An Australian academic Friday praised the increasing use of social media during disasters, saying there had been a "beautiful display of humanity" on Facebook during recent catastrophes.

Communications expert Gwyneth Howell said she had been prompted to research the use of social media following last year's major earthquake in New Zealand's second city Christchurch -- which caused damage but no deaths.

Microsoft on Thursday announced the dismantling of a "notorious and complex" network of virus-infected computers used to send billions of email messages daily hawking fake drugs.

The Rustock "botnet" consisted of about a million computers that were infected with malicious code to let hackers covertly control the machines from afar using "command and control" servers.

Young Australian entrepreneur Andrew Dever has gone from being mortified to being inspired by his dad's penchant for taking him and school friends on colorful tours of their home city.

Dever used the South By Southwest Interactive festival in Texas to launch iTourU software that captures "living memories" by letting people with local insights become virtual tour guides on iPhone smartphones.

Apple Inc. has changed how purchases inside iPhone and iPad games are authorized after customers complained that their kids were racking up hundreds of dollars worth of charges.

The issue was that after a user entered his or her iTunes password on a device, the device didn't prompt for the password again for 15 minutes. Any purchases, whether in the iTunes store or inside kid-friendly games such as "The Smurf's Village," went through without a new password prompt.

Julian Assange, the founder of whistleblower website WikiLeaks, Tuesday warned that the Internet was the "greatest spying machine the world has ever seen" and an obstacle to free speech.

Speaking to students at Britain's prestigious Cambridge University, the former computer hacker claimed that the Internet, particularly social networking sites such as Facebook, gave governments greater scope for snooping.

Google-owned YouTube said Tuesday that it has bought an Irish digital video company whose technology can help improve the quality of amateur footage submitted to the video-sharing site.

Financial details of the acquisition of Green Parrot Pictures, which was founded by Anil Kokaram, an associate professor at the engineering school of Trinity College in Dublin, were not disclosed.

The founder of Internet anonymity haven 4chan thinks Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is mistaken when it comes to online identities.

Remaining unknown online frees people to blaze ahead with creative endeavors they might otherwise shy away from for fear of being embarrassed, Christopher "moot" Poole said at the South By Southwest festival ending Tuesday in Texas.

Hewlett-Packard plans to offer a complete range of cloud computing services, HP chief executive Leo Apotheker said Monday as he outlined his strategy for the U.S. computer giant.

Apotheker, speaking in San Francisco at an event that was streamed over the Internet, also said that HP plans to release its touchscreen tablet computer, the TouchPad, in June.

Microsoft has released the latest version of its Internet Explorer Web browsing software free online, hoping to fend off recent challenges by Firefox and Google Chrome.

"IE9 has just released around the world," a booming voice told a cheering crowd at 11:00 pm Monday (0400 GMT Tuesday) in the Austin City Limits Live concert hall where a launch party was being held.

The rapid growth of smartphones and electronic tablets is making the Internet the destination of choice for consumers looking for news, a report released Monday said.

Local, network and cable television news, newspapers, radio and magazines all lost audience last year, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a research organization that evaluates and studies the performance of the press. News consumption online increased 17 percent last year from the year before, the project said in its eighth annual State of the News Media survey.