Communist China in August secretly ordered certain Chinese news websites to require new users to log on using their real names and identification numbers, the New York Times reported on September 5.

Microsoft has obtained a stay against a court injunction that would have prevented the company from selling its Microsoft Word software until an appeal could be filed, Channel Web reported on September 4.

CNET News reported on August 28 that it had obtained a draft copy of a Senate bill (S. 773) that would “permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.”

A sixth U.S. State Department employee or contractor has pleaded guilty to illegally looking at electronic passport files, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

Microsoft and Yahoo are joining a coalition to oppose Google’s creation of what could become the largest virtual library the world has ever seen. Amazon may also join, but has so far declined to comment, BBC News said on August 21.

Microsoft on August 18 filed an appeal to a judge’s ruling that the company’s Word application violates a Canadian firm’s patent. The ruling would require Microsoft to stop selling its flagship word processor within the United States in 60 days, InformationWeek reported on August 19.

In order to meet the demand for ever smaller and faster computer chips, IBM and the California Institute of Technology have been researching the use of DNA molecules in microprocessors. It turns out that the building blocks of life may help keep alive Moore’s Law that computer performance doubles every two years.

CNET News reported on August 6 that “a Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Google's Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial-of-service attack that led to the sitewide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on Thursday, according to a Facebook executive.”

A denial-of-service attack took down the Twitter short messaging service on the morning of August 6. As of this writing, the Twitter status blog says that “the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.”

The Los Angeles Times reported on August 5 that the Defense Department is studying how to use social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter without compromising security. In a similar story, the New York Times mentioned on August 3 that the National Football League is clamping down on Twitter and text messaging.