "fingerprint" music files, but Eircom refused indicating that it could not run that software on its servers.

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As of 1 January 2007 a law took effect in Finland allowing the Police to maintain a secret blacklist of child porn sites and distribute it to ISPs so that these may block access to those sites. Use of the lists is ostensibly voluntary to ISPs, but there have been rather strong hints of making it mandatory if not adopted otherwise. After a slow start, Police actually started distributing the list late last year and several ISPs have began using them.

In February 2008, the police added the site lapsiporno.info to the blacklist. Despite the name (Lapsiporno means "child porn" in Finnish), the website contains no child or any other kind of porn, but criticism of censorship and a partial collection of addresses from the officially secret

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French Internal Affairs Minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, announced on 14 February 2008 new measures to fight against cybercrime, including extending the websites blacklist and pushing for computer online investigations, without the permission of the country of the hosting company.

The Minister visited the Cybercrime Brigade that is located in Nanntere and announced a new "best practices chart" with the operators in order to block websites. According to the statements, the Norwegian model was taken into consideration, meaning the creation of a list with websites not only with child pornography information, but also the ones with information on making explosives or chemical weapons, terrorist propaganda and racial hate speech.