Anyone with a smartphone can now be a savvy cybershopper for the holiday season.

With mobile Internet and apps, it is easy for someone in a store to compare prices on specific items, and then make a quick decision to buy or leave or to instantly make a purchase elsewhere.

Google has jumped into the debate over a U.N. telecom gathering set to review regulations affecting the Internet, claiming it is "the wrong place" to make decisions about the future of the Web.

In a posting on its "take action" blog this week, Google said the December gathering of the U.N.'s International Telecommunications Union comes amid "a growing backlash on Internet freedom."

A South Korean man has received a suspended 10-month prison term for retweeting North Korean propaganda posts.

The Suwon District Court cited the National Security Law in its ruling Wednesday against Park Jeong-geun. The law prohibits praising and glorifying North Korea. Park could have received seven years in prison.

A federal jury on Tuesday convicted a man of illegally gaining access to AT&T's servers and stealing more than 120,000 email addresses of iPad users including New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and film mogul Harvey Weinstein.

Andrew Auernheimer, of New York, was convicted of identity theft and conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to computers. Each count carries a maximum prison sentence of five years.

Japanese nuclear reactor maker Toshiba on Wednesday unveiled a remote-controlled robot resembling a headless dog that they hope will be used at the battered Fukushima power plant.

The tetrapod, which weighs 65 kilograms (143 pounds) and is about one meter (3 foot, four inches) tall, is designed to be able to cover difficult terrain -- such as going up steep steps -- that regular robots struggle with.

The soaring popularity of smartphones is crushing demand for point-and-shoot cameras, threatening the once-vibrant sector as firms scramble to hit back with web-friendly features and boost quality, analysts say.

A sharp drop in sales of digital compact cameras marks them as the latest casualty of smartphones as videogame consoles and portable music players also struggle against the all-in-one features offered by the likes of Apple's iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy.

As India's financial capital shut down for the weekend funeral of a powerful politician linked to waves of mob violence, a woman posted on Facebook that the closures in Mumbai were "due to fear, not due to respect." A friend of hers hit the "like" button.

For that, both women were arrested.

Morocco's pioneering 160-megawatt solar power plant took a step forward on Monday, securing European financing agreements worth 300 million euros ($385 million), or nearly half of the project's cost.

The European Investment Bank (EIB), Germany's KfW bank and the French Development Agency signed the financing accords with Morocco's solar energy agency MASEN in Marrakesh, to support the first phase of the Ouarzazate solar complex, a joint statement said.

Hollywood-style robots able to shoot people without permission from their human handlers are a real possibility and must be banned before governments start deploying them, campaigners warned Monday.

The report "Losing Humanity" -- issued by Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic -- raised the alarm over the ethics of the looming technology.

South Korea's most popular smartphone messaging application Kakao Talk said Tuesday it was launching three of its wildly successful mobile games on the global market.

Kakao Talk, launched in March 2010, boasts around 36 million domestic users -- some 70 percent of the population -- with another 30 million overseas.