A company linked to Microsoft Corp co-founder Paul Allen is suing 11 major corporations, including Apple, Google and Facebook, accusing them of infringing on technology patents.

Actor and environmentalist Robert Redford has weighed in on the U.S. oil spill crisis, condemning efforts by major energy companies to promote their environmental credentials and use their money to influence “their parrots in Congress.”

A 12-year-old boy who became a hit on YouTube with his cover version of Lady Gaga’s Paparazzi has received a phone call from the pop star.

Virtuous driver escapes repeatedly of the police

Google Inc, its YouTube video service, and Yahoo Inc on Thursday filed counterclaims against Xerox Corp in a lawsuit accusing them of infringing the document management company’s patents on Internet searches.

In filings in Delaware federal court on Thursday, the defendants sought declarations that they did not infringe the two patents at issue, or variantly that the patents are invalid and thus cannot be enforced by Xerox.

Google is bringing in some extra help for its YouTube video service with the acquisition of another startup.

The purchase of Episodic marks Google’s fifth acquisition so far this year. Terms of the deal announced Friday weren’t disclosed.

Episodic, based in San Francisco, provides a platform for streaming live video on the Web. YouTube recently has been showing more live video besides the more than 500 million clips that are continuously available on its site.

Google has said it intends to buy at least one company per month this year as part of its effort to develop more products and import more talented engineers. The company is drawing upon its cash hoard of $24.5 billion to pay for the shopping spree.

After months of planning and testing, the Internet’s No. 1 video-sharing site, YouTube, launched a new look and received mixed reviews.

The redesign eliminates one of the chief irritants to tubesters: clutter.

“We heard from users that there are a lot of unnecessary features and clutter that could be cleaned up,” YouTube spokesperson Chris Dale told TechNewsWorld.

A China-based root DNS server associated with networking problems in Chile and the U.S. has been disconnected from the Internet.

The action by the server’s operator, Netnod, appears to have resolved a problem that was causing some Internet sites to be inadvertently censored by a system set up in the People’s Republic of China.

On Wednesday, operators at NIC Chile noticed that several ISPs (Internet service providers) were providing faulty DNS information, apparently derived from China. China uses the DNS system to enforce Internet censorship on its so-called Great Firewall of China, and the ISPs were using this incorrect DNS information.

Google’s face-off with Beijing over censorship may have struck a philosophical blow for free speech and encouraged some Chinese Netizens by its sheer chutzpah, but it doesn’t do a thing for Internet users in China. It merely hands the job of blocking objectionable content back to Beijing.

Its more lasting impact may lie in the global exposure it has given to the Chinese government’s complex system of censorship – an ever-shifting hodgepodge of restrictions on what information users can access, which Web tools they can use and what ideas they can post.

“You can only guess what the rules are,” said Zhao Jing, a Chinese free-speech activist whose popular blog was deleted by censors from its host server in 2005. “It means you should self-censor, limit your mind and be cautious, because you have no idea where the line is.”

Censorship in China is unpredictable in part because it employs an array of tools — combining cutting-edge filtering algorithms and software that detects taboo keywords with the blunt instruments of the government’s old propaganda machine. It takes place at different levels, involving government agencies and the private sector.

Chinese Internet users have one less Web search option this week, but otherwise it’s business as usual as the People’s Republic of China uses technology and intimidation to keep citizens away from objectionable content.

Following several months of strategizing and negotiations, Google finally stopped censoring its search results in China and is redirecting visitors to Google.cn to a server based in Hong Kong. There they see unfiltered results and are able to visit sites about Falun Gong, Tiananman Square, and Tibetan independence.

As noble as the move might be on Google’s part, it changes very little for the approximately 4 million Internet users in China who have lived with restrictions on their online and offline activities for decades.

The departure of Google search from the country is “an obvious reminder of how heavy censorship is in China,” Hal Roberts, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, said in an interview this week.

Meanwhile, a mysterious mix-up that sent Domain Name Server (DNS) traffic destined for Google’s YouTube, Facebook and Twitter among other sites to servers behind the so-called Chinese Firewall of censorship on Wednesday has some speculating it was retaliation against Google. How far will the People’s Republic of China go in its geopolitical squabbles over freedom of the Internet?