The strike call followed two Net boycotts staged on Sunday in protest at the high cost of getting online in the UK and France.

And a coalition of 13 free speech and scientific organisations have launched an e-mail campaign to free two jailed Chinese scientists charged with using the Internet to try to overthrow the government.

Wassenaar worries

The one-day strike was targeting the Wassenaar Arrangement, which limits arms exports. Its 33 member nations - including the US, Germany, Japan and the UK - agreed on 3 December to extend export controls to encryption products generally available to the consumer.

One measure of the degree of security of scrambled e-mails is the length of the software key needed to unlock the messages. Wassenaar restricts the length that can be exported to no more than 64 bits to try to prevent criminals from taking advantage of stronger encryption.

Civil liberties organisations say strong encryption is needed to ensure the privacy and human rights of everyone, and the security of electronic commerce.

The US had been under pressure from the software industry to lift its unilateral ban on the export of strong encryption as American business was losing out to foreign companies cashing in on the demand for such products. Instead, it has achieved the coup of persuading its competitors to fall into line with its own restrictions.

Strong encryption and human rights

Campaigners for the two imprisoned Chinese scientists said it was likely neither would be in jail if strong encryption had been available to them.

Lin Hai, a Shanghai software engineer, was arrested in March after sending 30,000 Chinese e-mail addresses to an Internet pro-democracy newsletter in the US. Wang Youcai, a physicist, was taken into custody last month and charged with e-mailing documents to dissidents overseas.

An action alert is available on each of the 13 organisation's Websites urging visitors to send e-mail protests to Chinese media and government bodies calling for the scientists' release.

Telecom protesters strike out

The "cyberstrike" on Sunday in protest at local call charges in the UK appeared to have little impact on Net traffic. Most users appeared to be ignoring the boycott call - the uk.telecom newsgroup was full of messages discussing the supposed strike.

The Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications (Cut), which is planning its own Europe-wide action for next year, had initially supported the gamers organising the strike. Cut said on its Website on Monday that it had dropped this altogether when e-mails went unanswered and their site appeared to be down for long periods.

In France, the Association of Unhappy Internauts called its 24-hour strike in protest at France Telecom's charges. Like their British counterparts, the internauts would like phone charges to be on the lines of the American model of a flat monthly fee for local calls.

Politicians, including the National Assembly speaker Laurent Fabius had supported them, saying lower rates would democratise the Web and prevent it from becoming an exclusive preserve of the well-to-do.