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PC Magazine – PayPal said Saturday that “Black Friday” online payments climbed by nearly a quarter compared to 2009, while overall mobile shopping increased 310 percent. The company’s parent, eBay, also released sales figures.

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Mashable – Initial numbers for Black Friday sales are in, and things are looking pretty rosy for Internet retailers.

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PC Magazine – The Web sites of American Eagle and JC Penney suffered the worst outages of the holiday season including Black Friday, with major sites such as Amazon.com succeeding perfectly, according to a site uptime survey.

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Reuters – Two Egyptian opposition pages on the social network site Facebook were deleted from the Internet ahead of Egypt’s parliamentary election on Sunday then restored after discussions with the site’s administrators, web activists who run the pages said on Friday.

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AFP – The United States has been in contact with Turkey over new files to be released on the Internet by WikiLeaks, Turkish officials said Friday, stressing Ankara’s commitment to fighting terrorism.

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Mashable – When you’re struggling with that one person on your list — the fellow or lady who has everything he or she could want and is consequently impossible to shop for — there is one typically overlooked option that’s much more thoughtful than a gift care and more useful than a tchotchke, flowers or food: philanthropy.

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AFP – Australia’s plans to build a 35 billion US dollar high-speed national broadband network overcame a major hurdle when the Senate passed a bill to restructure the country’s largest telco.

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AFP – South Korean police said Friday they had charged 22 people with spreading rumours and false information online or in text messages after North Korea shelled an island in the South, a news report said.

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AFP – Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani plans to tap the Chinese market with a new online store that opened Friday for Emporio Armani in one of the first such initiatives in China by a major fashion brand.

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PC Magazine – Google is partnering with several online retailers to offer discounts for those who complete their purchases via Google Checkout.

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PC World – The U.K.’s domain name registry is examining its policies around suspending domain names, a move occasionally undertaken in order to prevent criminal activity on the Internet.

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Mashable – I have to admit, when I walked up to Best Buy two days ago and saw two eager consumers already waiting by the front door in a camping tent, I felt a tiny bit smug.

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PC Magazine – Sony will unveil an e-book store for Android devices and the iPhone in December, according to a note on the company’s Web site.

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PC World – Hong Kong-based network operator CSL has become the first to offer mobile broadband using both LTE and the latest version of HSPA, it said in a joint statement with network vendor ZTE on Thursday.

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PC Magazine – For those who don’t want to battle the in-store crowds, Amazon is holding a large-scale Black Friday event on its Web site, combining normal holiday discounts with limited-time “lightning rounds” on select items.

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AFP – The latest generation of wireless Internet that will allow people to watch a crystal clear movie or live sporting event on the street or atop a hill is being deployed throughout Hong Kong.

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AFP – The Philippine senate has begun broadcasting live on the Internet, in keeping with President Benigno Aquino’s pledge of government transparency, officials said.

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Mashable – After taking the U.S. online store down for a couple of hours, Apple has lowered the prices on selected items for its special, one-day Black Friday shopping event.

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AP – The Australian Senate on Friday approved legislation that enables the government to roll out a 36 billion Australian dollar ($35 billion) high-speed national broadband network.

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PC World – European countries are outstripping the U.S. in terms of broadband take-up, but their broadband connections don’t match the speeds of those in Asian countries.

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Mashable – When University of the People founder Shai Reshef welcomed 16 Haitian students to their first day of class last Thursday, he told them that life might prevent some of them — as it does students in every part of the world — from completing their degrees at the free, online university.

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PC World – The U.K.’s National Health Service plans to make clearer the privacy policy of its Choices health information Web site, which shares browsing information with Facebook, following complaints from a security expert and a lawmaker, an NHS spokesman said Thursday.

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Mashable – The fact that people who make more money spend more time on computers and connected devices doesn’t come as a major surprise. Yet it’s still impressive that a full 95% of people with an income of $75,000 or more use cellphones and the Internet, according to a recent study from Pew’s Internet & American Life Project.

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Mashable – Dr. Nathan Bonilla-Warford, OD, is a licensed VSP Vision Care provider based in Tampa, Florida specializing in children’s vision, computer vision, and orthokeratology. You can visit his blog here and follow him on Twitter here.

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Reuters – Investment firm Oakley Capital has bought a 50 percent stake in magazine and travel guide publisher Time Out, attracted by the potential to exploit its strong brand online.

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AP – YouTube and top associations of French authors, filmmakers and other creative artists say they have struck an agreement to put more TV shows and movies online in France.

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Reuters – Sony Corp will re-enter Japan’s electronic book market and open an online bookstore offering 20,000 titles, almost all in Japanese, in time for the year-end shopping rush, it said on Thursday.

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AFP – A group of “crush fetishists” has caused an online storm in China after uploading graphic videos showing attractive young Chinese women crushing small rabbits.

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PC World – The Internet generation is stunningly disloyal. Brands mean very little to us. Our parents might never have bought anything other than a Ford car, or a Westinghouse refrigerator, but we switch online services without a second thought.

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AP – Cracking down on fake pot, the government began emergency action Wednesday to outlaw five chemicals used in herbal blends to make synthetic marijuana. They’re sold in drug paraphernalia shops and on the Internet to a burgeoning market of teens and young adults.

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Mashable – Around this time of the year, as many of us begin to celebrate our blessings, our thoughts turn toward those in need.

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PC World – A 19-year-old employee of a Rochester, New York, community college stole thousands of dollars from students’ online accounts because he needed the money “to find a cure for HIV,” according to investigators.

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AFP – FC Barcelona says it has attracted over seven million fans on Facebook, making it the most popular sports club on the social networking site ahead of Real Madrid and Manchester United.

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Macworld – Macworld is getting social with you, dear readers, not only to give you more ways to stay on top of the latest Apple news and reviews, but also to hear what you think. To do so, we’re launching a new series of polls on Facebook, the Internet’s largest water cooler. I posted our latest poll Tuesday to find out what your favorite new iOS 4.2 features are, and the results are in.

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PC World – Netflix moved some of its most crucial IT operations over to Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud in order to save money and gain flexibility compared to using more Oracle software and IBM iron.

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PC World – Diehard fanboys are often guilty of unruly, mean-spirited behavior, but most of these scuffles are relegated to online bulletin boards and comment threads. Not so in the case of Google devotees, who have inexplicably gone brutal — and ridiculous — in their defense of Google Street View.

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AP – A recently released Egyptian blogger who served the longest prison term in the Arab world for his writings said Wednesday that jail was a “cruel experience” but his views remain unchanged.

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PC Magazine – If you’re not sure how long that turkey should cook, what recipe you should use for green beans, sweet potato casserole, or apple pie, there are a variety of online help links.

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AFP – A Syrian court has questioned a teen blogger who was detained nine months ago on accusations of spying for the United States, rights groups said on Wednesday.

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AFP – Museum authorities at the site of the Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau on Wednesday said they were launching an online study programme to teach people about the Holocaust.

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AP – A Roman Catholic priest suspended after federal agents seized a computer from his inner-city rectory has long sought riches online, where he sports a tuxedo and calls himself “Jerry from Philly.”

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Reuters – Online spending this holiday is now expected to rise by 11 percent over last year, comScore said on Tuesday, marking the second time the analytics firm has raised its closely watched view.

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Mashable – In a society that is more connected than ever, investigative journalists that were once shrouded in mystery are now taking advantage of their online community relationships to help scour documents and uncover potential wrongs. The tools and information now available to journalists are making the jobs of investigative outlets more efficient.

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PC World – In Nigeria, South Africa and Indonesia, more than 90 percent of 18- to 27-year-olds use mobile phones as their primary means to access the Internet, even though smartphones aren’t widely used, according to a survey by Norwegian browser company Opera Software.

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PC World – This Friday millions of people will venture out in the middle of the night and brave frigid temperatures and long lines to battle for Black Friday holiday shopping bargains. Many retailers have expanded to include online promotions as well on Black Friday–including Amazon and Apple. Whether you plan to do your Black Friday shopping sitting at your PC, or join the crowds there are some inherent security concerns to watch out for.

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PC World – Days after Apple released the iOS 4.2 software update for iPhones and iPads, another update to the OS is rumored to be arriving in December, together with News Corp’s iPad-only news app. A corroborated report from Apple-centric blog MacStories claims that at some point in mid-December Apple will release iOS 4.3, which will enable publishers to charge for recurring subscriptions.

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PC Magazine – It’s Thanksgiving week, which means there are lots of retailers offering holiday sales, including Staples, which has just released its Cyber Monday online deals.

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PC Magazine – Ten years after Apple established iTunes, The Beatles were finally added to the digital music retailer’s library. About a week later, Billboard has reported strong preliminary sales figures.

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AP – Apple says people snapped up more than 450,000 copies of Beatles albums plus two million individual songs during the Fab Four’s first week on sale through iTunes.

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Appolicious – Seems we can’t get away from shopping apps this week — sure, we’ve featured a lot in the last few days, but these are just too cool to pass up. After Thanksgiving, we’ll get back to Twitter clients and to-do list apps. Today, enjoy barcode scanning, eBay style.

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