The sheer number of queries concerned Google

The internet suffered a number of slowdowns as people the world over rushed to verify accounts of Michael Jackson's death.

Search giant Google confirmed to the BBC that when the news first broke it feared it was under attack.

Millions of people who searched for the star's name on Google News were greeted with an error page.

It warned users "your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application".

Work started on the title back in 1997

Veteran games developer 3D Realms has closed down because of a lack of funds.

Founded in 1987, the firm popularised the concept of shareware gaming and produced the seminal Duke Nukem and Wolfenstein 3D first-person shooters.

The company was working on a follow-up title, Duke Nukem Forever, which after being in development for 12 years has become the object of industry derision.

Publisher Take-Two says it will no longer fund development of the game but retains rights to the title.

A court in Sweden has jailed four men behind The Pirate Bay (TPB), the world's most high-profile file-sharing website, in a landmark case.

Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail.

They were also ordered to pay $4.5m (£3m) in damages.

Record companies welcomed the verdict but the men are to appeal and Sunde said they would refuse to pay the fine.

The Pirate Bay founders will receive a verdict on Friday

One of the founders of file-sharing website The Pirate Bay has said he anticipates victory in the court battle over alleged copyright theft.

Peter Sunde said: "We are quite confident we are going to win."

Mr Sunde said the site would continue operating even if he and his three co-defendants were found guilty on Friday.

The Pirate Bay is the world's most high profile file-sharing website. In February 2009, it reported 22 million simultaneous users.

Percentage of green house gas emissions per spam message

A study into spam has blamed it for the production of more than 33bn kilowatt-hours of energy every year, enough to power more than 2.4m homes.

The "Carbon Footprint of e-mail Spam Report" estimated that 62 trillion spam emails are sent globally every year.

This amounted to emissions of more than 17 million tons of CO2, the research by climate consultants ICF International and anti-virus firm McAfee found.

Searching for legitimate e-mails and deleting spam used some 80% of energy.

The study found that the average business user generates 131kg of CO2 every year, of which 22% is related to spam.

The ad-serving system profiles the sites people visit online

Amazon has said it will not allow online advertising system Phorm to scan its web pages to produce targeted ads.

Phorm builds a profile of users by scanning for keywords on websites visited and then assigns relevant ads.

It has proved controversial because it scans almost all sites a user visits and there is an ongoing political debate about how a user gives consent.

The service will be available later in the year and charge a monthly fee

After seven years in stealth mode, a Silicon Valley start-up has launched a "revolutionary" video game service that offers new competition to consoles.

OnLive, which launched at the Game Developer Conference, promises to deliver on demand video games via the cloud to the PC, Mac or TV.

The company said it can provide high quality gaming on low end machines.

"We think this moment, this day will be remembered as the beginning of a new era," said OnLive boss Steve Perlman.

"This is huge. This is transparent cloud computing. This is really really important for the industry.

UK ISPs stand to make a lot of money from targeted advertising

The online advertising industry has launched a set of guidelines for a genre of adverts that have been causing controversy.

The code of practice drawn up by the Internet Advertising Bureau looks specifically at behavioural advertising.

This form of advertising delivers ads based on people's browsing activity and is therefore far more targeted.

UK ISP BT is planning to roll out such advertising developed by US firm Phorm.

The guidelines which have been signed by key players including Phorm, AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo agree on three core commitments:

Two of the defendants argued their innocence on Sunday in a webcast

Half of the charges levelled at the founders of the Pirate Bay file-sharing site have been dropped.

Swedish prosecutors dropped charges relating to "assisting copyright infringement" leaving the lesser charges of "assisting making available copyright material" on trial day two.

Pirate Bay co-founder Frederik Neik said it showed prosecutors had misunderstood the technology.

The music industry played down the changes as "simplifying the charges".

China operates a broad-based net filtering system

Australian government plans to filter net use have been rebuffed by local internet service providers (ISPs).

Telstra, Australia's largest ISP, has said it will not join trials of the filters and others say they will only back a scaled-down system.

The government wants to filter all net traffic and block access to 10,000 sites deemed to hold illegal content.

The initial trials of the filtering technology were due to take place before Christmas.