Cisco has said it will challenge Microsoft's $8.5bn (£5.4bn) takeover of Skype at the EU's top court.

The networking giant said conditions needed to be set to ensure Microsoft would not block other video services.

In October, the European Union had ruled the deal would not impede competition.

But Cisco has called on the European Commission to introduce open standards similar to those used for mobile phones.

"Cisco does not oppose the merger, but believes the European Commission should have placed conditions that would ensure greater standards-based interoperability," Cisco's video conferencing head Martin De Beer wrote in a blog post.

European Commission spokesman Antoine Colombani said: "We will defend our decision in court."

Summary of article from, The Financial Times, January 17 2012

Google has joined forces with Wikipedia and other US technology companies today to stage online protests against anti-piracy legislation, in the first co-ordinated political demonstration by many of the world’s most popular websites.

Wikipedia will begin a global blackout of its English-language sites today (see image), while Google will post a message on its US home page criticising the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act currently being discussed in Congress. Wikipedia and Google are two of the five most visited sites on the web.

Google has wielded its dominance of web search as a key weapon in its battle with Facebook, with a new approach that draws information from its Google+ social network directly into users’ search results.

By including more personal and social information in its results, the new feature also takes Google a big step towards fulfilling a dream long talked about by its top executives: to create a personalised search engine that “knows” its users so well that all the results are tuned directly to their interests.

Known as Search plus Your World, the new approach marks the most direct attempt yet by Google to use its core service to help it make up lost ground in social networking. However, favouring its own Google+ network at the expense of rivals could heighten regulatory concerns at a time when the company’s behaviour is already under the microscope in Brussels and Washington. “They could have done this for Facebook and Twitter and they didn’t,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land. “That will probably make some antitrust people even more anxious over what [Google] is doing.”

Summary from article, Mashable, 6th January 2012.

You don’t have to be an online privacy expert to understand that there is probably too many app developers with access to your profile, but how many apps have permission to your account?

After becoming frustrated with how difficult it is to locate app permission pages on social sites, Israel-based entrepreneur Avi Charkham has cut down the time it will take you to find out and compiled direct links to such pages for eight different networks into one place on the site MyPermissions.