Reuters - The husband of Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez said he was attacked by government supporters as he waited on Friday to confront state security agents accused of detaining and beating his wife two weeks ago.
NewsFactor - California's ban on plasma-screen televisions to reduce energy consumption could cost as much as $50 million per year in sales taxes because consumers are free to buy the sets online or in other states. "At a time when the state of California is facing its worst money crisis in history, this is going to be disastrous," said Jennifer Bemisderfer, a spokesperson for the Consumer Electronics Association, which lobbied against the ban.
AP - A lawsuit in Wisconsin is bringing a fresh challenge to the practice of paying for keywords on Google and other search engines to boost one company's link over a rival's.
PC World - For entertainment hardware companies like Sony, a thriving, all-encompassing online media store is the Holy Grail. It's a glorious balance, in which the customer buys software through the store, and therefore becomes hooked on the hardware to which it's attached. That's how brand loyalty is created.
AFP - Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's blood and brain went on sale Friday for 15,000 euros (22,000 dollars) on online auction website eBay, before the company pulled the ad posted by an anonymous seller.
NewsFactor - On Friday, Cloud Engines released its newest version of the Pogoplug, a small "multimedia sharing device" that connects hard drives to the Internet and allows a user to access the files remotely. The company described Pogoplug as "your own personal cloud that broadcasts safely from your home."
AFP - A US judge set February 18 for a hearing on the revised legal settlement between Google and US authors and publishers that would allow the Internet giant to scan and sell millions of books online.
PC World - Have some extra USB hard drives you'd like to put to a good use? How using them to create an Internet storage cloud for your company, yourself, or your family?
AFP - Cisco on Friday announced the release of a free iPhone application for anyone who wants to stay on top of the latest trojans, worms, or other threats marauding on the Internet.
PC World - Facebook can be a dangerous beast. As social media evolves -- and the freedom of the Internet diminishes our self-censorship -- many have run into situations where Facebook has landed them in trouble and sometimes canned from a gig. It has been established that some companies scrutinize employee and potential employee Facebook pages to ensure what it's getting isn't tarnished by bad behavior such as playing hooky or being loose-tongued about one's feelings about work. The latest example is a little trickier: a Canadian woman saw her health benefits stripped away after the insurance company saw "happy" pictures of her on Facebook.
PC World - In a step to make YouTube videos more accessible to deaf people as well as to anyone else searching for videos online, Google has launched an automatic video captioning service.
PC World - The judge in the copyright infringement case pitting the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) against Google and its book search program has set a date for the final hearing on the parties' controversial settlement proposal.
AFP - Sony Corp. aims to launch next year a new online service that will allow people to download content such as music and movies to their televisions and other electronic gadgets, a top executive said Friday.
Reuters - Scottish singer Susan Boyle, one of the biggest stars of the Internet age, seeks to turn global celebrity into record sales next week with the release of her debut album "I Dreamed a Dream."
PC World - The launch of a new search engine for a booming online retail site run by Alibaba Group, the owner of Yahoo China, is just one more sign that Taobao.com is taking over roles formerly filled at the group by Yahoo.
AP - Sony's new online service connecting the whole range of its gadgets to downloadable content like movies and games should help build brand loyalty, a top executive said Friday.
PC World - Sony is hoping to launch its planned online content service early next year and expects it will give the company an advantage in the increasingly competitive consumer electronics market, the executive heading up the project said Friday.
Reuters - Sony Corp said on Friday that its planned entertainment content distribution service for network-compatible TVs and other devices will be launched next year.
PC World - A Seattle computer security consultant says he's developed a new way to exploit a recently disclosed bug in the SSL protocol, used to secure communications on the Internet. The attack, while difficult to execute, could give attackers a very powerful phishing attack.