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AFP – The Pentagon said that it would consider all options if the United States were hit by a cyber-attack as it develops the first military guidelines for the age of Internet warfare.

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AP – New York Congressman Anthony Weiner testily fended off questions Tuesday about the lewd photo sent from his Twitter account and has hired a lawyer to help him figure out how to respond.

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Mashable – Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt has announced that the search giant will launch its Groupon competitor on Wednesday, starting with Portland.
The news that Google is getting into the daily deals space is not a surprise. Google attempted and failed to acquire Groupon for $6 billion last year. A few months later, Mashable exclusively learned that Google was developing a Groupon competitor called Google Offers.

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Reuters – Twitter has acquired the team behind a small Internet company whose tools helped manage advertising campaigns on Google Inc, stepping up the microblogging site’s effort to generate revenue.

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PC Magazine – Twitter has added an easy button to “follow” a Web site or an individual, adding a twist to the traditional RSS feed.

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Reuters – A U.S. judge approved a class action settlement over Google’s Buzz social network, and awarded $500,000 to an Internet privacy group that had previously been left out of the proposed deal.

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Reuters – Apple Inc CEO Steve Jobs leaps back into the spotlight next week to showcase the iPad maker’s latest software and is widely expected to unveil an online music storage and streaming service.

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NewsFactor – In yet another example of online attacks as commentary, a hacker group has broken into the PBS site. The attack, claimed by the anonymous group LulzSec, is reportedly due to unhappiness with a documentary about WikiLeaks aired by the PBS series Frontline.

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Mashable – Google has announced that three Gmail Labs add-ons have graduated and become standard Gmail features. Starting today, users now have access to Superstars, Nested Labels and Advanced IMAP Controls as part of the regular Gmail experience. The Google Search Box lab feature, which was added in April 2009, was retired.
The Official Gmail Blog gives an overview of these labs turned features and describes how users can access them in their settings.

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AP – iTunes’ top 10 selling singles and albums of the week ending May 30, 2011:

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AP – Activision knows it’s more fun to blast on-screen enemies into oblivion with friends, so this fall it’s launching an online service for its “Call of Duty” games that’s part Facebook, part player matchmaker and part organized sports.

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Reuters – Google Inc will keep the focus of its Chrome operating system on notebooks, and has no immediate plan to make it available on tablets or to merge with its popular Android software for smartphones, said a senior executive.

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Appolicious – The long weekend is over, but while returning to work after three days off can be a bit depressing, we have a few cool apps to kick off the week. Starting out is AOL TV, which integrates services like Hulu, Netflix and local TV stations to let users keep track of everything they can see on just about every service. After that is Parkbud, an app for finding your parking spaces and keeping track of parking meters to cut the stress of receiving tickets. …

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AFP – Sony said Tuesday it plans to restore by this weekend PlayStation Network services worldwide except in Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea, after being targeted in a massive online attack in April.

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PC Magazine – Sony said Monday that the company will restore almost all of its services, including the Playstation Store, by the end of the week in the Americas, Europe, and most of Asia.

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Mashable – The number of adults in the U.S. who make phone calls over the Internet has risen exponentially in recent years.

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Mashable – Instagram users can now take advantage of hundreds of other photo effects and filters, thanks to a new feature in the app 100 Cameras in 1 [iTunes link].
100 Cameras in 1, which is available for the iPhone and iPad, [iTunes link] lets users to apply various effects (and layer effects) onto photographs either stored on the device’s camera roll or taken directly from the device itself.

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Mashable – 3D is no longer exclusive to movie studios. If you can scrape together two camcorders, some sticky tape and access to a hooked-up computer, you’re just a few steps away from making your own three-dimensional cinematic works of art.
This is largely thanks to YouTube’s free online 3D Editor suite. Mashable spoke to Samuel Kvaalen, YouTube software engineer who helped develop the product. Kvaalen told us why the video-sharing company created the tool in the first place: “The idea was trying to make creating 3D videos accessible to as many users as possible in a simple, easy manner.”

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Mashable – THQ has found a way to glom on to Zynga’s popular “-Ville” franchises without impinging on any copyrights with a new social game, Margaritaville Online.
The game, “inspired by the lifestyle of author and singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett,” according to a THQ release, and based on the 1977 hit song, will hit Facebook and iOS devices this fall. The release describes the game as “an immersive 3D paradise, filled with frozen concoctions, music and adventure.”

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Reuters – In a country where being connected is seen as crucial, Ushi, China’s answer to LinkedIn, expects explosive growth over the next few years in the world’s largest Internet market.

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AFP – An English local authority said it had forced Twitter to hand over users’ details after it took the US microblogging site to court in California, in what is believed the first case of its kind in Britain.

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AFP – Like tens of millions of others, US technology writer Nicholas Carr found the lure of the worldwide web hard to resist — until he noticed it was getting harder and harder to concentrate.

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AP – China’s e-commerce giant is stepping up its heated rivalry with bricks-and-mortar retailers with the launch of a five-story home furnishings showroom in Beijing.

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AFP – With the announcement of “Google Wallet” the Internet giant became the first player to dash into a future where people use smartphones as credit cards, but rivals are expected to cut its lead short.

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Mashable – The Hangover Part II made its debut on the big screen this weekend, and along with it, made an appearance in Mike Tyson’s iPhone game in a Warner Bros. promotion for the film.
Specifically, a free update to the game (Mike Tyson’s Main Event [iTunes link]) features the ability to fight Mr. Chow (played in The Hangover Part II by Ken Jeong) in Bangkok (where the film is set), watch the full trailer within the app and buy tickets.

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Reuters – An Egyptian administrative court fined ousted President Hosni Mubarak and two former officials 540 million Egyptian pounds ($91 million) on Saturday for cutting mobile and Internet services during protests in January.

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Mashable – Google just made it a lot easier to quickly look up flight information. Now you can type “flights from [a city] to [another city] in the Google search window, and it’ll quickly display a summary of flight information right there on the results page.
Could it get any easier? We tested this new feature that was announced Friday on Google’s Inside Search blog, and it works beautifully, especially if you’re talking about major cities.

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Mashable – Rajat Paharia is the founder and chief product officer at Bunchball. You can follow him on Twitter @Bunchball and read his blog.
Gamification, or the use of game mechanics in non-gaming contexts, has quickly made its way into the lexicon of the marketing and tech world. Companies in every industry imaginable are trying to tap into this powerful new strategy for influencing and motivating their customers, employees and fans.

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AFP – Internet technology will blend with coveted vintages next week to open a premier Napa Valley wine country charity auction to the world.

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NewsFactor – While Google was outlining Google Wallet for mobile payments, PayPal was readying a lawsuit against the search giant. eBay-owned PayPal filed suit against Google and two executives for allegedly stealing trade secrets that helped Google develop Google Wallet and push for a piece of the multibillion-dollar mobile-payments pie.

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NewsFactor – Even before a court decides whether Amazon.com can sell apps for Android devices and call it an app store, the biggest U.S. online retailer opened a second front this week by offering downloadable software for Apple’s Macintosh computers.

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AP – Internet phone service Skype says a small percentage of its 170 million users have been unable to sign in to its service, a problem that it expects to fix with a software update.

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Mashable – How many times each day are you distracted by social media, email or instant messages?
According to a recent survey from social email software provider harmon.ie, you and other employees are blowing $10,375 in productivity each year, and all because we don’t disconnect from an online chat quickly enough, or we get sidetracked by a bulging email inbox, or we fall into a Facebook hole of photos, updates and messages.

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AP – Google Inc.’s ambitious plan to supplant credit cards with smartphones has thrust the Internet search leader into a legal tussle with online payment pioneer PayPal, which contends Google stole its ideas by hiring away two key executives.

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Appolicious – Newish rumored details are emerging concerning Apple’s answer to Google Music, a cloud-based music service that could make users’ music collections better.

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AP – Thai authorities said Friday they arrested an American citizen on charges he insulted the country’s monarchy, in part by posting a link on his blog four years ago to a banned book about the Southeast Asian nation’s ailing king.

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AP – Sony has begun restoring access to its PlayStation Network and Qriocity movie and music service in Japan and elsewhere in Asia. The company shut down the services in April after a massive security breach that affected more than 100 online accounts.

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NewsFactor – Let Google rejoice and Bing and Yahoo Search hope for the best. Online advertising revenues in the U.S. alone hit $7.3 billion in the first quarter. That’s a 23 percent increase over the year-ago period, according to new figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

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AFP – Google on Friday rejected a charge that it swiped PayPal trade secrets to build its new mobile application that turns a smartphone into an electronic wallet.

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Mashable – Many music fans were disappointed by Google Music Beta, the cloud-based locker that the company released at Google I/O this year — in particular because it lacks the ability to purchase music and stream seamlessly without uploading. Now it seems Google was prepared to offer big bucks to make a more robust notion.
Bloomberg Businessweek is reporting that Google was ready to shell out $100 million to the four major labels — up front — for licenses. However, those negotiations fell apart because of “the music industry’s concern that search results in Google and YouTube often point to pirated music.”

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PC Magazine – It might be a little late for a Memorial Day getaway, but Google has begun adding flight schedules to its search results.

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AFP – A Tunisian court has ordered the Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI) to block all pornographic websites, which became accessible after the lifting of censorship in January, the media said on Friday.

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Appolicious – The Wall Street Journal continues to deliver the news in forms cooler than that dead-end paper product. Check out their phone-only app release below. Just when you think the only giant powerful corporations control the mobile industry, a streaming music “little guy” arrives with a cool update. And just for fun, help a busy bee on his appointed rounds.

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PC Magazine – Surprise, the rumored iTunes cloud service will mimic the abilities of Lala, which Apple acqiured in 2009.

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AFP – China’s military has set up an elite Internet security task force tasked with fending off cyberattacks, state media reported on Friday, denying that the initiative is intended to create a “hacker army”.

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Reuters – The proliferation of smartphones in South Korea is transforming this former “walled garden” ruled by local players into one of Asia’s most promising destinations for global Internet and social networking firms.

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AFP – Within hours of the unveiling of “Google Wallet,” eBay and PayPal filed a lawsuit charging the Internet giant tapped into trade secrets for the mobile payments project.

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Reuters – EBay and its online payment unit, PayPal Inc, on Thursday sued Google Inc and two executives for stealing trade secrets related to mobile payment systems.

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Mashable – When’s the last time you got something just because you asked for it? That’s the premise behind Wish Upon a Hero, an online platform that allows anyone to post — or grant — a wish.
It’s an interesting experiment in crowdsourced social good. After registering, anybody can post a wish for anything, whether it’s for a positive goal like sending a terminally ill child to camp or simply asking for help with rent. It is then up to the community at large to decide if and who it should help.

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Reuters – Jimmy Buffett has partnered with THQ to bring “Margaritaville Online” to Facebook and iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) this fall, but attendees of E3 in Los Angeles will get a first look at the game. The casual online video game is targeting Buffett’s devoted followers, known as Parrotheads, along with the 45 million Facebook gamers who play FarmVille.

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