Early in the week, we reported that a US judge had, at the urging of Swiss Bank Julius Baer, issued an injunction calling for the whistleblower website Wikileaks to be pulled offline. The company's domain registrar, Dynadot, responded by suspending the domain, but the decision drew criticism from all over the Internet, as many considered the effort to gag the site outright a serious free-speech issue.

On Thursday, we reported that the efforts to block access to the site had been mostly ineffective, with the site's IP address working instead of the .org extension, and the Indian and Belgian versions of the site working normally. The site's continued operation was partly due to its work with PRQ, a self-proclaimed "bulletproof" host operated by two of the founders of the BitTorrent tracking site The Pirate Bay. Having plenty of experience avoiding efforts to shut them down, the PRQ provides no-questions-asked services and maintains almost no customer information or logs.

In a somewhat related decision, it was reported earlier in the week that Danish ISP Tele2 would fight an injunction ordering it to block its users from accessing The Pirate Bay. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry says Danish Internet users are using the site to download copyrighted files, and suggests that ISPs are complicit by allowing them access to the site. Tele2, which obeyed the injunction and blocked the site, met with other ISPs and resolved to dispute the injunction.

While some website operators fight outside legal pressures to keep their sites online, others found their sites were simply down this week, as Globat experienced an outage that began late Wednesday evening and lasted most of Thursday. Commenters gathered on a DigitalPoint message board thread to share what information they could about the outage, which Globat appeared to have remedied by late afternoon on Thursday. The company reportedly offered to provide a full explanation once it had completed the more pressing task of getting its customers back online.

The unexpected events made up most of this week's most gripping news, but there were also several hotly anticipated products launched this week.

On Thursday, search giant Google launched the beta of its AdSense service for video, providing a new means for driving revenue from the Web's enormously popular video content. Some of the service's specifics are still unclear, particularly what publisher's cut for the InVideo overlay ads and text overlay ads will be, though it was reported that text ads will be PPC based and the InVideo ads will be based on a CPM rate. The beta is currently limited to US-based English language sites serving a minimum of 1 million video streams per month.

Earlier in the week, Rackspace spin-off Mosso announced that it had launched a new version of its Hosted Cloud offering. The company says the new version offers seamless scalability, making the process of scaling Web infrastructure more affordable, particularly for companies looking to deploy large Web applications. For $100 per month, The Hosting Cloud delivers 500GB of bandwidth, 50GB of disk space and three million Web requests per month. The package can be supplemented by utility-priced services for additional bandwidth, storage and extra requests.

And on Thursday, Lunarpages announced that it had upgraded its Basic and Business hosting plans to offer "unlimited hosting." The upgrade came shortly after a recent upgrade to very large allotments of storage and bandwidth for those same packages. The new update enables users to host an unlimited number of websites from their accounts. It also follows the launch of a similar "unlimited" package from Yahoo!, which is promising unlimited storage and transfer.

The biggest ongoing impact from this week's news will certainly be from the Wikileaks ruling, which is scheduled to be reviewed next Friday, February 29, and will likely see some interesting development as a result of the controversy surrounding the ruling.