International governments are set to agree a new information and communications treaty next month.
 Reports in the Russian press have suggested the Kremlin and others wanted control of key internet systems passed to a UN agency. Internet control currently lies largely with US-based groups such as Icann, which regulates the web address system. The European Parliament has said the UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU) was "not the appropriate body" to have authority. The ITU has said a new treaty was needed to ensure "the free flow of information around the world, promoting affordable and equitable access for all and laying the foundation for ongoing innovation and market growth". The UN agency is hosting the conference to draw up the treaty between 3 and 14 December in Dubai. Members of the European Parliament backed a resolution which urged member states to reject changes to the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR) which would "negatively impact the internet, its architecture, operations, content and security, business relations, internet governance and the free flow of information online". 'Equal rights' The ITRs are designed to ensure interoperability of telecoms equipment and services across the world.

In an email to all members, Facebook said it wanted a "more meaningful" way for users to give feedback. The site has also proposed combining information across its other services, such as photo-sharing app Instagram. Facebook said a vote into the changes could take place, but more than 300m users would need to participate. Under the site's rules, votes have an effect only if 30% of the user base has taken part. The site recently announced its one billionth sign-up. A campaign opposing the changes and calling for more transparency has been launched. The Our-Policy.org website is urging users to comment on the announcement in order to trigger a user vote on Facebook's plans. Under current rules, if there are 7,000 comments on an issue it will be voted upon. At the time of writing, 3,000 members had commented. 'Accountable' In explaining the changes, Facebook said it was looking for ways to more "effectively engage" with its users over changes to the network. "That commitment guided our decision in 2009 to launch an unprecedented process for user feedback," wrote Elliot Schrage, a vice-president of communications. "When we held our second global site governance vote in June, we indicated that we would review our site governance process in light of the growth of both our community - to over one billion users - and our company, which is now publicly traded and accountable to regulators around the world.

Twitter resets 'hacked' passwords after being compromised
 Some accounts had been compromised, but other users had received the emails after Twitter had unintentionally reset unaffected passwords, the company said. The mass email coincided with incidents involving several high-profile accounts, including at least one account belonging to the BBC. Other media organisations, such as the TechCrunch blog, reported being warned. Twitter gave no indication of the cause or source of the compromise, and would not share details of the size of the issue. In a statement, it said: "When we believe an account may have been compromised, we reset the password and send an email letting the account owner know this has happened along with information about creating a new password. This is a routine part of our processes to protect our users. "In this case, we unintentionally reset passwords of a larger number of accounts, beyond those that we believed to have been compromised.

Software that can translate spoken English into spoken Chinese almost instantly has been demonstrated by Microsoft.
The software preserves intonation and cadence so the translated speech still sounds like the original speaker. Microsoft said research breakthroughs had reduced the number of errors made by the instant translation system. It said it modelled the system on the way brains work to improve its accuracy. Details about the project were given by Microsoft research boss Rick Rashid in a blogpost following a presentation he gave in Tianjin, China, in late October that had, he said, started to "generate a bit of attention". In the final few minutes of that presentation the words of Mr Rashid were almost instantly turned into Chinese by piping the spoken English through Microsoft's translation system. In addition, the machine-generated version of his words maintained some of his spoken style.