A hacker from Russian was taken into custody last week in Cyprus for two cyber attacks he is alleged to have performed against Internet giant Amazon.com. Dmitry Olegovich Zubakha was taken into custody by local and international law enforcement officials under a worldwide warrant. He was indicted back in May 2011 for attacking the Internet sites. On Saturday, the indictment was unsealed following the arrest of the Russian computer whiz. The indictment details the hacker attacks, which were denial... 

On Friday, Viacom and DirecTV came to a new seven-year agreement. The agreement makes over 20 million DirecTV subscribers very happy as they will now receive their favorite shows once again. The satellite TV provider reached the agreement to have the shows telecast from Viacom. However, the dispute’s size, scope and high profile could make all future programming battles different. The dispute between the two companies caused more than 20 million subscribers to lose 26 networks for a full nine days.... 

Social-media pioneer Digg, Inc. once considered to be valued at over $160 million is selling for a discounted price of only $500,000, said people familiar with the situation. Betaworks, a technology development company based in New York is buying Diggs. The company said it was attempting a revival of the news-sharing website that was out maneuvered by both Twitter and Facebook. On Thursday, Digg confirmed it had sold its website, technology and brand to Betaworks. The sales price is practically nothing... 

Apple has withdrawn its products from the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) certification, which is a program that gives products ratings of gold, silver and bronze classification. The classifications are based on how they stack up against a variety of criteria that is environmentally themed including energy consumption, environmental impact and recyclability. Apple appeared to have taken the program very seriously up until it requested to be removed early in June. Apple, in... 

Yahoo and Facebook have buried the corporate hatchets to settle their lawsuits and have agreed to form a broader partnership for licensing and internet advertising. The agreement settles the technology patents infringement allegations brought against Facebook by Yahoo. The new settlement between the two giants of the internet comes following Scott Thompson’s ouster, the former CEO of Yahoo over some inaccuracies found in his curriculum. The new deal would see Yahoo and Facebook extend and broaden... 

Twitter released its first transparency report Monday and it revealed that the United States leads when it comes to government demands for user data. According to the report, the US government filed 679 requests in the first half of 2012. Twitter said that it has received more government demands for data in the first half of the year than the whole of 2011. In its Transparency Report, Twitter said that it complied with 75 percent of user-data disclosure demands made by the US government. The global... 

On Friday, Apple Inc. was awarded another sales ban against Samsung. A judge in the U.S. ordered South Korean based Samsung Electronics to stop sales of its Nexus smartphone while the an Apple claim is considered by the court over patent infringement. The ban was the second Apple was awarded this week against Samsung. A northern California court said the Nexus smartphone might infringe on four of Apple’s patents, including one used in the voice activated system Siri found on the iPhone 4S. Apple,... 

Microsoft announced plans buy Yammer, a social network service for businesses.  Yammer’s web-based service allows companies to create private social networks where employees can privately chat, shares files, and collaborate on projects.  The purchase is intended to strengthen Microsoft’s enterprise software business and allow the company to compete directly with Salesforce.com.  Microsoft will pay $1.2 billion in cash for the deal. Yammer allows Microsoft to have a proven social networking... 

Oracle’s reported financial results exceeded Wall Street’s expectations.  Oracle’s results indicate that there is still a strong demand for technology that helps companies automate administrative tasks.  Oracle’s chief financial officer, Safra Catz, said that the company did not think investors would mind hearing about a solid quarter amid fears about Europe’s shaky economy and its effect on business conditions. Oracle reported an 8% increase in net income for its fiscal fourth quarter. ... 

A French court dismissed a copyright lawsuit against Google’s YouTube, an online video-sharing platform that lets people post videos to the site.  French television company TF1 filed the lawsuit and had sought €141 million, or $176 million, in damages.  TF1 is the biggest television company in France. The Tribunal de Grande Instance declared that YouTube had made suitably adequate efforts to remove programs like “Heroes” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” for which TF1 owned French broadcasting... 

Research In Motion, the Canadian based maker of Blackberry smartphones and the PlayBook tablet could see its cash dry up and fail, even with the proposed launch of its Blackberry 10 early next year, says Wall Street analysts. The price target for RIM stock was cut by 10 brokerages, some cut it be 50%. This comes a day after RIM reported much worse than expected results from their first quarter and announced it would have to delay the launch of its new Blackberry until sometime in early 2013. Shares... 

Search warrants that 70 police from New Zealand used to raid a mansion that was the home of a suspected internet piracy kingpin were ruled illegal by a court in New Zealand on Thursday. The ruling deals a huge blow to the copyright theft case brought by the FBI. Kim Dotcom, whose birth name is Kim Schmitz, was arrested last January as part of an FBI investigation into his website Megaupload.com. Prosecutors allege that Dotcom was the head of ring that earned over $175 million since 2005 through copying... 

An executive for the Taiwanese manufacturer of computers, Asus, has been quoted as saying Google will announce its own branded computer tablet. The device has been designed to compete with the latest handheld tablet from Amazon. This is the latest evidence that suggests Asus is making a tablet for the developer of Android despite the recent purchase by Google of Motorola, which is also a maker of tablets. The executive, who remained unnamed, was quoted as saying that the new tablet targets the Kindle... 

Microsoft Corporation announced it was purchasing social network site Yammer for an estimated $1.2 billion. Yammer will be incorporated into the Office division of Microsoft that Kurt DelBene heads and will continue to report to David Sacks the founder and current CEO of Yammer. Sacks founded Yammer in 2008, which offers services similar to Facebook to businesses and has over 5 million active corporate users that represent over 85% of the companies in Fortune 500. The basic product offered by Yammer... 

The largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, Samsung Electronics expects its new phone to sell over 10 million units before the end of July, which will make it the company’s bestseller to date. The company, based in South Korea, said earnings from the mobile handset division would increase in the second quarter over the previous three months, as the new Galaxy S III has been accepted well by consumers since it was launched globally in the latter part of May, which beat the newest model for... 

Larry Page the CEO of Google has lost his voice however, not much more is being said about the matter. Some experts believe the head of the internet company should speak up about what might be going on. The co-founder, billionaire of Google missed the company’s annual meeting on Thursday and a spokesperson said Page would miss two more functions that are important during the upcoming weeks. No further explanation of Page’s problems was given, though it said he remained in charge of the company. Some... 

Google has added software to its search page that warns users when they search a term whose results are likely to be blocked by Chinese authorities.  The change is viewed as an improvement of the search experience for users based in mainland China.  The change was announced without fanfare on one of Google’s corporate blogs. The announcement said that users were frustrated by error messages and disconnections and Google engineers had “taken a long, hard look at our systems and have not found... 

Google is setting out to save the dying languages of the world. The Internet giant entered an alliance with linguists and scholars on Wednesday. The alliance introduced on Wednesday a website for the Endangered Languages Project where people will be able to find and store information regarding different dialects that are regarded, as being in danger of disappearing. In a blog post in Google, representatives from the search giant said that people would be able to share research and knowledge through... 

Once again, the United States is the home of the most powerful supercomputer in the world. Two years ago, the title was taken from the U.S. by China and last year Japan won the distinction. The supercomputer is an IBM computer system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is part of the Department of Energy. The system is capable of more than 16.32 sustained petaflops. The ranking takes place twice each year and was released on Monday. The name of the system is Sequoia and it has over 1.57... 

Shenzhou-9, China’s latest spacecraft blasted off Saturday night from a western China desert. The spacecraft is carrying a crew of three, which includes the first female astronaut in the country. The astronauts will try to complete the first manned space docking for China during the mission. This is an important step for the country in its ambitious plan to have a space station before 2020. The launch was powered by the Long March 2F rocket and was telecast live on state TV from the Jiuguan Launch... 

Vizio announced earlier in the year it would branch out from HDTVs into computers and has kept its promise. Today the company officially launched its all in one computers, a pair of laptops and a notebook. All of the categories start at just $898. The design of the computers is styled after Apple, but the insides are all Windows-based. Vizio said it wanted the computers to look elegant while delivering flawless entertainment and execution of tasks. The company said that design and innovation was... 

A study that was recently published claims that humans are the cause of the overall rise in the temperature of the world’s oceans. The study showed that at most, that natural variability in the temperatures of the world’s oceans amounted for only 10% in temperature change. Inputs came from India, Japan, Australia and the United States in the study. Test were done to account for various uncertainties nevertheless the researchers found no evidence the increase in surface temperatures in the world’s... 

Microsoft, in a move to enhance Bing, its search engine results, has agreed to a deal with Encyclopedia Britannica that will increase the amount of information on the service. Microsoft announced the new deal in a company blog post. The deal means that information from the online Britannica site will be included in selected search results from Bing. The move is also part of the encyclopedia’s expansion into the digital world following a March announcement it would stop production of its printed... 

Asus and Acer two PC makers based in Taiwan took another attempt at entering the tablet market by unveiling a number of new products that use the Microsoft Windows 8 operating system. The tablets were showcased by the companies on the eve of Asia’s largest fair for IT, Computex. The fair is held this week in Taipei and is expected to put a great deal of focus on Windows 8. Acer, which reduced its European payroll by several hundred jobs last year, has struggled to gain a foothold in the tablet... 

Oracle is looking to take over the lead from IBM in business network hardware, which includes high-end servers. Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO said its biggest competitor was Big Blue during a chat on-stage at the All Thing Digital Conference that was hosted by Robert Murdoch’s technology website. Ellison said that before IBM had been number one for databases, but now Oracle is. He also said IBM was number one for middleware and now it’s Oracle and finally IBM is number one for high-end servers...