While Google's principles may have slid sideways in recent years (their selling out on net neutrality being exhibit A) the company does appear to be putting up a good fight against the government's use of national security letters (NSLs). We've covered for several years the growing use (or in a significant number of proven cases, the abuse) of NSLs, which allow the government to obtain personal user records from ISPs (or banks and other companies), then involve a gag order against the company preventing them from ever mention it -- all with no judicial review.

That process is incredibly open to abuse, given the FBI could obtain any records they want, nobody could talk about it, and nobody could review it. Fortunately for users and companies, a California Judge recently ruled the use of such letters Unconstitutional. Now according to court filings (which appear to have accidentally been made public), the recent ruling has spurred Google to begin waging war against NSLs:It's great to see Google involved here, since this so far has been an under-the-radar battle. The field general in the fight against NSLs has been Nicholas Merrill of Calyx Internet Access, who was sued by the DOJ for questioning the practice's legitimacy after he and his ISP were "gagged" by the government for years.

A Berkeley city councilman has proposed a tax on e-mail and each bit as a possible way to help shore up the United States Postal Service's dwindling funds. "There should be something like a bit tax," insisted District 8 Berkeley Supervisor Gordon Wozniak this week. "I mean a bit tax could be a cent per-gigabit and they would still make, probably, billions of dollars a year. And there should be, also, a very tiny tax on email,” he said.

CBS's existing legal efforts to scuttle Dish's Hopper ad-skipping DVR just got slightly more ridiculous. Back in January CBS shot itself in the public relations foot by injecting itself into CNET's editorial standards, demanding the news outlet pull a CES award for the device -- and avoid reviewing it -- ever.

A small bug in a line of Facebook code temporarily rendered a huge swath of websites, including CNN, Gawker, The Washington Post, and The Huffington Post -- inaccessible. Users trying to access those sites were redirected to a borked Facebook page instead of the requested content. In typical spokesperson fashion, a statement issued to the press by Facebook significantly underplayed the scope of a problem. "For a short period of time, there was a bug that redirected people logging in with Facebook from third-party sites to Facebook.com. The issue was quickly resolved, and Login with Facebook is now working as usual."

You'll recall that executives at CBS recently shot themselves in their very expensive loafers when they decided to prevent CBS-owned CNET from giving a CES best-of-show award to Dish's ad-skipping Hopper DVR. Not only did CBS ban CNET from giving the CES award, CBS decided to ban CNET from reviewing any Dish products -- ever.

A Sprint network glitch is incorrectly directing users to the home of Wayne Dobson in North Las Vegas. According to the Las Vegas Review Journal, an unexplained location and GPS data glitch is sending victims of cellphone and tablet theft -- and the police looking for them -- to this poor guy's home at all hours of the day and night.

CIAPC, the Finish wing of the entertainment industry, has saved the world from the evil of a nine year old girl and her Winnie the Pooh laptop. The organization, which has been responsible for forcing Finish ISPs to block The Pirate Bay, conducted an early morning police raid on a household that hadn't responded to the entertainment's industry settlement demands.

A T-Mobile employee decided that the best way to deal with a complaining customer -- was to stab him. The 59-year-old customer went to a store outside of Philadelphia this week to complain about being double-billed, but according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, received a knife in the rib cage instead of a refund.

Russia's Communications and Press Ministry has proposed banning children from using Wi-Fi networks in public, seemingly oblivious to the uphill battle enforcing such a law could pose to restaurants and other establishments. According to the St. Petersburg Times, an official at the country's Federal Mass Media Inspection Service insists the ban would cover anyone eighteen years of age or younger, with establishments who fail to enforce the new rule facing fines ranging from 20,000 rubles to 50,000 rubles ($640 to $1,600). The push is part of a new campaign in the country that begins in November aimed at blocking Web pages that contain "material harmful to child welfare." Restaurants worry that determining the age of patrons and blocking them from hotspots will be borderline impossible.

Both Bright House Communications and Time Warner Cable recently decided to implement new modem rental fees; $2 a month for Bright House customers and $4 for Time Warner Cable customers. Time Warner Cable has not only struggled to deal with customer complaints, they've struggled to justify what is essentially a price hike on already expensive service.

In what could be a record for these sorts of stories, one French woman has been greeted with a phone bill for 11,721,000,000,000,000 euros ($15,066,462,883,968,732). The error was the fault of French provider Bouygues Telecom, who initially told her there was nothing the company could do about the huge bill, then proceeded to inform the woman they'd be nice enough to allow her to pay the bill off in installments. After some back and forth the company finally acknowledged that the bill should have been for 117.21 euros, and said they'd waive the entire fee for their error. The company blamed the screw up on "a printing error and a subsequent misunderstanding between the client and staff at their call center."

Companies and governments are rushing to distance themselves from Chinese hardware vendors Huawei and ZTE after a House Intelligence Committee report accused the companies of being Chinese spies, despite no evidence after an 11 month investigation. It's widely believed this is simply protectionism with a coat of fear mongering, and the media is helping the U.S.

Though a parade of gushing, uncritical reviews have proclaimed the iPhone 5 a device created by gods that was perfectly hewn from the metal of the ancients, back on planet earth all is not well within the church of Apple. While some have noticed that the device is easily scratched, the biggest issue this week was that Apple's mapping software may be currently be the worst in the business.

Back in August we explored how a Canadian citizen and Videotron customer Arthur Pequegnat found himself banned from his own account and e-mail after his wife removed him during an ugly divorce. At the time, Videotron stated there was nothing they could do, since the man had added his wife as an authorized user to the account.

A new study from Citrix Systems unsurprisingly finds that most of the public remains rather clueless about the term "cloud computing," despite the fact the term has been in circulation for at least six years and possibly since 1996. According to the survey, 51% respondents stated that stormy weather can interfere with cloud computing, and while technically not wrong (thunderstorms) a quick look at the survey results shows you they weren't thinking quite that deeply.

We've all seen more than a few public Wi-Fi initiatives rise and fall as cities realize that it's simply not very profitable selling Wi-Fi service many places already offer -- for free. Municipal operations looking to improve regional connectivity have instead shifted their attention to fiber networks.

Late last year Iranian leaders made it a criminal offense to bypass the country's Internet filters using VPNs or any other technology. The announcement by Iranian Telecommunications Minister Reza Taghipour insisted the move was made to combat a "soft war” being waged by Western countries against Iran (read: we want to spy on our own citizens and stifle information exchange among government critics). Amusingly, Iranian leaders recently issued a fatwa about getting around the filters -- a fatwa that was immediately filtered (via Techdirt):Meanwhile, Iran has also recently made it illegal for local banks, insurance firms and telephone operators to use foreign-sourced email services like Gmail to communicate with clients.

Marketing firm Bartle Bogle Hegarty is courting more than a little controversy with their decision to use homeless people as walking human Wi-Fi hotspots at this year's South by Southwest festival in Austin. The ad agency is calling "Homeless Hotspots" a "charitable experiment" aimed at drumming up funds for homeless shelters as an alternative to things like homeless selling newspapers. Each homeless person dons a T-shirt promoting the program and carries a 4G MiFi device users can pay what they want to access. But Wired critiques the program as a shallow and ultimately hollow effort to simply drum up publicity for supposedly "cutting edge" marketing that ultimately doesn't do all that much for the plight of the homeless.

With a small line of code, the iPhone 4S is now apparently a "4G" device. For some time Apple had held off on insisting their device supported "4G," going so far as to knock other competitors for doing so.

• Verizon Says 4G Restored, Service Still Spotty [laptopmag.com]
• Data throttling: Annoying but effective [fiercebroadbandwireless.com]
• Feds Request DNSChanger Internet Shutdown Deadline Extension [krebsonsecurity.com]
• FCC chairman calls on ISPs to adopt new security measures; says broadband providers should notify subs when their computers are infected with malware [computerworld.com]
• Pirate Bay vows to go underground over blocking threat [bbc.co.uk]
• Quitting Cable TV: Truth or Lie? [abcnews.com]
• We’re not out of spectrum. Let’s talk terahertz [gigaom.com]
• You've Heard of VoLTE; How About Voice over HSPA? [marketwire.com]
• AT&T vs. Verizon: LTE Showdown in the Big Apple [pcworld.com]
• Spam crashes to historic low as malware explodes on mobiles [theregister.co.uk]
• MetroPCS joins opposition to Verizon Wireless spectrum deal [bizjournals.com]
• AT&T launches trials for enhanced push-to-talk services [fiercewireless.com]
• Apple battles to avoid iPad ban in China [telegraph.co.uk]
• Google ready to launch pilot pay-TV program in Kansas City [nypost.com]
• Google Patent Clearly Eying the Desktop Market for Android [patentlyapple.com]