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Reuters – Google Inc said on Monday it has launched a new service for people in Egypt to send Twitter messages without requiring an Internet connection, amid widespread anti-government protests in the country.

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Reuters – Baidu Inc breezed past Wall Street financial targets in the fourth quarter as the No. 1 Internet search engine in China benefited from a sharp increase in advertising spending by its customers.

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AFP – Chinese Web search engine Baidu, which has strengthened its grip on the Chinese market amid Google’s troubles with the authorities, said Monday that net profit nearly tripled in the fourth quarter.

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AFP – Google, in response to the Internet blockade in Egypt, said Monday that it had created a way to post messages to microblogging service Twitter by making telephone calls.

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AP – Baidu.com Inc., which operates China’s leading search engine, said Monday that its fourth-quarter profit more than tripled to surpass Wall Street expectations, sending shares higher in after-hours trading.

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AFP – Egypt’s last working Internet service provider, the Noor Group, went down on Monday, a US Web monitoring company said, leaving the crisis-torn country completely offline.

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NewsFactor – The media revolution that is the Egyptian uprising is now going back to the future. Since Internet access was largely shut down shortly after the current protests began, older technology is helping to get the word out.

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Reuters – AOL has teamed with Mark Burnett, publisher John Wiley & Sons and independent film production firm Coalition Films to co-develop a series of comedic video shorts based on the CliffsNotes Literature Guides.

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NewsFactor – As the tablet wars heat up, the newest version of Google’s open-source Android operating system — version 3.0, or Honeycomb — could become a major factor. That new OS, which is optimized for tablets, will be formally unveiled Wednesday at the search giant’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

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PC World – A U.S. court has shut down an online operation that allegedly posed as the U.S. government and charged customers fees between US$200 and $2,500 for immigration processing fees at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, although the operation was not affiliated with the agency, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced Monday.

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PC World – ARM is offering two new processors — the Cortex-R5 and Cortex-R7 — which will help next-generation smartphones and tablets take better advantage of increasing mobile broadband speeds, the company said on Monday.

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PC World – With the last IPv4 addresses about to be allocated, the good news is that IT managers — at least in the U.S. and Europe — don’t suddenly have to get the next Internet Protocol working.

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Mashable – With the Internet still inaccessible for the majority of people in Egypt, much of the international community is relying on journalists with satellite phones for real-time updates on the violent protests calling for Hosni Mubarak to resign after 30 years in power.

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AFP – Mobile applications downloaded from online stores will be a $58 billion worldwide business by 2014, as tablet computers such as Apple’s iPad stoke the surging market, a new study said Monday.

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Reuters – Iranians have found their access to major news websites even more restricted than usual as more foreign sites were blocked by a government filter, Reuters witnesses observed on Monday.

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AP – One of Indonesia’s best-known pop stars was sentenced Monday to 3 1/2 years behind bars after sex tapes with his celebrity girlfriends found their way to the Internet, riveting and dividing this predominantly Muslim nation.

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PC Magazine – Internet and SMS access in Egypt remained spotty or non-existent Monday. Though one provider appears to be live, those without access to this ISP are reportedly turning to more old-school options – from dial-up Internet to paper leaflets.

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AFP – Chinese censors are blocking online discussion and sanitising news reports about the unrest in Egypt, in a sign of official unease that the uprising could fuel calls for reform at home.

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Mashable – Online dating site Plentyoffish was hacked last week, and e-mails, usernames and passwords of users were compromised, Plentyoffish CEO Markus Frind reveals in a blog post.

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PC World – Chinese PC maker Lenovo has broken ground on a new operations center in southwestern China that will produce computers, as well as bolster the company’s research efforts in mobile Internet.

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PC World – Here at Viral Views headquarters (in the basement of PCWorld, next to the water heater), we are constantly searching the Internet to find things of interest. They can be weird, wacky, cool, or all of the above. So here we present to you this week’s Internet discoveries, all for your entertainment. We hope you enjoy these Viral Views.

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AP – Up in rural northern Vermont, it took until the 1960s to run power lines to some towns — decades after the rest of America got turned on.

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AFP – The scale of Egypt’s crackdown on the Internet and mobile phones amid deadly protests against the rule of President Hosni Mubarak is unprecedented in the history of the web, experts said.

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PC World – In the wake of the FCC decision to approve a basic framework of net neutrality rules, the battle rages. While Internet providers like Verizon file preemptive challenges to regulations that haven’t even taken effect yet, Netflix chimes in to defend net neutrality, and the political strife in Egypt provides a poignant illustration of how important it is for the Internet to be free and open.

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PC Magazine – If you couldn’t access your email on your BlackBerry this morning, you weren’t alone. RIM’s BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) experienced a brief outage early Saturday.

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PC Magazine – The Verizon iPhone 4 is getting closer. So close, that Verizon has posted a pre-order countdown clock on its Web site.

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AFP – The word “Egypt” was censored Saturday by several micro-blogging sites in China, where the ruling Communist Party is wary of issues of political reform, demands for democracy and disturbances to public order, including overseas.

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AP – PayPal is making more changes to its online payment service in India, saying it will begin restricting the size of payments to merchants in India because of new rules from the Reserve Bank of India.

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Mashable – Online fraud and related crime is on the rise, affecting more lives and costing individuals and businesses more money year after year.

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AP – In its effort to silence protesters, Egypt took a step that’s rare even among authoritarian governments: It cut off the Internet across the entire country.

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Reuters – The U.S. Justice Department’s review of Google Inc’s planned acquisition of airline ticketing software company ITA Software is focusing on making sure ITA’s products remain available, even to Google’s rivals, according to a source close to the deal.

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AP – The nation’s largest cable TV company, Comcast Corp., was set to take control of NBC Universal on Friday after the government shackled its behavior in the coming years to protect online video services such as Netflix and Hulu.

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AFP – The US state of Connecticut said Friday it would hold negotiations with Google over the collection of private wireless data by its Street View mapping cars and not take the Internet giant to court.

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AFP – An Internet blockade in Egypt inspired Google on Friday to provide an improved tool for tracking access to the firm’s popular websites.

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PC World – Yes, Data Privacy Day exists, in case you weren’t aware, and Google is trumpeting the special occasion with comforting words on its Public Policy Blog. You may find it odd that Google is banging the privacy drum — after all, the search giant is a personal-information-collecting brute, a company routinely excoriated by consumer advocates and government officials for its lackadaisical attitude toward personal privacy.

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AFP – The Egyptian government’s unprecedented shutdown of Internet access came under fire on Friday from the White House, social networking giants and digital rights groups.

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PC World – When Google sneezes, the Internet catches a cold. Or so it seems with Searchzilla’s latest tinkering with its super secret algorithm to squeeze spam out of its search results. The company announced two weeks ago it would be launching a new offensive on spammers and this week it made good on its promise. There’s a question, though, whether or not innocent webmasters might be collateral damage in Google’s quest to quell spam.

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PC World – Reading the news of Egypt’s Internet crackdown, CIOs around the world may be wondering how their companies would fare if such a situation happened in their home countries.

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PC World – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called on the Egyptian government to restore communications in the country after reports that officials there had ordered Internet service providers to shut down outside traffic in response to ongoing protests.

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Macworld – Showing products online is typically a flat, 2D affair. The ability to create interactive 3D and 360-degree photographs of objects isn’t new, but properly lighting, capturing, and combining the numerous images needed for an interactive animation is a daunting and expensive task.

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PC World – Through its broad attempt to shut down Internet communications, Egypt’s government has not only successfully blocked Twitter but also significantly limited access to Facebook, Yahoo and Google, as it scrambles to squelch political unrest.

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Reuters – The Federal Communications Commission filed on Friday to dismiss challenges to its new Internet traffic rules, an agency official said.

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AFP – Agence France-Presse (AFP) plans to build up its brand image by boosting its Internet presence with a news website and on platforms such as the iPad, its chief executive Emmanuel Hoog said.

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AP – The Federal Communications Commission is asking a federal appeals court to dismiss two legal challenges to its new “network neutrality” regulations. Those rules, adopted by the agency last month, prohibit phone and cable companies from interfering with traffic on their broadband networks.

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Macworld – Miraizon has announced Cinematize 3 Pro, an upgrade of its DVD clip extractor and converter. The software lets users extract audio and video clips from DVDs and save them in formats compatible with popular applications and devices, including QuickTime, iMovie, Final Cut Pro, iDVD, DVD Studio Pro, Keynote, PowerPoint, iTunes, and iPods, iPhones, and YouTube.

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AFP – Egypt’s four main Internet service providers (ISPs) cut off international access to their customers in a near simultaneous and unprecedented move, an Internet monitoring company said.

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Reuters – Amazon.com founder and Chief Executive Jeff Bezos trimmed his stake in the world’s biggest online retailer on New Year’s Eve, a regulatory filing showed on Friday, a day after it reported quarterly results.

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AP – British police arrested five people Thursday on suspicion of involvement in recent cyber attacks conducted by an Internet hacking group that has backed WikiLeaks, and in a coordinated action U.S. authorities issued 40 search warrants in America.

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AP – About a half-hour past midnight Friday morning in Egypt, the Internet went dead.

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Appolicious – Coffee is great, but sometimes store gift cards can be a hassle to track. The new Starbucks Card Widget lets you manage your Starbucks card right over your Android phone. Need more to download? Radio.com streams Internet radio from over 600 CBS owned stations, and Rest Wise sports cool features for hardcore athletes.

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