American companies counting on a favorable trade ruling against China to boost sales of CDs, DVDs, books and video games will need a crackdown on rampant piracy before they can reap big benefits.

Call this city blogger central. Two grassroots groups _ one left leaning, the other right leaning _ are holding their annual conferences here and teaching members how to wield clout online.

A few weeks ago, Pasquale Castaldo was waiting at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport for a delayed flight, when a man sitting across from him pulled out an Amazon Kindle book-reading device.

The next installment of Microsoft's flagship racing franchise won't offer any clunkers.

The founder of the online gambling site BetOnSports.com pleaded guilty on Friday to federal racketeering conspiracy and other charges, concluding years of investigating and prosecuting a case in the complex world of offshore sports gambling.

Twitter's been having a rough couple of weeks.

State-owned China Unicom Ltd. said Friday it is talking with Apple Inc. about becoming an iPhone carrier but denied a report it has reached a deal and will buy 5 million handsets.

On Friday afternoons in the office, Kevin Grinnell's employees often thank him by singling him out and shooting him in the head. (Only virtually, of course.)Companies are turning more to video games as a way of building bridges between employees, or even between employees and management.

Amid a boisterous debate on health care reform, people flooded members of Congress on Thursday with so many e-mails that they overloaded the House's primary Web site.

Individual computer users in China may choose whether to install a controversial content filtering system, but the system will be installed on computers in any public place, China's minister of Industry and Information Technology said Thursday.

Alice Connors-Kellgren was surprised by her boyfriend's new Facebook profile picture a few weeks ago: He was kissing another girl on the cheek.

Without more funding, NASA will not meet its goal of tracking 90 percent of all deadly asteroids by 2020, according to a report released today by the National Academy of Sciences.

On a Monday night earlier this month, the projection screen hanging on the wall of a bowling alley in Brooklyn's bar-heavy Williamsburg neighborhood was displaying neither strikes nor scores, but columns of the Twitter client TweetDeck.

These days, it seems that most Americans carry three things in their pockets or purses at all times: keys, a wallet and a phone. In the not-too-distant future, you may be able to leave the wallet and the keys behind. The mobile phone is staging a coup.

Do you use your kids' names? Your pet's? Your favorite color? We all use some dumb passwords that are too easy to guess.

A legal battle is endangering the future of Skype. If Skype loses the right to use a key part of its software and can't create an adequate replacement, "Skype's business as currently conducted would likely not be possible."

A federal jury on Friday ordered a Boston University graduate student who admitted illegally downloading and sharing music online to pay $675,000 to four record labels.

Apple Inc. says it has fixed an iPhone vulnerability that lets hackers knock people offline _ and possibly take over the phones _ by sending them specially crafted text messages.

EBay Inc. is developing software it might use to continue running the online telecommunications service Skype if it cannot resolve a legal dispute with a separate company run by the service's founders.

The crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavour returned to earth on Friday morning after spending 16 days in space. Endeavour landed at 10:48 a.m. at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.