AP - Google Inc.'s business ties in China unraveled a little more amid a widening backlash to the U.S. Internet company's decision to move its Chinese search engine offshore in a challenge to the country's online censorship laws.

Reuters - Best Buy Co beat profit and sales estimates in its holiday quarter, boosted by demand for notebook computers, flat-panel televisions and mobile phones.

Reuters - A virtual farm attracting up to 83 million aspiring farmers monthly has video game developers scrambling to find ways to plough the booming popularity of games on social networks.

AP - SkillSoft PLC, an education software company that has agreed to be taken private, said a proxy advisory firm RiskMetrics Group is recommending that its clients vote in favor of the company's acquisition.

AFP - India's top mobile firm Bharti Airtel was poised Thursday to seal a 10.7-billion-dollar deal to buy the African assets of Zain, giving it a presence in one of the world's least developed phone markets.

Reuters - A virtual farm attracting up to 83 million aspiring farmers monthly has video game developers scrambling to find ways to plough the booming popularity of games on social networks.

AFP - Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Thursday broke ground on a light-emitting diode plant that marks one of the company's most ambitious forays into energy-saving technologies.

AFP - IBM said Thursday it has developed a system for a Chinese mobile phone operator that blocks spam text messaging, but denied the software could be used as a censorship tool.

Macworld.com - Apple's Safari browser got hacked on both Snow Leopard and the iPhone during the first day of the annual Pwn2Own contest, where security specialists can win the hardware they successfully attack. As CNet reports, security analyst Charlie Miller won $10,000 after remotely exploiting Safari on a MacBook Pro.

Reuters - A key U.S. lawmaker expressed support on Thursday for a proposal by communications regulators to give auction proceeds to broadcasters as an incentive to give up some airwaves highly sought by wireless broadband providers.

Reuters - U.S. stocks extended gains in late-morning trade on Thursday, pushing the Nasdaq up more than 1 percent amid optimism about earnings.

AFP - YouTube was hit by an outage on Thursday with some users temporarily unable to access the popular video-sharing service.

AP - Qiao Xing Mobile Communication Co. Ltd. said Thursday that it has terminated the proposed purchase of a 40 percent stake in cell phone retailer Beijing Eversun Technology Co. Ltd.

Macworld.com - Broadcast giant CBS has long been a proponent of iPhone-viewable content: Apps like March Madness on Demand and TV.com, developed by its CBS Mobile arm, allow iPhone users to watch much of the network’s content. Now, thanks to a few enterprising Mac bloggers, we have a few hints about CBS’s plans for the iPad.

PC World - China Unicom says it is in talks with Research In Motion about offering BlackBerry devices, making it the third Chinese mobile carrier interested in the popular handsets.

PC Magazine - The annual Pwn2Own contest at CanSecWest is underway, and on the first day Web browsers fell to attack. Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.6.2 on 64-bit Windows 7 and Safari on OS X all were forced to run exploit code. To add insult to injury, an iPhone was cracked and the SMS database lifted from it.

AP - Google Inc.'s business ties in China unraveled a little more amid a widening backlash to the U.S. Internet company's decision to move its Chinese search engine offshore in a challenge to the country's online censorship laws.

AP - He's unemployed and isn't much of a computer expert. The Frenchman accused of infiltrating Twitter and peeping at the accounts of President Barack Obama and singers Britney Spears and Lily Allen says he wanted to reveal just how vulnerable online data systems are to break-ins — and he says he didn't mean any harm.

AP - THE TEST: Associated Press reporters in Beijing and Hong Kong compared searches and other features using the Hong Kong-based Google site that mainland China and the semiautonomous territory now share.

AFP - India's top mobile firm Bharti Airtel said Thursday it expected to sign a 'definitive' deal soon to buy the African assets of Zain, giving it a presence in one of the least developed phone markets.

Macworld.com - The recent passing of Apple director Jerome York has left a hole in the company’s board of directors, but it’s also revealed that the group is not quite the unified front that it’s often thought to be.

PC World - A malware attack dressed up as an e-mail from organizers of the upcoming Shanghai World Expo targeted at least three foreign journalists in China, in the latest sign of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks from the country.

InfoWorld - Open source is no longer considered the wild underdog, but it will need more new companies making money off the trend, the one-time CEO of MySQL stressed Wednesday at the EclipseCon 2010 conference.

NewsFactor - Publishers may once again be in the catbird seat with advertisers, thanks to Apple. The Wall Street Journal reports that national publishers are having no trouble signing top-tier advertisers for spots on the iPad versions of their magazines.

AP - Oracle Corp.'s profit fell 10.5 percent in the latest quarter as the business software maker absorbed Sun Microsystems and its expenses for building and supporting computer servers.

AP - The Maine House of Representatives has rejected a watered-down version of a bill to require cancer warnings on cell phones.

PC Magazine - Microsoft has scheduled a 'Project Natal for Xbox 360 Experience' press conference at the E3 show in Los Angeles on June 13. But whether it's a formal announcement or just another explanation of the technology won't be known until then.

PC Magazine - In a rather odd match-up, director James Cameron, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, and the U.S. chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra closed out this year's CTIA trade show in Las Vegas this morning in a keynote that touched on 3D, piracy, the Google-China situation, and government intervention in wireless issues.

NewsFactor - Android, 4G and large screens were among the highlights of the International Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) Wireless 2010 trade show in Las Vegas. All three were featured in two of the most-discussed new products at the show, the HTC EVO 4G and the Samsung Galaxy S.

AFP - The Wall Street Journal plans to charge 17.99 dollars a month for a subscription to the newspaper on Apple's upcoming iPad, it reported Thursday.

PC World - For the first time security researchers have spotted a type of malicious software that overwrites update functions for other applications, which could pose additional long-term risks for users.

AP - A computer hacker from Florida was sentenced Thursday to 20 years in prison for helping engineer one of the largest thefts of credit and debit card numbers in U.S. history.

Macworld.com - With a little more than a week to go before the iPad hits the pavement (figuratively speaking, of course), more details continue to surface about content providers prepping their material for consumption on the device.

Macworld.com - Electronic Arts announced earlier this week an update to their beloved SimCity franchise. SimCity Deluxe for iPhone, due out this summer, promises not only more robust game features but also a complete visual makeover. Now, the civilization you keep on your mobile device will look even better and you’ll be granted even more control over your Sims.

NewsFactor - U.S. legislators examined key aspects of the FCC's national broadband plan Thursday during testimony given by all five commissioners before the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet. The urgency to move forward was emphasized the previous day by a wireless industry executive, who warned that continued investment and innovation in broadband will depend on the adoption of a clearer regulatory system.

PC World - When is a wireless router not just a wireless router? Belkin's answer: When it's a total pain. That's why it introduced four new 802.11n Wi-Fi routers, ranging from $50 to $130, that come with a set of applications designed to help you use your wireless network for backing up, playing music and movies, setting up file transfers, and speeding up important Internet traffic without having to muck around in arcane menus

Reuters - Oracle Corp reported a higher-than-expected 13 percent jump in new software sales as a rebound in corporate technology spending boosted sales of its business computer programs.

PC World - The Apple iPad is coming, and--thanks primarily to the iPhone revolution--it is guaranteed to break out of its consumer-oriented shackles and start showing up at work. A quote from Star Trek: The Next Generation comes to mind: 'Resistance is futile.' Your business data will be assimilated.

PC World - The falling cost of text messaging is making mobile-phone users a more attractive target for spammers, according to the GSM Association. To counter this, it wants its mobile-network-operator members to 'crowd-source' spam reports from their customers to help them identify and cut off spammers abusing SMS (Short Message Service).

PC World - LG announced this Thursday that its upcoming LX9500 will be the worlds first HDTV set to combine a fully-LED-backlit LCD with 3D support.

PC Magazine - Online ad networks have seen an increase in traffic from Android-based phones, but the iPhone remains the dominant OS, according to a Thursday report from AdMob.

Macworld.com - Still running into trouble with Aperture 3, even after the recent Aperture 3.0.1 update? Not to worry, Apple has just posted yet another update for Aperture 3 users.

Reuters - Oracle Corp issued its strongest sales forecast in more than a year as a rebound in corporate technology spending boosted demand for its computer programs.

PC World - Fueled by growth in new software licenses, Oracle revenue for its fiscal third quarter, ended Feb. 28, increased 17 percent from the same period last year, hitting US$6.4 billion, though earnings declined due in part to restructuring charges incurred by the company's purchase of Sun Microsystems.

AFP - A 28-year-old Florida man who stole millions of credit card numbers in one of the biggest computer hacking operations in US history was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Thursday.

PC World - Want to know what the iPad version of your favorite magazine will cost? A report in the Wall Street Journal leaked the prices for a few publications, but we may already know more than that.

PC World - It's no secret that Netflix has been gearing up to stream movies and TV shows via the Nintendo Wii console, but now it appears the launch is near. Netflix today announced that it has shipped instant-streaming discs to some of members for testing. 'Their feedback will ensure that we deliver a great experience to everyone when we launch,' writes company spokesperson Jessie Becker on The Netflix Blog.

PC World - Though earnings season won't start in earnest until next month, financial reports and earnings forecasts from companies as varied as Adobe, Red Hat, Oracle and Qualcomm this week indicate that sales across a range of technology products are recovering from the Great Recession.

NewsFactor - Conference organizers at CanSecWest dangled the carrot in front of hackers yet again. And hackers participating in the PWN2OWN contest targeted at Internet browsers took down the latest versions of several browsers.

NewsFactor - Time Warner Cable is looking to the airwaves to maintain and build its ISP business, offering more than one million New York City subscribers access to free Wi-Fi hot spots throughout the city, beginning Thursday. And in an agreement with rival Cablevision, customers from both companies will have access to each other's Wi-Fi networks in the Tri-State area, vastly increasing the amount of available hot spots.

Macworld.com - As you may have noticed, Macworld.com has been updated with some new features and some changes to our design.