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AFP – After years of lurking in the literary wilderness, the e-book market has exploded with online retailer Amazon.com’s digital volumes recently overtaking sales of their hardcover counterparts.

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AFP – Computer security researcher Barnaby Jack jokes that he has resorted to hiding cash under his bed since figuring out how to crack automated teller machines remotely using the Internet.

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AFP – Google does not know if the Chinese authorities were behind a disruption in the company’s services on Thursday, chief executive Eric Schmidt said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

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NewsFactor – After assuming the worst with its China operations, Google on Thursday evening backed off accusations of censorship in the communist nation. Google said earlier Thursday that the Chinese government was blocking its search engine, Google Mobile, and Google Ad products. Google also said its news and image services were being “partially blocked.”

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PC World – A legal battle is brewing between Microsoft and Google for control of Japan’s lucrative search market.

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Ben Patterson – Rumors of a BlackBerry tablet are heating up by the day, with Bloomberg now claiming that the BlackPad — yes, the BlackPad — will arrive in November, complete with an iPad-size screen and the ability to connect to the Internet via either Wi-Fi or your Bluetooth-connected BlackBerry.

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Ben Patterson – Take an iPod Touch, add Wi-Fi and an Internet-calling app like Skype, and you’ve pretty much got a phone, right? Now comes word that Sprint could be prepping a cradle for the Touch that acts as a portable hotspot, good for keeping the iPod in a Wi-Fi cloud when Sprint 3G coverage is available.

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Macworld.com – Amazon on Thursday released significant upgrades to its Kindle app for iPhone and iPad. Just days after the company announced the new Kindle 3, Amazon’s made the iOS version of its e-reader even more competitive with its hardware device: The app now includes a dictionary with 250,000 entries, adds the ability to search within books on the iPad, and improves the experience of searching books on the iPhone and iPod touch.

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AP – Invasion of privacy in the Internet age. Expanding the reach of law enforcement to snoop on e-mail traffic or on Web surfing. Those are among the criticisms being aimed at the FBI as it tries to update a key surveillance law.

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Mashable – Rob Howard is the CTO/founder of enterprise collaboration software company Telligent.

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AP – Australia’s government expanded its ambitious plan to bring broadband to much of the vast country, adding 300,000 homes and businesses to the coverage area Friday in hopes of winning votes in next month’s federal election.

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PC Magazine – Addressing an audience at the company’s annual financial analyst meeting in Redmond, Microsoft COO Kevin Turner announced that a beta for Internet Explorer 9, the latest version of its popular browser, will be available fore download this September.

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AFP – The Australian government Friday committed to expanding its fibre broadband Internet network to a further 300,000 homes across the vast island continent if re-elected at next month’s polls.

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AP – Researchers have uncovered new ways that criminals can spy on Internet users even if they’re using secure connections to banks, online retailers or other sensitive Web sites.

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AP – Google Inc. triggered a false alarm Thursday by posting a notice that its search engine and several other services had been cut off from mainland China – a key market where the company has been locked in a high-profile battle over online censorship.

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PC World – Google’s search engine in China appeared to have been partially blocked overnight Thursday, but a Google spokeswoman said the service was up and running again by Friday morning local time.

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Reuters – Google Inc said its earlier report that Internet search services in China were being fully blocked could have been the result of a technical glitch that overstated the problem.

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PC World – Smartphones, tablet PCs and other wireless devices are poised to play a greater role in health care as doctors and patients embrace the mobile Internet, panelists at a mobile health technology conference in Boston said Thursday.

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Reuters – Google Inc said its Web search and mobile services in China were blocked on Thursday, weeks after Beijing agree to extend the company’s Chinese webpage license.

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AFP – Former US spy master and retired general Michael Hayden warned on Thursday that the country’s “cyber flank” was exposed and it was losing clout to influence rules of war on the Internet.

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Reuters – Online travel agency Expedia Inc on Thursday reported a higher-than-expected profit as travel bookings rose, boosting its shares 2 percent.

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PC World – I purchased the RegWork Windows Registry cleaner online but lost my Internet connection before I could download it.

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Reuters – A court in Russia’s far east has ordered an Internet provider to block five sites which it said disseminated extreme views, prompting U.S. Internet giant Google to say on Thursday the move restricted access to information.

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AFP – The White House wants to give the FBI easier access to the Internet activity of suspects without a court order, the Washington Post reported Thursday.

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AFP – A Chinese court has jailed the webmasters of three Uighur-language Internet sites who were detained following deadly ethnic unrest in China’s Xinjiang region last year, Radio Free Asia said Thursday.

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Ben Patterson – Heard about the new, smaller Kindle? My fellow tech blogger Chris Null had the scoop Wednesday night, and I was recently lucky enough to spend some hands-on time with Amazon’s lighter, pared-down e-reader. After playing with it for a few minutes, I’m pretty sure I want one.

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AFP – Austrian online betting company bwin announced Thursday it had signed a merger agreement with British rival PartyGaming.

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AP – President Barack Obama said Thursday that the racial firestorm that led to the ouster of a black Agriculture Department official was a “phony controversy” generated by the media. He said his administration overreacted by forcing her out.

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Mashable – This series is supported by Ben & Jerry’s Joe, Ben & Jerry’s new line-up of Fair Trade and frozen iced coffee drinks. Learn more about it here.

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Mashable – Maria Ogneva is the Director of Social Media at Attensity, a social media engagement and voice-of-customer platform that helps the social enterprise serve and collaborate with the social customer. You can follow her on Twitter at @themaria or @attensity360, or find her musings on her personal blog and her company’s blog.

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AP – Vietnam has banned the advertisement of online games and restricted access after several cases in which young people committed murder or robbery to get money to pay to play, an official said Thursday.

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PC World – Zynga, the online gaming company best known for its Farmville Facebook game, has received a US$150 million investment from Japanese Internet company Softbank.

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AFP – The Internet has undergone a key upgrade that promises to stop cyber criminals from using fake websites that dupe people into downloading viruses or revealing personal data.

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Christopher Null – How do you know how fast your Internet connection is? You probably just trust that your ISP is giving you the bandwidth you’re paying for and go on your merry way.

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NewsFactor – Though the Dell Streak took its inaugural bows on Telefonica’s O2 network in the United Kingdom early last month, U.S. consumers are still waiting to get their hands on the hybrid tablet-smartphone. Despite a large volume of pre-orders on the company’s web site, Dell has yet to announce pricing or provide a firm U.S. launch date.

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AP – HULU PLUS: Hulu, the website with shows from ABC, Fox and NBC, is now available as an app for iPhones, iPod Touches, iPads and Samsung Internet-connected TVs. High-definition shows look great even on big TVs, and the iPhone version works over the cellular network.

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AP – WikiLeaks’ editor-in-chief claims his organization doesn’t know who sent it some 91,000 secret U.S. military documents, telling journalists that the Web site was set up to hide the source of its data from those who receive it.

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AP – An online parody of a Jay-Z hit that swaps New York’s metropolis for a modest Welsh port town has won hundreds of thousands of fans, the director of the spoof said Wednesday.

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Reuters – Amazon.com said its best-selling Kindle device was currently out of stock, leading one Internet analyst to surmise the online retailer was poised to launch a new version.

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Reuters – CBS entertainment president Nina Tassler said on Wednesday the top-rated TV network was “restless, motivated and paranoid” about developing new shows and looking increasingly to social networking and the Internet for its next big hits.

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Reuters – Hackers replaced a “Book of the Dead” with neo-Nazi slogans and symbols on World War Two concentration camp Buchenwald’s website (www.buchenwald.de) on Wednesday and completely erased the Mittelbau Dora camp website.

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AP – IAC/InterActiveCorp reported stronger second-quarter revenue Wednesday, citing growth in its search and Match online dating businesses. Net income fell, however, because the comparison quarter a year ago included a bump from the sale of its Match Europe operations.

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Macworld.com – Microsoft has started rolling out more details about Office 2011, the upcoming upgrade of its productivity suite. On Wednesday, the company posted a brief video on its Mac Mojo blog showing off a few of the suite’s new features.

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Macworld.com – If you casually surf the Internet for chuckles, you’ve probably come across at least one Cracked.com article.

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AFP – Japan’s fair trade watchdog said Wednesday it saw no monopoly problem with a search alliance between top Internet portal Yahoo! Japan and Google, Kyodo News reported.

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AFP – Google is holding talks with online game developers as part of its bid to build a social-networking service that could compete with Facebook, The Wall Street Journal reported.

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PC World – It seems only a matter of time before the Internet’s version of Clash of the Titans occurs between Google and Facebook.

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The Upshot – Presidents stop at lots of random places to shake hands and pose for pictures — like sub shops in Edison, N.J. No one seems to mind that. But one of Obama’s other pit stops Wednesday has prompted much hand-wringing debate …

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PC World – Next week may see the debut of the Blackberry 6 operating system running on a brand new slider phone, suggested by an upcoming press announcement. Many sites and blogs are getting excited about invitations from Research In Motion and AT&T for an event in New York City on August 3. The event invitation doesn’t say much, but its timing lines up with previous rumors that the Blackberry Bold 9800 would debut this summer.

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AP – PayPal, the online payment unit of Internet commerce firm eBay Inc., is planning to break into the Japanese market — the first time it has entered a region without eBay’s powerful auction business.

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