EarthLink (ELNK) email customers experienced outages over much of the weekend, according to numerous online complaints.

Starting Friday, Twitter users began to post updates about service outages. Alex Mendez tweeted “33:40 minutes on the cellphone dealing with TW / earthlink. UGH,” and Diane Fischler wrote, “Not getting email messages again. Woke up to about 60 left over from yesterday’s Earthlink outage, now seems to be down again. Who else?”

On Saturday and Sunday, EarthLink users continued to complain about their lack of service. Jim Rattray wrote: “#Earthlink email has been down for 24+ hours. ‘We’re aware and working on it.’ Not good enough,” while romeneskoblogs said, “I haven’t received Earthlink email since Friday night. Customer service rep (in India) said could be 72 hours b4 restored.”

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The use of peer-to-peer networks for sharing files has come under fire during recent months, including the dismantling of Swedish BitTorrent site Pirate Bay, but it turns out even members of Congress need to be kept in check over their file-sharing practices.

Congress on Tuesday introduced the Secure Federal File Sharing Act, which would restrict the use of peer-to-peer file sharing software like Limewire among federal employees.

The new legislation follows multiple embarrassing leaks of sensitive government information by means of open file sharing networks, including the location of a safe house for the First Family, financial files belonging to Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the electronic schematics to President Obama’s helicopter, and a list of 30 lawmakers currently under investigation by the House Ethics Committee.

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Cybercriminals are capitalizing on swine-flu fears by pitching sales of fake Tamiflu, security firm Sophos said.

Networks of fraudsters use spam and malware to direct Web traffic to phony pharmaceutical sites, wrote Graham Cluley, a technology consultant for Sophos.

“Although unwitting buyers do often receive some kind of drug as result of the transactional exchange, at best the drug doesn’t work and at worse it can pose serious health risks,” he added. Cybercriminals are “putting their customers’ health, personal information and credit card details at risk” with these counterfeit versions of Tamiflu.

Many of these fraudulent pharmaceutical sites originate in Russia, Sophos’s Dmitry Samosseiko noted in a paper on the topic. One network called GlavMed, for example, has more than 120,000 online pharmacy sites selling generic drugs under the name of Canadian Pharmacy.

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A new fashion-rental service has been getting buzz this week, but it follows other designer sites that have adopted the Netflix (NFLX) model to their ventures.

Rent the Runway, which started Monday, marks another entry into the growing market of online luxury rental services. Shoppers can browse its selection of dresses and rent them at roughly 10 percent of their retail price, then return it in a prepaid envelope.

Before that, Madeline Passarelli, a former fashion editor at Lucky, introduced Wear Today, Gone Tomorrow in March. The daughter of a fashion designer and manufacturer, she spent years as a stylist and editor and had noticed that women in her field attended many events but didn’t want to wear the same outfit twice.

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The Council of the European Union has approved new legislation that would require Web users to consent to Internet cookies.

Cookies, small programs that can be used to track Web movements, have come under fire as consumer groups, including the Federal Trade Commission, have sought to regulate companies that engage in targeted behavioral advertising.

While the current EU telecom law states that cookies are allowed if Internet users are notified of them and have an opt-out option, in practice, the law has been interpreted more loosely. In the United Kingdom, for example, the information commissioner’s office issued a directive emphasizing that sites should clearly direct users to a page where they can opt out.

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As news of the Fort Hood shooting rampage spread last week, media outlets and readers both put Twitter and its new lists feature to the test.

Just as the service was instrumental in providing updates during the summer’s election protests in Iran, Twitter feeds from Texas-based news sources such as the Austin-American Statesman and the Killeen Daily Herald provided a stream of local updates.

The Statesman’s feed amassed more than 3,000 followers by the end of the day Thursday, and soon larger news outlets such as Huffington Post, CNN and the New York Times (NYT) had tapped into it and other sources by using Twitter Lists, which lets users create groups of other Twitter accounts that others can view and follow.

“Lists proved a new way to follow breaking news on Twitter, with filtered groupings of local news outlets, military accounts, and local citizens,” Craig Kanalley wrote on Poynter’s E-Media blog.

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Jack Dorsey, the chairman and co-founder of the popular microblogging service Twitter, shared far more than his site’s 140-character message limit when he offered himself up to a public psychoanalysis.

As part of an exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City, Mr. Dorsey subjected himself to a Jungian analyst. “I thought it was an awesome experiment,” Mr. Dorsey said after his session. “It’s not something I had done before.”

The Rubin Museum is currently showcasing renowned Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung’s previously unpublished Red Book, a tome which has been referred to as “the holy grail of the unconscious” and has been hidden away from the public by Mr. Jung’s family for decades.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s latest effort to call out what it considers violations of copyright and trademark law comes in the form of a mock-awards page, complete with “honorees,” called the Takedown Hall of Shame.

The tech-advocacy group highlights a handful of cases it calls “the most egregious examples of takedown abuse,” usually involving businesses or organizations that cry foul–or issue takedown notices–even when their copyrighted materials are used in accordance with fair-use laws.

Among the honorees are National Public Radio, which tried to get an All Things Considered segment removed from YouTube because it appeared in an anti-same-sex-marriage ad. Others include NBC, for yanking an Obama campaign video that used archival footage of Tom Brokaw, and the National Organization for Marriage, which pulled YouTube footage of Rachel Maddow criticizing the audition tapes of one of its ads opposing gay marriage.

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The success of private-sale sites like Gilt Groupe, which holds daily members-only sales of off-season luxury items, have led to imitators hoping to emulate the success of a business model that’s catching on with recession-strapped consumers.

Private-sale sites let shoppers experience the cachet of owning luxury items without paying full price. Their Web-only setting eliminates the public guilt of making big-ticket purchases down a down economy. And the short time in which items can be reserved in shopping carts means customers have to click fast, enhancing the allure for some.

One of the newest such sites is One Kings Lane, which focuses on furniture and other housewares. Like the Gilt model, it sells luxury goods from two or three brands a day at 50 percent to 70 percent off original prices.

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This Is Why You’re Fat, a Web site for food gone awry, is holding a photo competition in which contestants visit New York street vendors and shoot themselves with coronaries-on-plates.

It’s not a contest for the faint of heart. For a site whose tag line is “Where dreams become heart attacks,” each food truck will create an appropriate contest dish, like chocolate cupcakes with bacon shavings.

This Is Why You’re Fat will tweet the location of the participating vendors every 20 minutes, and competitors are to respond by sending a photo of him- or herself with the dish. The first player to post pictures from all six trucks will win a party for 25 friends catered by his food truck of choice, as well as free copies of This Is Why You’re Fat’s new book. The competition will also be filmed by VendrTV, a weekly street-food podcast.

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Studies have already shown that chatting on a cellphone while driving is just as dangerous as driving drunk.

While several U.S. states have enacted hands-free cellphone laws for drivers, New York’s Taxi and Limousine Commission is going a step further by proposing harsher rules for cab drivers who violate the commission’s decade-old rule against all cellphone use. The current regulations include cabbies who talk while wearing a hands-free headset, but the TLC says it’s tired of the ban being violated.

“The time has come to put an end to cellphone abuse once and for all,” said TLC commissioner and chairman Matthew Daus in a statement. “New technology–including stealthy hands-free devices–has made it difficult to enforce our current laws, and the use of cellphones by drivers has become all too prevalent.”

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Grammy judges will be listening to the upcoming award nominees online, thanks to a partnership with Yangaroo, a Canadian media-distribution start-up.

The company’s technology encrypts music files with a watermark and lets record labels share them securely with radio stations and other destinations. The watermark allows Yangaroo to identify each person who has downloaded a track, so if a song is leaked, it can trace its origin.

Cliff Hunt, Yangaroo’s operating chief, used to work in music production and management but helped to start the company in 2004 after seeing a presentation about Biopassword. The biomarker system, now called AdmitOne Security, identifies a person’s unique typing rhythm. Mr. Hunt acquired the rights to use it for music and advertising.

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Looking for obnoxious chauvinism? There’s an app for that.

Pepsi’s (PEP) Amp energy drink issued an apology for its new iPhone app, called Before You Score, which drew outrage from some female consumers who deemed the application sexist.

Amp tweeted, “Our app tried 2 show the humorous lengths guys go 2 pick up women. We apologize if it’s in bad taste & appreciate your feedback,” and even included a self-deprecating “pepsifail” hashtag.

The Before You Score app drew ire for its male-centric approach to categorizing women, calling itself “a roadmap to success with your favorite kinds of women–24, in all.”

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A new celebrity site has launched a campaign to get Tracy Morgan, a star of NBC’s “30 Rock,” on Twitter.

The site, OMGICU, encourages visitors to send their celebrity sightings, and Mr. Morgan is its most-seen subject. Its founder, Hugh Dornbush, on Tuesday created a second site, Twacy.org, to convince the comedian to get to tweeting.

Mr. Morgan “is someone who just really resonates with people, and his sense of humor and his sensibilities are so well-suited to the medium,” Mr. Dornbush said. “Once you put it on their radar, it’s been pretty easy to find people who say, ‘I would rather be living in a world where Tracy Morgan is sharing his day to day life with us.’”

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When it comes to social-networking sites, women are more plugged in than men, according to data analysis by Brian Solis, president of Silicon Valley public-relations firm Future Works.

Mr. Solis used Google (GOOG) Ad Planner to determine the gender breakdown of users signed up for the most popular social-networking sites and found that in most cases, women outnumbered men. “The point of interest that’s worth review and discussion is that in social media, women rule,” he wrote.

For example, the data show that on Facebook, 57 percent of users are women and 43 percent are men, with the same gender breakdown on Twitter and Yelp. On MySpace, it’s a whopping 64 percent female, and on the social-network-creation site Ning, 59 percent of users are women. There’s slightly more equitable gender distribution on YouTube, which is half women and half men, and professional-networking site LinkedIn has the same gender breakdown. On the photo-sharing site Flickr, women make up 55 percent of users, as they also do on FriendFeed.

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