The diminutive singer told her more than one million followers on the site that she adored her supporters, but one among them was not her ‘lover’ — her nickname for her fans.

“I love 1,033,861 of you LOVERS, but 1 is not a lover, just a deluded weirdo making threat #andthatdoesnotmakeyouspecial So..police alerted,” she tweeted Tuesday.

The announcement prompted a groundswell of support for the 43-year-old on the social networking site, with fans vowing to protect her and offering support.

“I hope whoever’s threatening @kylieminogue knows there’s more than 1,000,000 of us ready to jump to her defence,” wrote one.

Former television soap star Minogue this year celebrates 25 years in the music business since her hit debut single “Locomotion” was released in 1987.

The singer, who has successfully battled breast cancer, has attracted unwanted attention in the past, reportedly receiving hundreds of threatening letters at her British home and office in 2003.

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While Ancestry.com founder Paul Allen believes that Google+ has recently reached over 100 million users, Google’s social network isn’t driving people to other sites on the Web according to Sharaholic’s data. While the percentage of referral traffic may grow over time as more Google products are integrated with Google+ profiles, the lack of referral traffic suggests that content isn’t being shared on the service or users aren’t paying attention to content that is shared on Google+. However, sites may also see more Google search traffic as Google+ author profiles are linked to articles on the Web and search rankings may potentially increase over time.

Similar to Tumblr, Pinterest is an extremely visual social network. Sites that offer large resolution, beautiful images with smart, intelligent content are far more likely to be shared than sites with lower quality images and poor content. Content from sites around the Web are “pinned” to a virtual cork board broken up into a wide variety of varied categories such as photography, DIY, home, women’s apparel, pets, fitness and architecture. Users can create their own boards on the service and “pin” anything that they see on the Web. Pinterest has also rolled out a variety of tools to pin content including a browser bookmark and on-site buttons.

Similar to a service like Twitter, users can follow other users to watch what they pin. In addition, users can follow specific boards rather than following all of the boards of a particular user. While users can also “repin” content found on Pinterest on a personal board, they can also like content on the site as well as leave comments for other users. On each pin and repin, a link back to the original content is included. This allows users on Pinterest to visit the site where the content originated and look around for similar content.

According to a recent demographic study conducted by Ignite Social Media, Pinterest’s audience is predominantly made up of females between the ages of 25 to 54 and content that appeals to females ultimately sends more referral traffic back to sites around the Web. In addition, Pinterest users are likely to have completed some college courses and make between $25,000 to $75,000 a year. The study also found that Pinterest users are likely to originate in the mid-west United States.

While Pinterest still remains an invite-only social network, Pinterest users are currently allowed to invite an unlimited number of friends to the service through the admin interface. Brands, particularly fashion labels and clothing stores, are also flocking to Pinterest to advertise new products and attract the attention of consumers. Online shopping website Etsy is probably the most successful example of attracting consumers with over 44,000 followers on its Pinterest brand page. Every time Etsy pins a new product to the page, it can directly influence potential customers and attract new sales on the main site. Other brands are also using the social network to run contests or use boards as a virtual focus group through the commenting system.

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Speaking at the All Things D conference, Costolo repeated the company’s justification for the policy change it announced last week: By taking down tweets only in the country where Twitter believes they may have violated local laws, it is making sure the maximum 140-character-long messages are still available to the rest of the world.

Twitter’s reasoning has been mostly lost in a barrage of comments — many from Twitter users themselves — that the company is caving into attacks on free speech, especially in countries with repressive regimes.

“It’s a super complex issue,” Costolo said. “When the news came out, people tried to distill it down to, ‘What did they just say?’ It’s easy to distill it down to ‘Twitter is endorsing XYZ.’”

“It takes a while for the scholars and the people who study these matters to weigh in and start to say, ‘Wait, this is actually a thoughtful and honest approach to doing this and it’s in fact being done in a way that’s forward-looking.’ So we wait for that to happen,” he added.

The complaint about knee-jerk responses to complex issues is somewhat ironic given that the company’s meteoric growth has been fueled often by buzz-worthy but flippant comments.

Costolo also emphasized that if Twitter reacts to take-down requests, it will make public the reasons a tweet is being removed. The company already has 45 people who respond to such requests, including those from copyright holders of music or movies in the United States.

He said the policy wouldn’t affect its stance toward China or Iran, where the service is already blocked completely.

“I don’t think the current environment in China is one in which we think we could operate,” he said.

Costolo spoke just days before Facebook is expected to file the paperwork necessary for an initial public offering of stock, a move that is likely to make initial investors and employees in the company rich.

San Francisco-based Twitter also faces the same securities regulations that are forcing Facebook to go public — a rule that says companies with more than $10 million in assets and more than 500 shareholders of a certain class of stock must disclose their financial results and other details.

Twitter, which was founded in 2006, will bump up against the rule “at some point,” Costolo said. But he added he would rather spend time building value at the company than dealing with such issues.

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“I can’t comment on who we are in discussions with, but we are conducting dialogues with four to five interested parties who we consider are seriously interested,” Hans Bergqvist told the TT news agency.

He said the aim was to sell all of Saab, which filed for bankruptcy on December 19, to a single buyer.

“That is our main tack (since) we… will get the most value,” he said, adding that administrators were also looking at the possibility of selling off parts of the business piecemeal.

Chinese carmaker Youngman has shown keen interest but its bid to snap Saab up before it declared bankruptcy was thwarted by the Swedish brand’s former owner GM, which balked at transferring the necessary technology licences.

A delegation from the Chinese company will reportedly arrive in Sweden on Monday to try to hammer out a deal.

Indian commercial utility vehicles manufacturer Mahindra and Mahindra is also interested and company officials have reportedly prolonged a visit to the Saab factory in the southwestern town of  Trollhättan to pursue talks.

Turkish private equity firm Brightwell Holdings has also expressed interest, with board member Samier Ahmed saying that “We will place a bid as soon as they (the administrators) are ready to accept bids.”

Bergqvist said the administrators hope to have a deal in weeks.

“We have to (hurry) due to the economic situation we are in. To make it possible for someone to restart the activity again, we have to keep the factory in good shape, and that costs an incredible amount of money,” he told TT.

Earlier this month, the administrators sold off the Saab museum to the town of Trollhättan, for 28 million kronor ($4.2 million), he said.

Administrators are also trying to sell surplus stock of equipment like engines, he added.

Saab was already on the brink of bankruptcy when GM sold it in early 2010 to Dutch company Swedish Automobile (SWAN) — at the time called Spyker – for $400 million.

The past two years have been lined with desperate efforts and numerous failed deals to keep it afloat.

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Iran’s Envoy to the IAEA Ali Ashgar Soltanieh said last week that a delegation of the UN nuclear watchdog would visit Iran on January 29-31 “to negotiate and discuss issues raised by the IAEA.”

The IAEA delegation is led by Herman Nackaerts who is in charge of the Iran nuclear file.

The visit comes amid heightened international tensions over the Iran nuclear program.

The EU voted on Monday to ban oil imports from Iran. The move came after the Islamic Republic announced earlier this month that it had launched a nuclear enrichment program at a well-protected underground facility near the holy Shia city of Qom.

The program envisages enriching uranium to the 20-percent level, which can easily be turned into fissile warhead material.

Western nations suspect Iran, which is already under numerous international sanctions, of pursuing a secret nuclear weapons program but Tehran insists it needs nuclear power solely for civilian purposes.

Iran has threatened to retaliate by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, the main export route for supplies from the Middle East.

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The news came as an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) team of experts began examining Japan’s safety checks on idled nuclear reactors.

Tokyo wants an international seal of approval for the energy-hungry country’s nuclear industry to bolster its faltering efforts at reassuring the public it is safe to resume atomic operations.

The vast majority of Japan’s 54 commercial nuclear reactors are offline because popular opposition is preventing their being restarted in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear crisis.

The disaster, triggered by the March earthquake and tsunami, contaminated the environment and forced tens of thousands of residents around the Fukushima nuclear site, in northeast Japan, to evacuate their homes.

Many still do not know if or when they will be able to return.

Utility companies say Japan will experience severe power shortages if nuclear electricity production is not re-started.

“We are making contact with the International Atomic Energy Agency to see what’s possible after we received requests from Fukushima that it hoped IAEA will have a permanent presence in the area,” a Japanese diplomat told AFP, under the customary condition of anonymity.

Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba, whose parliamentary constituency is in Fukushima, told residents on Sunday that he was making the push after requests from local leaders.

“We are calling on IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano for the international agency’s constant presence,” he said in a speech, according to Jiji Press.

The announcement coincided with a visit by a 10-member team of experts, led by James Lyons, IAEA director of nuclear installation safety.

At the request of the Japanese government, Lyons’ team will review Japan’s “stress test” before Tokyo approves nuclear reactor re-starts.

The Vienna-based IAEA has offices around the world — including in Tokyo — but it does not normally have permanent bases to monitor commercial reactor sites.

The Tokyo government has struggled with public trust on the nuclear issue since the March disaster.

That drive appeared to have suffered a further setback on Monday when it was revealed the body set up to manage Japan’s unfolding atomic catastrophe at Fukushima kept no records of its meetings.

The government’s nuclear disaster task force, headed by then prime minister Naoto Kan and including all of his ministers, has no minutes of the meetings that approved the evacuation of people living near the exploding reactors.

The Cabinet Office, in charge of keeping all public records, said it has told the agency to study what it can do to create a written record of the decision-making processes.

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Washington attorney Robert Bennett said Friday that he will represent the company, which was indicted in federal court in Alexandria Thursday on copyright infringement and other charges.

The U.S. government shut down Megaupload’s file-sharing website on Thursday, alleging that the company facilitated illegal downloads of copyrighted movies and other content. Seven individuals — including the company’s founder, who had his name legally changed to Kim Dotcom — were also charged. Dotcom and three others were arrested in New Zealand; three others remain at large.

New Zealand police raided several homes and businesses linked to Dotcom and seized guns, millions of dollars and nearly $5 million in luxury cars, officials said.

In Hong Kong, where Megaupload is based, customs officials said they seized more than $42.5 million in assets. They said the company operated out of luxury hotel space costing more than $12,000 a day, and they seized high-speed servers and other equipment from the offices.

The shutdown and indictment generated headlines around the world in part because of the size and scope of Megaupload’s operation. Sandvine, Inc., a Canadian company that provides equipment to monitor Internet traffic, said the website alone accounted for about 1 percent of traffic on U.S. cable and DSL lines. The site is even more popular in many foreign countries.

Bennett said that “we intend to vigorously defend against these charges” but declined to comment on the case in detail.

Bennett is best known for serving as President Bill Clinton’s attorney when he was accused of sexual harassment by Paula Jones. He has also represented Defense Secretaries Clark Clifford and Caspar Weinberger.

Megaupload was no stranger to accusations that its website existed for the sole purpose of mass copyright breach. Before its website was taken down, Megaupload offered a more detailed defense of its operations, claiming in a statement that such accusations are “grotesquely overblown.”

The company said it had a clear, easy-to-follow procedure if movie studios or other copyright holders saw that their products were being illegally shared on Megaupload, and said that it responded to those “takedown notices” as required by law.

“Of course, abuse does happen and is an inevitable fact of life in a free society, but it is curbed heavily and efficiently by our close cooperation with trusted takedown partners. It is just unfortunate that the activities of a small group of ‘black sheep’ overshadows the millions of users that use our sites legitimately every day,” the statement said.

Indeed, sites like megaupload.com, known as cyberlockers, can fulfill legitimate needs and are used every day by people looking for an efficient way to share or transfer large files that can’t easily be sent by email.

In their indictment, however, federal prosecutors offered a detailed glimpse of the internal workings of the website. They allege that Megaupload was well aware that the vast majority of its users were there to illegally download copyrighted content.

According to the indictment, in a 2008 email chat session, two of the alleged coconspirators exchange messages, with one saying “we have a funny business . . . modern days pirates ” and the other responds, “we’re not pirates, we’re just providing shipping services to pirates ”.

In another instance, one of the defendants allegedly laments in colorful language that an episode HBO’s “The Sopranos” has been uploaded to site, but the dialogue is in French, limiting its appeal.

In fact, prosecutors allege that the entire website was specifically designed to encourage piracy. The website provided cash bonuses to users who uploaded content popular enough to prompt mass downloads — such content was almost always copyrighted material.

Stefan Mentzer, an intellectual property partner with the White and Case law firm in New York, said it’s likely that Megaupload will try to argue at least two defenses: One is that its service qualifies as a so-called “safe harbor” under Digital Millennium Copyright Act — the federal law governing copyright infringement — if they can show, for instance, that they had no actual knowledge that infringing material was on their system. Another possible defense would be jurisdictional — specifically, that a case can’t be brought in the Eastern District of Virginia against a Hong Kong-based company like Megaupload without evidence that they directed criminal activity related to the district.

But Mentzer said both defenses would be a challenge, given the evidence that prosecutors appear to have collected.

“The Department of Justice doesn’t just cavalierly file these lawsuits,” Mentzer said.

Federal prosecutors have made Internet piracy a priority in the last decade, especially in the Eastern District of Virginia, which can claim jurisdiction over many such cases because large portions of the Internet’s backbone — servers and other infrastructure — are physically located in northern Virginia’s technology corridor.

The vast majority of those cases have resulted in guilty pleas and prison time. On Friday, a day after announcement of the Megaupload case, a federal judge sentenced Matthew David Howard Smith, 24, of Raleigh, North Carolina, to 14 months in prison for his role in founding a website called NinjaVideo. That site was one of many shut down in 2010, at a time when it facilitated nearly 1 million illegal downloads a week.

NinjaVideo was what prosecutors called a “linking site” to Megaupload. Casual users of Megaupload would be unable to find popular movies and TV shows on the site without the proper links. Sites like NinjaVideo allowed users to easily search for the desired movies or music and provided the links that enabled them to download the content from Megaupload.

The other co-founder of NinjaVideo, Hana Beshara, was sentenced earlier this month to 22 months in prison. While she admitted guilt, she portrayed herself as a sort of Robin Hood of the online world, stealing from greedy movie studios to provide entertainment downloads to the masses in the form of free films, TV shows, videogames and music.

While the legal defense for piracy may be difficult, accused Internet pirates clearly have their supporters, as evidenced by the millions of people who use their sites as well as the response to Thursday’s Megaupload shutdown. Within hours of the indictment being unsealed, the loose affiliation of hackers known as Anonymous caused temporary shutdowns of the Justice Department website as well as the websites of the Motion Picture Association of America and other industry groups that support a tougher piracy laws.

It could be months before the criminal case against Megaupload gets underway. The four defendants arrested in made an initial appearance in a New Zealand court Friday and are scheduled to make a second appearance on Monday. Authorities have said it could take a year or more to bring them to the U.S. if they fight extradition.

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The demise, at least for the time being, of the anti-piracy bills was a clear victory for Silicon Valley over Hollywood, which has campaigned for a tougher response to online piracy. The legislation also would cover the counterfeiting of drugs and car parts.

Congress’ qualms underscored how Internet users can use their collective might to block those who want to change the system.

The battle over the future of the Internet also played out on a different front Thursday when a loose affiliation of hackers known as “Anonymous” shut down Justice Department websites for several hours and hacked the site of the Motion Picture Association of America after federal officials issued an indictment against Megaupload.com, one of the world’s biggest file-sharing sites.

The site of the Hong Kong-based company was shut down, and the founder and three employees were arrested in New Zealand on U.S. accusations that they facilitated millions of illegal downloads of films, music and other content, costing copyright holders at least $500 million in lost revenue. New Zealand police raided homes and businesses linked to the founder, Kim Dotcom, on Friday and seized guns, millions of dollars and nearly $5 million in luxury cars, officials there said.

In the U.S., momentum against the Senate’s Protect Intellectual Property Act and the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act, known popularly as PIPA and SOPA, grew quickly on Wednesday when the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and other Web giants staged a one-day blackout and Google organized a petition drive that attracted more than 7 million participants.

That day alone, at least six senators who had co-sponsored the Senate legislation reversed their positions. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, in statements at the time and again on Friday, stressed that more consensus-building was needed before the legislation would be ready for a vote.

On Friday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he was postponing a test vote set for Tuesday “in light of recent events.” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, followed suit, saying consideration of a similar House bill would be postponed “until there is wider agreement on a solution.”

With opposition mounting, it was unlikely that Reid would have received the 60 votes needed to advance the legislation to the Senate floor.

The two bills would allow the Justice Department, and copyright holders, to seek court orders against foreign websites accused of copyright infringement. The legislation would bar online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as credit card companies from doing business with an alleged violator. They also would forbid search engines from linking to such sites.

The chief Senate sponsor, Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., cited estimates that copyright piracy costs the American economy more than $50 billion annually and that global sales of counterfeit goods via the Internet reached $135 billion in 2010. He and Smith insist that their bills target only foreign criminals and that there is nothing in them to require websites, Internet service providers, search engines or others to monitor their networks.

That didn’t satisfy critics who said the legislation could force Internet companies to pre-screen user comments or videos, burden new and smaller websites with huge litigation costs and impede new investments.

The White House, while not taking a specific stand on the bills, last week said it would “not support any legislation that reduces freedom of expression … or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.” On Friday, White House spokesman Jay Carney said online piracy is an issue that has to be addressed, “but everybody has to be in on it for it to work and get through Congress.”

The scuttling, for now, of PIPA and SOPA frustrates what might have been one of the few opportunities to move significant legislation in an election year where the two parties have little motivation to cooperate.

Until recently “you would have thought this bill was teed up,” with backing from key Senate leaders and support from powerful interest groups, said Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., who cosponsored the original bill but quickly dropped his backing on the grounds the bill could undermine innovation and Internet freedom.

Moran said the “uprising” of so many people with similar concerns was a “major turnaround, and in my experience it is something that has happened very rarely.”

Moran said PIPA and SOPA now have “such a black eye” that it will be difficult to amend them. Reid, however, said that there had been progress in recent talks among the various stakeholders and “there is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved.”

Jeff Chester, executive director for the Center for Digital Democracy, a consumer protection and privacy advocacy group, said Google and Facebook and their supporters “have delivered a powerful blow to the Hollywood lobby.” He predicted a compromise that doesn’t include what many see as overreaching provisions in the current legislation.

“It’s been framed as an Internet freedom issue, but at the end of the day it will be decided on the narrow interests of the old and new media companies,” he said. The big questions involve who should or shouldn’t pay — or be paid — for Internet content.

Leahy said he respected Reid’s decision to postpone the vote but lamented the Senate’s unwillingness to debate his bill.

“The day will come when the senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem,” Leahy said. Criminals in China, Russia and other countries “who do nothing but peddle in counterfeit products and stolen American content are smugly watching how the United States Senate decided” it was not worth taking up the bill, he said.

In the House, Smith said he had “heard from the critics” and resolved that it was “clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.” Smith had planned on holding further committee votes on his bill next month.

The bill’s opponents were relieved it was put on hold.

Markham Erickson, executive director of NetCoalition, commended Congress for “recognizing the serious collateral damage this bill could inflict on the Internet.”

The group represents Internet and technology companies including Google, Yahoo and Amazon.com. Erickson said they would work with Congress “to address the problem of piracy without compromising innovation and free expression.”

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who has joined Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Moran in proposing an alternative anti-piracy bill, credited opponents with forcing lawmakers “to back away from an effort to ram through controversial legislation.”

But the CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, former Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, warned, “As a consequence of failing to act, there will continue to be a safe haven for foreign thieves.” The MPAA, which represents such companies as Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., is a leading advocate for the anti-piracy legislation.

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The slogan “We Are Legion,” the group’s online rallying cry, was inserted into the navigation bar of the official Elysee site’s (www.elysee.fr).

Before the end of the day, the site had been restored to normal.

The group’s action appeared to be linked to France’s stance on the US clampdown on file-sharing.

French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand on Friday denounced those behind the file-sharing site Megaupload.com as delinquents, backing the US decision to shut it down.

“It is delinquency, it is theft,” the minister said in an interview with BFM TV, denouncing what he called the site’s massive violations of copyright law.

“The truth is that they are stealing on a large scale,” he added.

The US Justice Department and FBI indicted seven people for “massive worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyrighted works, through Megaupload.com and other related sites”.

Washington wants the extradition of four of the company’s senior figures from New Zealand to face prosecution for online piracy, racketeering and money laundering that could carry jail time of up to 20 years.

The Anonymous group had earlier shut down the FBI and Justice Department websites for several hours.

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New Zealand police also seized guns, artwork, more than £5 million in cash and luxury cars valued at nearly £3 million after serving 10 search warrants at several businesses and homes around the city of Auckland.

The Megaupload site was shut down on Thursday over US accusations that it facilitated millions of illegal downloads of films, music and other content, costing copyright holders at least £300 million in lost revenue.

With 150 million registered users, about 50 million hits daily and endorsements from music superstars, Megaupload.com was among the world’s biggest file-sharing sites. Big enough, according to a US indictment, that it earned founder Kim Dotcom £27 million last year alone.

The company is based in Hong Kong and Dotcom was living in New Zealand, but some of the alleged pirated content was hosted on leased servers in Virginia, and that was enough for US prosecutors to act.

The four defendants stood together in an Auckland courtroom in the first stage of extradition proceedings that could last a year or more.

Dotcom’s lawyer raised objections to a media request to take photographs and video, but then Dotcom spoke out from the dock saying he did not mind photos or video “because we have nothing to hide”.

The judge granted the media access, and ruled that the four would remain in custody until a second hearing on Monday.

Dotcom, Megaupload’s former chief executive and current chief innovation officer, is a resident of Hong Kong and New Zealand and a dual citizen of Finland and Germany who had his name changed legally. The 37-year-old was previously known as Kim Schmitz and Kim Tim Jim Vestor.

The other defendants are two German citizens and one Dutch citizen, and three other defendants – another German, a Slovakian and an Estonian – remain at large.

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