"What these social networks have shown is that you can use the viral capabilities of the Internet to grow a site very quickly, but I'm not even sure that anybody has proven yet that these businesses by themselves are sustainable, stand-alone businesses," said David Card, an analyst at Jupiter Research.

Friendster was the first popular social networking site, which typically offers users ways to create personal pages, post digital pictures, and invite people to link with them on the Website.

Friendster logged 703,000 visitors to its site in April, a 15 percent drop from the year-ago month and the average visitor spent 14 minutes on the site that month, down 65 percent year over year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. By contrast, MySpace boasted 8.2 million visitors in April, who spent an hour and 23 minutes on the site.

We can already use DNA, for example, to make electronic circuits so it's possible to think of a smart yoghurt some time after 2020 or 2025, where the yoghurt has got a whole stack of electronics in every single bacterium. You could have a conversation with your strawberry yogurt before you eat it.

WebTrends said that the percentage of users saying no to third-party cookies has risen four-fold in the past 18 months, from 2.8 percent in January of 2004 to 12.4 percent in April of this year. However, the firm also said that growth seems to have peaked. Some industries are being hit harder than others, with a nearly 17 percent refusal rate in retail, more than 15 percent in telecommunications and 12 percent among media firms.

Get ready for electronic portals known as backscatters, expected to be tested at a handful of airports this year, that use X-ray imaging technology to allow a screener to scan a body. And yes, the body image is detailed. Let's not be coy here, ladies and gentlemen:

"Well, you'll see basically everything," said Bill Scannell, a privacy advocate and technology consultant. "It shows nipples. It shows the clear outline of genitals."

"Backscatting has been around for years," he said. "They started talking about this stuff back during the protests when they were grabbing women. Under the right circumstances, the technology has some efficacy and can work. That is, provided we're willing to pay the price in a further loss of personal privacy."

He isn't. "I have a beautiful 29-year-old daughter and a beautiful wife, and I don't want some screeners to be looking at them through their clothes, plain and simple," he said.

"How many have (a) password policy that says under penalty of death you shall not write down your password?" asked Johansson, to which the majority of attendees raised their hands in agreement. "I claim that is absolutely wrong. I claim that password policy should say you should write down your password. I have 68 different passwords. If I am not allowed to write any of them down, guess what I am going to do? I am going to use the same password on every one of them."

We got hands-on with Robosapien V2 at the E3 games show in LA ? now he can lie down and get back up onto his feet, distinguish between different colours and sounds, grip and pick up an object as heavy as a beer can, and throw lighter objects around ten feet.

Using a voice recorder attachment, you can record your thoughts on your iPod, dump it to your computer, publish it to your web site in such a way that people can download your musings to their iTunes Library, sync that with their iPod, and listen to you babble about something on their way to work. It's called podcasting and hopefully it'll get much easier than that.

"As good as Apple may be, I don't believe the success of the iPod is sustainable in the long run," he said in an interview published in Thursday's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

"You can make parallels with computers: Apple was very strong in this field before, with its Macintosh and its graphics user interface -- like the iPod today -- and then lost its position," Gates said.

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"If you were to ask me which mobile device will take top place for listening to music, I'd bet on the mobile phone for sure," Gates told the newspaper.

Yahoo gave no indication how long it would keep its initial pricing of its Music Unlimited service, which is 6.99 dollars a month or 4.99 dollars for those who buy a one-year subscription.

Additionally, Yahoo will be offering consumers permanent downloads at 79 to 99 cents a song, cutting into the turf of Apple's iTunes service, but also others including RealNetworks and Napster.

"We keep passing the baton between California and India, and that way we can cram a lot more work into a 24-hour period," said Jeff Hawkey, vice president of hardware engineering, who conducts evening meetings from the office or on his laptop at home. "A lot of nights, I go home, tuck the kids into bed and then get on the conference call."

Analysts said the risk is that AOL may accelerate the steady decline in its subscriber base by causing more people to stop paying for content and services since they will be able to get them for free. "Maybe this will cause the access business to wind down faster before the advertising business picks up," warned David Card, an analyst with Jupiter Research.

a new "show video full screen" button that lets you easily watch full-screen movies that have been organized in your iTunes Library, as well as options to view movies in a separate smaller window, or within the main iTunes pane.

They were totally hush hush about this update, so it's got to mean all the pieces of the puzzle aren't quite together yet. Apple quietly rolled out iTunes version 4.8, which includes playback support for QuickTime video content. So what does it all mean? Video iPod? iTunes Movie Store? Just plain tease? What do you think?

Currently, Google's news search returns results based on how recently a story was posted online and how closely the story appears to align with the keywords in related stories. However, the search giant has filed for a patent on an improvement that seeks to filter stories by certain measures of quality as well.

Critics are already noting that the approach might be flawed or at least misleading. Short of having news stories read by experts who could rank them based on quality, the technology will instead rely on pre-determined factors such as the reputation of a news site, how much Web traffic it generates and how old and large the organization that produced the story is in terms of news bureaus and employees.

It's one matter when the search engine caches a page you can't get anymore; that's a copyright violation but an all-in-all benign one in the sense that it's only giving you content you could not otherwise see (no different from, say, the web archive).

But it's quite another matter for Google to get in the way of serving current content. This means that the page is served from Google rather than from a publisher's server, which means that the publisher cannot count the traffic and serve targeted and dynamic advertising.

It also means that Google is copying content on its servers and serving it from there and thus is violating copyright.

And it means that Google is in a position to snoop on data on consumers' usage of sites that Google does not own: That is, Google will know what the consumers on my site are doing better than I will for these "accelerated" pages.

IBM's chief financial officer Mark Loughridge said the west European market was performing poorly so jobs would be lost in the UK, Germany, France and Italy.

He gave no figures on how many jobs would be lost in each country.

Answering questions after a conference call with analysts, he said the job cuts were new, and not "bundled" together parts of an ongoing restructuring.

Spitzer said the suit filed in New York City against Intermix Media of Los Angeles combats the redirecting of home computer users to unwanted websites and its own website that includes ads, the adding of unnecessary toolbar items and the delivery of unwanted ads that pop up on computer screens. After a six-month investigation, Spitzer concluded the company installed a wide range of advertising software on countless personal computers nationwide.

With Metro, Microsoft basically wanted to create a file format that would handle two specific tasks. First, the software giant wanted a way to save files from within any Windows program that could then be opened, viewed and shared without needing the specific program that created it. Second, Microsoft wanted to use the same method for sending data to a printer that it uses for displaying data on screen. So Metro uses the same method for describing and understanding graphics and text that Longhorn's Avalon graphics engine uses.

But that is where Metro's ambitions end, Brown said, pointing out that PDF is useful for entirely different kinds of documents, such as multimedia files or electronic forms.

Adobe's Pam Deziel, director of product marketing for the company's Acrobat product line, agreed that PDF offered capabilities far beyond Metro's, describing the Microsoft format as a way to update the current Windows print architecture, which has become "a little long in the tooth."