British police encouraged to snoop

The British Home Office has signed up to an EU strategy against cybercrime that "encourages" police across Europe to remotely access personal computers, reports the BBC.

The plan has sparked fears that the government is looking to increase police powers to hack into people's computers without a court warrant.

UK police already do a "small number" of such operations under existing law. However, the Home Office said the EU agreement would not affect police behaviour and was not legally binding.

US president-elect Barack Obama will probably tear down long-standing barriers between the US's civilian and military space programmes to speed up a mission to the moon amid the prospect of a new space race with China, says Bloomberg.com.

Obama's transition team is considering a collaboration between the US Defence Department and Nasa because military rockets may be cheaper and ready sooner than the space agency's planned launch vehicle, which isn't slated to fly until 2015, according to people who've discussed the idea with the Obama team.

The potential change comes as Pentagon concerns are rising over China's space ambitions because of what is perceived as an eventual threat to US defence satellites.

The Twitter accounts of President-elect Barack Obama, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, Britney Spears, Fox News and 29 others were hacked Monday according to the microblog site, leading to false and inappropriate messages being posted on their accounts, states CNN.

Twitter is a social-networking blog site that allows users to send status updates, or "tweets," from cellphones, instant messaging services and Facebook in less than 140 characters.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the accounts were compromised after a hacker accessed tools the support team uses when a Twitter user can't remember or wants to reset their login information. "We considered this a very serious breach of security and immediately took the support tools offline," Stone said on the site's blog. "We'll put them back only when they're safe and secure."

Internet users in the US watched 12.7 billion online videos in November, an increase of 34% versus a year ago, according to numbers released Monday by market researcher ComScore, says CNet.

Thanks to YouTube, Google Sites retained the crown as the top US video property with nearly 5.1 billion videos viewed or about 40% of all videos viewed online. The video-sharing site accounts for more than 98% of Google's traffic.

The data also showed 77% of all US Internet users viewed online videos in 2008, and that the average online video viewer watched 273 minutes of video. That's good news for sites like YouTube and Hulu that are trying to build an online ad market around video. One analyst firm expects the market for video ads to grow 45% to $850 million this year.