The European Commission reportedly has decided to accept an e-book pricing settlement that includes Apple and four publishers -- Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette and Macmillan's parent company, Holtzbrinck. The ruling, which has not yet been confirmed by the EC, is a win for Amazon and ...

TECH TREK

Google Maps Loses Its Way in China

Google Maps' mobile app reportedly is losing market share to local competition in China. Statistics from the third quarter show that Google Maps has lost almost half its market share since the second quarter -- from 17.5 percent to 9.5 percent -- and fell to No. 6 from No. 2 among mobile map apps. A...

A man in Melbourne, Australia, won a defamation case against Google over the search engine's image results. The plaintiff, Michael Trkulja, reportedly contacted Google in 2009 requesting that the site remove images linking him to former meth kingpin Tony Mokbel. Google used the innocent disseminatio...

In a meeting with Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, French President Francois Hollande urged the search giant to reach an advertising-revenue agreement with French news publishers before 2013. If no agreement is reached, then France could adopt a law that would charge search engines like Googl...

Google on Wednesday threw open the doors of its Lenoir, N.C. data center to the public, posting a virtual tour of the facility on Street View. Meanwhile, a detailed story about the facility by author Stephen Levy, who toured the data center by invitation, has been published. Add to that a new sectio...

TECH TREK

UK Blocks Extradition of UFO-Seeking Hacker

Gary McKinnon, a 46-year-old British computer hacker who admits to accessing U.S. government computers in 2002, will not be extradited to the U.S. UK home secretary Theresa May reportedly said that McKinnon was "seriously ill" and that the extradition request should be withdrawn. McKinnon says he ha...

OPINION

The United States of Google

I was watching "The Daily Show" the other night and Jon Stewart walked through the failures of the Obama administration, concluding that anyone who did this badly couldn't be reelected if not for the Democrats' secret weapon. He then showed Mitt Romney as that secret weapon, along with a number of t...

Facebook is making changes to its search function by adding a user's search history within the social network to the Activity Log, the company said. The tweaks, while still relatively minor at this point, could be part of more large-scale efforts to strengthen Facebook's search presence and compete ...

Google has announced it's testing a new service that will include relevant information from a user's personal Gmail account when that person types in a query on the company's basic search page. Google said the service is meant to further integrate the company's Web presence and its many functions, i...

Twitter has given its site an overhaul designed to simplify its search functions and provide users with suggestions when they're unsure of an exact handle or hashtag. The site's upgraded search results will now more closely resemble those of a Google search. Now when users begin typing a search term...

Google announced Monday that it had received more than 1,000 requests from authorities to take down content from its search results and YouTube video service during the past six months. Google has characterized this as an "alarming trend." The company also released its twice-yearly Transparency Rep...

Google unveiled new features to its mapping technology Wednesday, including an offline mobile version of Google Maps and 3D enhancements to Google Earth. The announcement comes just before Apple is expected to drop Google Maps from its built-in mapping application on the iOS platform and pursue adva...

Google users in China will now be notified when they are using search terms that could trigger Internet blocks set up by the country's government. This new feature is perhaps Google's boldest move yet in a censorship battle with Beijing that has been going on for two years. On Thursday the search gi...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

DCAC: A Field Day for the Heat

"Domestic Communications Assistance Center" is the kind of name you'd give to a couples counseling collective. At the FBI, though, it's the name that's been given to an agency designed to be at the cutting edge of digital snooping. The mission of the DCAC, located at the FBI facility in Quantico, Va...

Yahoo on Thursday launched Axis, a new mobile browser and plug-in. It lets users begin a search on a desktop and continue on iPhones and iPads, or vice versa. It also offers a faster, smarter search with instant answers and visual previews. Axis is offered both as a standalone mobile browser for iOS...

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