AP - Foreign-owned hotels in China face the prospect of "severe retaliation" if they refuse to install government software that can spy on Internet use by hotel guests coming to watch the summer Olympic games, a U.S. lawmaker said Tuesday. -- read full article
CNET - Google wouldn't be Google without its ownership of the estimated $10.4 billion annual search advertising market. But other ad-technology hopefuls are still angling for ways to take a few million or billion dollars off the top for themselves--just like Microsoft and Yahoo. -- read full article
PC World - New search engine Cuil seems to be off to a rocky start, associating some unrelated logos and photos with other content. -- read full article
Reuters - Word-wise game players lost a
popular online diversion on Tuesday as the creators of a
knock-off of the game Scrabble cut off service in North America
in the face of a lawsuit by game maker Hasbro Inc.
AFP - Foreign reporters will not have complete access to the Internet during the Beijing Olympics, Games organisers said Wednesday, reversing a pledge to bring down the Chinese firewall of censorship.
PC World - The European Environmental Agency and Microsoft have built a Web portal showing the water quality ranking for 21,000 sites... -- read full article
PC World - Journalists connecting to the Internet at the Beijing International Media Center are discovering China is still blocking... -- read full article
Reuters - The United States will launch a pilot
scheme on Friday which will require travelers covered by its
visa waiver programme to get prior Internet authorization
before boarding flights to America. -- read full article
NewsFactor - The latest search war is being touted as a David and Goliath battle. In modern-day terms, that means Cuil versus Google. -- read full article
NewsFactor - In response to demands from game publisher Hasbro, Facebook has disabled the Scrabble-like game Scrabulous on its U.S. and Canadian Web sites. -- read full article
PC World - Microsoft has released an API that allows Web sites to send location information to GPS navigation devices as part of an... -- read full article
AP - Billionaire investor T. Boone Pickens has sold all of his holdings in Yahoo Inc. in a pique over the way the Internet company's management handled sales talks with Microsoft Corp.
Reuters - A fifth of U.S. television viewers are
putting down their remote controls and clicking on a mouse
instead to watch primetime programs online -- particularly
professional women, according to a new survey. -- read full article
AP - The creators of a Scrabble knockoff responsible for countless hours at the online hangout Facebook suspended their word game Tuesday after being hit with a lawsuit, disappointing fans who logged on expecting to make their next moves.
