Google and Facebook are among a group of net heavyweights taking the French government to court this week.

The legal challenge has been brought by The French Association of Internet Community Services (ASIC) and relates to government plans to keep web users' personal data for a year.

The case will be heard by the State Council, France's highest judicial body.

More than 20 firms are involved, including eBay and Dailymotion.

The law obliges a range of e-commerce sites, video and music services and webmail providers to keep a host of data on customers.

Two manually encrypted notes found in a murder victim's pocket are causing the FBI sleepless nights. The authorities believe the notes could indicate who the murderer is. The murder was committed 12 years ago, but the FBI still has not been able to decrypt the notes – not even with help from the American Cryptogram Association, a group of hobby cryptologists.

No one even knows how the cryptology found on the victim works. The FBI has therefore published the notes on its web site. At first glance, it seems that encryption is based on transposition and substitution, but the matter cannot be that simple, for the FBI's Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU) has also failed to crack the code.

Comodo has confirmed that two other resellers have been compromised since the "Comodogate" attacks which saw an attacker generate forged certificates for login.live.com, mail.google.com, www.google.com, login.yahoo.com, login.skype.com and addons.mozilla.org. According to Comodo's CTO, Robin Alden, no further certificates were issued as a result of these compromises at the two RAs (Registration Authorities). The disclosure will do little to reduce the worry that other forged certificates could be in circulation.

Alden was responding to queries in the mozilla.dev.security.policy Usenet group. He also confirmed that Comodo was reinstating a "high value target check" on all certificate orders noting that "regrettably it had been disabled for a small number of RA accounts" and that the company was "removing the aspects of our back-end system that allow this check to be optional".

Computers belonging to the Australian prime minister and at least nine other federal ministers were recently hacked, according to a news report.

Besides Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd and Defense Minister Stephen Smith were also targeted.

Several thousand e-mails were accessed by the intruders beginning in February, before Australian authorities were tipped off to the breach by U.S. intelligence officials at the CIA and FBI, according to the Daily Telegraph.