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AFP – China has issued regulations banning its 2.3 million soldiers from creating web sites or writing web blogs, adding to the nation’s existing Internet curbs, state press said Saturday.

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PC World – It was a week of dueling smartphones in IT news, with the iPhone 4 release and Motorola announcing Droid X. Otherwise, legal news captured headlines with the dismissal of the Viacom copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube and states saying they’ll join together to investigate Google’s data gathering from Wi-Fi networks. Some of us, though, are ready to shut off our phones and disconnect for a little vacation time.

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AP – News Corp. has sold Beliefnet, a spirituality website, to an investment group.

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AP – Pakistan will monitor seven major websites, including Google and Yahoo, to block anti-Islamic links and content, an official said Friday. Seventeen lesser-known sites are being blocked outright for alleged blasphemous material.

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AFP – Twitter said Friday that World Cup football kicked the number of “tweets” fired off at the micro-blogging service to a record high of 3,283 per second.

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AP – It may soon be easier to block Internet porn: The agency that controls domain names said Friday it will consider adding .xxx to the list of suffixes people and companies can pick when establishing their identities online.

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PC World – In keeping with Google’s enthusiasm for the emerging HTML5 standard, many upcoming features of the company’s Gmail Web-based e-mail service will be rendered in HTML5, said Adam de Boor, a staff software engineer working on the service.

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PC World – The White House is seeking comment on a draft plan for establishing a trusted identity system online, with the goal of making Internet transactions more secure and convenient.

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NewsFactor – Users of Google Chrome on Linux, Mac and Windows machines were automatically upgraded Thursday to a new browser version that addresses several security bugs and features a fully integrated Flash multimedia player for the first time. Google Vice President of Engineering Linus Upson believes browser users will benefit in several different ways from Chrome’s integration of Adobe Systems’ Flash technology for the web.

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NewsFactor – Sales of Windows 7, which Microsoft is calling “the fastest-selling operating system in history,” have reached about 150 million licenses — or about seven copies of Windows 7 sold every second. In announcing the milestone on the official Windows blog, Windows Communications Manager Brandon LeBlanc earlier this week said Microsoft’s assessment is that, including companies that are either deploying or evaluating, about 75 percent of all enterprises are “looking at Windows 7 for their organization.”

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Reuters – AOL Inc CEO Tim Armstrong wants to remake the 25-year-old company into an online media juggernaut by focusing on content creation and advertising revenue, shedding non-core assets.

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AFP – Pakistan’s government ordered the monitoring of websites including Google, Yahoo and YouTube for “anti-Islam content” Friday, an official said, as tensions over the Internet continued.

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PC World – Web site operators will be able to register domain names written entirely in Chinese characters, including the final characters to the right of the last dot, in a matter of months.

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AFP – United States fans turned to the internet and mobile devices to follow the USA’s dramatic World Cup victory over Algeria in unprecedented numbers, broadcaster ESPN said Thursday.

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AP – Furious over Internet insults of the country’s beloved founder, Turkey has gone on the offensive against Google, tightening a ban on YouTube and cutting public access to a host of Google-owned sites.

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Reuters – Pakistani authorities on Friday put seven major websites, including Google and YouTube, under watch for containing material deemed offensive to Muslims, officials said.

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AFP – Porn moved tantalisingly close to being housed on dedicated .xxx web addresses on Friday, as Internet regulators admitted past mistakes and greenlighted an online revolution also extending to Chinese-script domain names.

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AP – Chinese speakers will soon be able to tap out Internet addresses in their own language after the agency that runs Internet addresses says it will start accepting Chinese script for domain names.

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PC World – ICANN has approved XXX as a top-level domain. The adult entertainment industry will soon have its own glaringly obvious domain, but unfortunately that doesn’t necessarily mean that dot-COM domains will suddenly be porn-free.

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PC World – Google served up a record number of video clips in May to U.S. Internet users, mostly through YouTube, as for the first time each Google visitor watched an average of more than 100 clips during the month, according to comScore.

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AFP – Venture capital firm Accel Partners is pouring 11 million dollars into GetJar, an online hot spot for free mini-applications for mobile telephones.

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PC World – A U.S. Senate committee has approved a wide-ranging cybersecurity bill that some critics have suggested would give the U.S. president the authority to shut down parts of the Internet during a cyberattack.

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AP – Yahoo Inc.’s shareholders on Thursday elected two new directors nominated by the Internet company to fill vacancies on its board.

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PC World – Google disclosed in a blog post on Thursday that it remotely removed two applications from Android phones that ran contrary to the terms of the Android Market.

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AFP – Paris-based media rights watchdog Reporters Without Borders on Thursday launched a virtual “anti-censorship shelter” to protect bloggers around the world from repressive authorities.

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NewsFactor – Google has gained a victory in its long-standing $1 billion copyright battle with Viacom. A federal judge granted Google’s motion for a summary judgment in Viacom’s lawsuit involving YouTube.

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Reuters – The company that oversees Web addresses is expected to give the go-ahead on Friday for the creation of a .xxx suffix for websites with pornographic content, company officials indicated on Thursday.

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PC Magazine – The company that oversees Web addresses is expected to give the go-ahead on Friday for the creation of a .xxx suffix for websites with pornographic content, company officials indicated on Thursday.

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AFP – Google said Thursday it was assessing the impact of a new Chinese rule on web mapping services, which state media said could exclude foreign companies from providing such services in the country.

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AFP – Google said on Thursday that Internet use in Indonesia was expanding at a fast pace and was the leading emerging economy in terms of growth.

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Reuters – The United States is urging Syria to open up its markets to U.S. companies’ computers and software, but fears over piracy and Internet access restrictions are holding back American technology companies from investing there.

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Reuters – Britain could force internet service providers such as BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk to reveal whether they restrict access to some websites at peak times while favoring others, regulator Ofcom said.

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Reuters – When Kenyan graduate Roy Wachira, 25, set out to start his first business, he turned to the Internet, whose growth in the east African nation is spawning opportunities unthinkable even a year ago.

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AP – Tickets to Jimmy Buffett’s free concert to show support for the oil spill-stricken Gulf Coast were grabbed up quickly Wednesday and began showing up for sale on eBay for more than $100 each — prompting the online service to ban the sales on its site.

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Reuters – Google Inc won a landmark victory over media companies as a Manhattan federal judge threw out Viacom Inc’s $1 billion lawsuit accusing the Internet company of allowing copyrighted videos on its YouTube service without permission.

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PC Magazine – Are you following a bunch of strangers on Twitter? The micro-blogging site is making your tweeting experience a bit more friendly, with the addition of Facebook and LinkedIn to its Find Friends feature.

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PC Magazine – People are just starting to receive their new Apple iPhone 4s, and there’s already a slew of online complaints that point to what appears to be one major design flaw in the latest iPhone: holding the phone by the metal antenna band causes the signal indicator to drop.

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AFP – A Pakistani court has ordered the authorities to block access to nine websites including Google, Yahoo and YouTube for allegedly offending Muslims with blasphemous material.

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AP – YouTube’s actions spoke louder than its founders’ words when it came down to deciding whether the Internet’s most watched video site illegally exploited copyrighted clips owned by media company Viacom Inc.

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Reuters – The Google geeks have beaten Hollywood chic. But how much will Wednesday’s court ruling against Viacom in its $1 billion copyright battle over YouTube tip the balance of power from professional content creators to online distributors?

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AP – THE RULING: U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton backs Google, saying the Internet search leader won’t have to pay the more than $1 billion in damages sought by Viacom Inc. for alleged copyright violations by YouTube. Google has owned YouTube, the Web’s top video site, since 2006.

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AFP – More than 160,000 mobile phones powered by Google’s Android operating system are being sold every day, the Internet giant said Wednesday on the eve of the launch of the new iPhone from rival Apple.

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AP – Tickets to Jimmy Buffett’s free concert to show support for the oil spill-stricken Gulf Coast were grabbed up quickly Wednesday and began showing up for sale on eBay for more than $100 each — prompting the online service to ban the sales on its site.

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AFP – Russian President Dmitry Medvedev fired off his first “tweet” on Wednesday as he toured the headquarters of Twitter and other Internet stars on a mission to create a Moscow version of Silicon Valley.

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PC World – Microsoft is progressing to the next phase of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) development today with the launch of Platform Preview 3 (PP3) of the next generation Web browser. Developers can download the latest preview to get a sneak peek at what’s in store with IE9 and what new functionality Microsoft is incorporating.

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PC World – One U.S. senator questioned why search engines and Internet service providers don’t block customers’ access to pirated music and movies online, and representatives of the U.S. movie and music industries praised a new plan by President Barack Obama’s administration to crack down on intellectual property violations, during a Senate hearing Wednesday.

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PC Magazine – EBay on Wednesday acquired RedLaser, a barcode-scanning application for the iPhone, and the related technology from developer Occipital.

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NewsFactor – While Google is working on an online music service that will reportedly debut later this year, Microsoft is getting out of the gate right now with new entertainment features. The new features include streaming music from its Bing search engine.

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PC Magazine – The team at Microsoft has committed to releasing an update of their Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview every eight weeks, and so far they’ve delivered. On Wednesday, the third preview version of IE9 launches, with support for HTML 5 video and audio.

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Reuters – The company that oversees Web addresses ending in .org said on Wednesday it was introducing extra security measures to guard against identity theft.

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