Well, after 50 days of causing amok on the web, the guys and/or girls behind LulzSec have called it quits last night. After hacking into the systems of various Arizona law enforcement agencies and releasing countless internal documents, they published a statement on Pastebin yesterday, dumping yet another boatload of data on The Pirate Bay, and announcing their disbanding.

Jon S. von Tetzchner has been with Opera for a long time - in fact, he co-founded the browser maker back in 1995, and led the company to great success; the desktop version may play a niche role, the various mobile versions surely do not. Today though, he has announced he will be leaving the company due to differences with the board and management.

"I write a trivia column for a newspaper called The Austin Chronicle. Someone has asked me the origin of the word daemon as it applies to computing. Best I can tell based on my research, the word was first used by people on your team at Project MAC using the IBM 7094 in 1963. The first daemon (an abbreviation for Disk And Executive MONitor) was a program that automatically made tape backups of the file system. Does this sound about right? Any corrections or additions? Thank you for your time!"

"The battle lines over online copyright enforcement sharpened on Thursday when dozens of prominent high-tech entrepreneurs and investors signed a letter urging members of Congress to reject the PROTECT IP Act. The legislation, which has been making rapid progress through Congress in recent weeks, would establish a blacklist of 'rogue sites' and compel a variety of intermediaries to block access to them. It is strongly supported by Hollywood and the recording industry."

"Early milestone builds of Windows 8 have leaked onto the Internet, and considerable effort has been put into figuring out how they work. Though officially tight-lipped, snippets of information have escaped Redmond's walls. So far, it appears that Windows 8 development doesn't just look not bad - there are signs that it will actually resolve many long-standing annoyances with writing Windows software. If Microsoft can pull off everything it's hoping to achieve with the platform, Windows 8 will be as important and radical a release as Windows Longhorn was going to be." Fantastic article by Ars' Peter Bright. His stance on H264 and WebM may boil my blood at times, but this is a good piece of writing. Highly recommended.

"Apple has now released Mac OS X 10.6.8, the eighth maintenance update for Snow Leopard, via Software Update. The update offers a number of fixes implemented since the release of Mac OS X 10.6.7 in late March."

So, while The Netherlands just adopted net neutrality, the US is now nearing a comprehensive agreement on a piracy crackdown system. It will include throttling internet speeds, limiting access to e.g. only the top 200 websites, and forced participation in an educational program on copyright. The system has been drafted by the White House, big content, and ISPs. I guess this is the final nail in the coffin for net neutrality in the land of the 'free'.

The Calligra Office Suite has announced its second snapshot release. The project, which is a fork of KOffice, is building a suite of productivity and creativity applications and is working towards its first formal end-user release due in October. The project is seeking feedback from end users particularly in the area of usability of the GUI. With this snapshot Calligra Office Words is claiming better compatibility with .docx than LibreOffice, and also claims to be approaching the best compatibility with legacy .doc formats.

After an epic vote fail in the lower house yesterday (labour accidentally voted against net neutrality lolfail), which was rectified today, The Netherlands has officially become the second country in the world, and the first in Europe, to turn net neutrality into law (okay, technically it needs to pass the senate, but that's more of a formality in our system). A big middle finger to Sarkozy, Cameron, and Obama. Hey Chile, ./fistbump.sh. We're honoured to follow in your footsteps!

We've taken the next step in Internet connectivity, and have IPv6-enabled this site for testing purposes. Of course, this will only work if your ISP or some third-party gateway provides you with IPv6 connectivity, which you can check here. If you're all set, try the IPv6 OSnews out at http://ipv6.osnews.com/ and let us know if you have any trouble with it.

Nokia may have gone with Windows Phone 7 for its future smartphone operating system, but until then, we now have the Nokia N9 to look at. Yes, a beautiful, top-of-the-line Nokia smartphone which runs MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan - but isn't this thing kind of a dead end? Also announced: the even prettier Nokia N950 Meego 1.2 developer device - only available to a limited number of developers. Sure to become a collectors' item.

"Mozilla's VP of Technical Strategy, Mike Shaver has rejected Microsoft's criticism of WebGL in which it said it would not implement the 3D graphics standard because of security issues in the design. Shaver says that "there is no question that the web needs 3D capabilities" to enable developers to create "advanced visualisations, games or new user interfaces" and points at Molehill (Adobe's 3D for Flash) and Microsoft's Silverlight 3D which are offering just those capabilities." One discussion of Microsofts WebGL criticism can be found here.

Daily time spent in mobile apps has now surpassed web consumption. The average user now spends 9% more time using mobile apps than the Internet. In June users spent an average of 81 minutes daily on mobile apps, compared to 74 minutes on the web.

Remember when Altavista was the search engine? Or Yahoo? They stuffed their search pages with useless, distracting crap, and using them became unpleasant. And then, bam, along came Google, with a simple, clear search page and uncluttered search results. However, now that Google has become this massive behemoth, tracking our every move, and tailoring our search results, leading to only being fed those pages you agree with - isn't it time for something new? Something simple? It might be, and you've undoubtedly heard of them: DuckDuckGo. I'm switching. Update: Just got an email from Gabriel Weinberg, the guy behind DuckDuckGo. The OSNews !bang (!osnews) is now live!